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15 reasons to take Genesis as history

Back to the beginning

15 REASONS TO TAKE GENESIS AS HISTORY
By D. Batten and J. Sarfati
Creation Ministries International. 32 pages. £1.25
ISBN 0-94990-632-8
Available from http://www.creationontheweb.com or 0845 680 0264.

The world was created in six 24-hour days and the flood covered the whole globe, producing most of the fossils, the authors, Australian scientists, maintain, for ‘abandoning the historicity of Genesis leads to heresy and apostasy’.

Their arguments, presented briefly, range from Jesus’s attitude to Scripture, through Hebrew grammar to a coherent worldview, emphasising the negative impact of naturalism and evolutionary theories on Christianity. The authors claim that the sequence of days in Numbers 7.10-84 shows that the creation days are ordinary days: ‘the first day’, etc., as the Israelites would have understood. However, Genesis 1 has ‘a first day’ etc. until ‘the sixth day’ and ‘the seventh day’, the Sabbath, which apparently continues, and does not imply each day followed immediately, in a week. To support reading Genesis 1 as a literal account, Batten and Sarfati state, ‘Hebrew uses special grammatical structures’ for historical narrative, failing to observe that they are used in every form of narrative, including dreams and parables. The authors’ literalism fails to recognise the metaphoric language of the text.

In dealing with the question of death and suffering, they assume death came not only to human beings at the Fall (Romans 5), but to all creation. That is not so clear in Scripture, which nowhere reveals when Satan fell or what impact that may have had upon the creation. While evangelicals will agree that God made the world and has a purpose for his creation, and accept that evolutionary philosophy is not biblical, the complex matters this booklet summarises should never be made tests of orthodoxy, as the authors tend to do. Alternative positions offered by conservative biblical scholars, such as H. Blocher, In the Beginning (1984), or B. Waltke, Genesis (2001), should be recognised.

Alan Millard,
Emeritus Professor of Hebrew, Liverpool University, Elder, Hoylake Chapel, Wirral