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Writer's pictureBible Brian

The Sabbath yom


Despite the Bible being widely available in a range of languages, some Christians still attempt to argue from the original languages to defend their more heretical views. By far the most common example is the Hebrew word "yom" which, much like our word "day", can have a non-literal meaning.


However, there's a reason Hebrew scholars of all faiths reject this interpretation. Both "day" and "yom" have default meanings, that being one 24 hour time span, which are normally applied unless the surrounding context suggests otherwise. Nothing in the context of Genesis suggests that the word "yom" is anything other than the literal 24 hour period that it is, and historically always was, usually interpreted as. In fact, God even went out of His way to demonstrate that the context is quite literal by describing an evening and a morning, and assigning a numerical value to each day, both of which, in Hebrew, prove that each day is literal.

But God didn't even stop there. When Jesus walked the Earth, He even told us why God took 6 days and rested on the 7th. In Mark 2:27, He declared "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath". What is the Sabbath? The Sabbath is the 7th day of the week (Saturday). But where did the Sabbath come from? According to Exodus 20:11, it came from God's own work week.

But if we work 6 days and rest on the 7th because God worked for 6 days and rested on the 7th, that either means Theistic Evolution is contrary to both creation and the Sabbath, or it means man is supposed to work for 6 million years before resting for one million. Given that no Jew has ever survived 7 million years, I think the former interpretation makes a little more sense.

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