91 Don,

And a natural metaphor (for me) is evening is the onset of darkness/night, which is associated with less order and morning is the onset of light/daytime, which is associated with more order. And God is increasing the order in Creation in each day, so this metaphor makes sense in context.

If you are saying that God chose evening and morning to not indicate time but rather to indicate “less order”, then you are saying that each new time period starts out with “less order” then the day before. This is not a natural thought from the text. If this is the picture that God wanted to bring, He would have done much better to show light getting brighter and brighter from dark to dim to medium brightness and then to full brightness. But to show a recurring pattern of dark to light to dark to light to dark to light, etc, is not an indication of going from disorder to more order to even more order to the most order. It is going backwards instead of continuing forward. It is much more natural to take the passage for exactly what it says.

I would also like to see a second witness that shows “evening” being used to mean less order. None of the bible examples that you gave show that meaning.

Part of the reason is that God can create over time, that is, the “creation days” can be times of proclamation of God’s activity that will take place over universe time in any order God wishes. For example, the first 3 days are anti-tohu (form) and the latter 3 are anti-bohu (void). I see this as a literary device that forms an ordered structure of forming the places for the occupants.

It doesn’t seem reasonable to me that God would express an “ordered” creation by using a mish-mash of numbered days that are meaningless. Why even give a number to day one if it isn’t first in time? Maybe Eve was created before Adam on day two? Didn’t God think that people would scramble what He said?

I have been told that God inspired wrong grammar (in 1 Timothy 2:15) because God can do anything He wants. The problem with having God communicate meaningless words is that it makes Him to be a mutterer of nonsense. Ever hear a person who isn’t quite sane who mutters things that don’t make sense? Is our God like that? That is what some seem to think. They make it appear that God doesn’t have to use the rules that he creates for us. He doesn’t have to make sense. He doesn’t have to use proper grammar and he can give an ordered creation a meaningless set of numbers that have no correlation to His works.

However if we take Genesis for what it actually says, we see that animals were also created after Adam. This is an extremely important event. It helps us to understand that the woman was not a dimwit who could be easily deceived while the man was smarter than Eve was. Instead it gives us a valid reason why God made Adam the guard of the garden and why God deemed Adam’s sin to be treacherous.

I would really like you to consider that the animals were made after the man (the second half of the creation of the animals). Do you not see any significance to this at all? If we cannot believe the order that God gave then by what logic can we believe any man who tells us the order of creation? And then perhaps woman wasn’t created after man. Perhaps it is only a metaphor that we are supposed to figure out and we haven’t got it yet. It is crazy making to think that there is no solid foundation in Genesis, just make it say whatever one “feels” is right. We have been there before.

Judges 17:6 In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.