Editor’s note: As
Creation magazine has been continuously published since 1978, we
are publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. For teaching and
sharing purposes, readers are advised to supplement these historic articles with more up-to-date ones suggested in the
Related Articles below.
Linguistics, Genesis, and evolution—Part 1
by Dr Charles V. Taylor
Most popular presentations of or claims about evolution, including those by many
scientists, discuss evolution using personified language, (things are given human
qualities) e.g. Science says, ‘ … and so the osprey developed double-purpose
talons’, or ‘ … Isn’t it truly amazing how man broke away
from his crouching ancestor … .’ and so on. Some mysterious force inside
each organism is often presented as being at work, yet at the same time everything
is stated to happen on a chance or fatalistic basis. Such a thought pattern is what
sociologists call animistic.
But it is not only the scientists who make claims. The Bible also contains claims
dating back thousands of years. Once again, the language is quite personal. But
this time it refers to an actual person, not some blind force, or the organism that
undergoes changes. What’s more, this person, God, talks things into being.
This, of course, is just as hard to believe as the fatalistic view called evolution,
and even more so if you’ve been brainwashed against it, for much of the problem
isn’t scientific at all! Surprisingly, part of the problem lies with linguistics—the
study of human speech. It is with one point from linguistics that I will commence
this series of articles.
One of the first linguistic problems we find in
Genesis 1 is the question of what is meant by the ‘days’ of
creation. Are we to understand ‘days’ as literal days, or as poetic
or metaphorical epochs? The best way to decide is to find out whether Genesis 1
is poetry, and therefore symbolic, or just narrative, and therefore factual history.
Contrary to what many people think it’s not impossible to know. Genesis chapter
1 was written in the Hebrew language which is consistent in using one structure
for narrative and quite a different one for poetry. Linguists divide the world’s
languages into groups according to the structure they use for their normal matter-of-fact
statements, as opposed to questions, literary devices and so on. All languages have
sentences, and so far no language has been discovered which doesn’t have them.
Sentences have in them bits we call subjects (S), verbs (V) and objects (O). Not
all sentences have all three, but they occur in all languages.
Languages differ in the order in which these parts appear in basic sentences. English
is called an SVO language, Hebrew is VSO, and Japanese is SOV. Let’s take
a sentence like: ‘Our cat caught a mouse’. Ignoring the fact that this
would be an extremely rare miracle for our cat, the sentence would appear in the
three languages roughly as follows:
English-our cat (S) caught (V) a mouse (O)
Hebrew-caught (V) our cat (S) (a) mouse (O)
Japanese-our cat (S) (a) mouse (O) caught (V)
You can work out for yourself that ‘our cat’ is subject, etc., and see
why we call Hebrew a VSO language. To find out which is which you say ‘What
was it (subject) did what (verb) to what (object)?’
But English doesn’t always put things in that order. If I rephrase my sentence
as a question, we have roughly VSVO: ‘Did our cat catch a mouse?’ In
stylish writing, and poetry, and all those fancy things they do in literature, languages
often change order. Hebrew poets, like David in the Psalms, used an SVO structure
like English. In general then, if the Hebrew goes VSO it will be narrative, but
if it is SVO it will be poetic. How does
Genesis 1:1 go?
At-start created God the heavens and the earth
verb(V) subject(S) object(O)
This is standard VSO, so it is narrative, not poetry. The same pattern goes all
the way through Genesis 1 telling of the things that were created on each day. So
we are dealing with narrative, or better still, history, because if the Hebrew writer
was just telling a tale he’d make it stylish and use a lot of other devices.
But he doesn’t. As a linguist, I understand that this claims to be history.
This means that the words in the passage have literal meaning unless such meanings
can in no way be fitted into the text. So I take the Hebrew word ‘Yom’
or ‘day’ to mean what everybody first thinks when someone says ‘day’
to them.
Another point which is often ignored, is that by far the most frequent translation
of Yom (the word in Hebrew which means ‘day’), is ‘day’.
And its meaning is predominantly an ‘earth-day’. I say ‘earth-day’
because I do not want to say a ‘24 hour day’. I say ‘earth-day’
because I mean the time it took the earth to rotate just once. The possibility exists
that the flood of Noah upset the rotation of the earth, and that our present 24
hour day isn’t exactly the same length as the day Adam had. But what it does
not mean is some vast period of time like a geological age.
At this point, two questions may be asked:
- Is the Hebrew word Yom or day, ever used symbolically? and
- Is it easy to tell when Yom is being used symbolically?
The answer to both questions is ‘Yes!’
A very important point that most people overlook when it comes to word use, is that
it is impossible to use a word as a symbol or figuratively unless it already has
a literal meaning. The word ‘day’ cannot, in Hebrew or English, be used
in the abstract or symbolic sense unless it already has a clearly understood literal
meaning. Let me illustrate by the interesting way the Hebrew writers of
Genesis chapter 2 and
Numbers chapter 7 use the word Yom or day.
Genesis 2:4–5—‘in
the day that God created the heavens and the earth and every plant of the field
before it was in the earth.’
Numbers 7:10—‘in
the day the altar was anointed, the princes offered up their offering.’
The Hebrew writer for the book of Numbers clearly spells out in the rest of
chapter 7 that it took 12 literal days for the princes to offer up their
offerings. He is, in the one chapter, quite content to lump the twelve days together
and call them ‘Yom’ or ‘day’, meaning period or group of
days that had something in common, as well as specify what happened on each separate
day or ‘Yom’ in that group.
Similarly, in Genesis 2, the group of 6 literal days which have creation in common
is referred to by ‘Yom’, ‘the day that God
created’.
The style of Genesis 1 convinces any ordinary English reader and even the trained
linguist that Genesis 1 is describing matter-of-factly the miraculous word of God
in creation, so different in style from other more recent creation myths.
Readers’ comments
Comments are automatically closed 14 days after publication.