ecord itself.

The first important fact that strikes us is one which has not
received the attention it deserves, viz., that the word _day_ is
evidently used in three senses in the record itself. We are told
(verse 5th) that God called the _light_, that is, the diurnal
continuance of light, day. We are also informed that the _evening_ and
the _morning_ were the first day. Day, therefore, in one of these
clauses is the light as separated from the darkness, which we may call
the _natural day_; in the other it is the whole time occupied in the
creation of light and its separation from the darkness, whether that
was a _civil or astronomical day_ of twenty-four hours or some longer
period. In other words, the daylight, to which God is represented as
restricting the use of the term day, is only a part of a day of
creation, which included both light and darkness, and which might be
either a civil day or a longer period, but could not be the natural
day intervening between sunrise and sunset, which is the _ordinary_
day of Scripture phraseology. Again, in the 4th verse of chapter ii.,
which begins the second part of the history, the whole creative week
is called one day--"In the day that Jehovah Elohim made the earth and
the heavens." Such an expression must surely in such a place imply
more than a mere inadvertence on the part of the writer or writers.

To pave the way for a right understanding of the day of creation, it
may be well to consider, in the first place, the manner in which the
_shorter day_ is introduced. In the expression, "God _called_ the
light day," we find for the first time the Creator naming his works,
and we may infer that some important purpose was to be served by this.
The nature of this purpose we ascertain by comparison with other
instances of the same kind occurring in the chapter. God called the
darkness night, the firmament heaven, the dry land earth, the gathered
waters seas. In all these cases the purpose seems to have been one of
verbal definition, perhaps along with an assertion of sovereignty. It
was necessary to distinguish the diurnal darkness from that unvaried
darkness which had been of old, and to discriminate between the
limited waters of an earth having dry land on its surface and those of
the ancient universal ocean. This is effected by introducing two new
terms, night and seas. In like manner it was necessary to mark the new
application of the term earth to the dry land, and that of hea