I have no doubt that the days mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis are \u201cliteral days\u201d. They each involve morning and evening, and so we can be even more specific: they are days according to traditional Jewish reckoning, beginning at sundown. Personally, I think that these literal days are part of a larger, extended metaphor of a divine \u201cwork-week\u201d, but that isn\u2019t the issue I want to focus on here.<\/p>\n
There is at least one other place in the Bible where it is just as clear that literal days must<\/em> be in view. In Matthew 12:38-40<\/a>, Jesus is recorded as saying that the Son of Man will be in the belly of the earth for three days and three nights. Not \u2018days\u2019 in a broad, partial sense, but days and nights, in the literal sense.<\/p>\n From a scholarly perspective, this detail is a reinterpretation of the \u201csign of Jonah\u201d by the author of Matthew\u2019s Gospel. Originally, the \u201csign of Jonah\u201d meant \u201cno sign<\/em>\u201d since Jonah had given no sign (compare Mark and Luke on this point). And we already know from his genealogy that Matthew was interested in the symbolic value of numbers rather than numeric precision<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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