and the morning were the first day," etc. For then the human weeks
could have followed the week of God, in which man, following the divine
example, would have had to work six days and to rest one. The same
commentator says (p. 24): "The author could not even have dared make a
statement about the life-duration of the first men, if to him the day in
which he was created had been an indefinitely long period of time." But,
according to the conception of the Biblical author supposed by us, only the
"day of God," in which he was created, would have been an indefinitely long
period of time (although we are not willing to identify the days of God
with certain earthly periods of time); the earthly days and the earthly
years, on the other hand, would have their existence after the fourth day
of creation, and thus, according to that view, we could estimate and name
the earthly years and days of all that which happened before the fourth day
of creation, under the condition that we have, or believe we have, the
means of estimating them. When Dillmann continues: "On the contrary, the
author took these days as nothing else than days," we wholly agree with
him; but add to it: "not days of the creature, but days of God."

By this long duration of the seventh day, we are obliged to draw still
another conclusion; namely, that according to the conception of the author
the six preceding days also must have far exceeded the duration of earthly
days. This leads us to another Biblical analogy, whose direct power of
demonstration for a long {303} duration of the Biblical days of creation
is, it is true, justly contested, but which, as soon as we have to assume
for other reasons that according to the author the days of creation far
exceed the earthly days as to duration, becomes a strong support of this
view. For it is certainly not unimportant that in the 90th Psalm, the psalm
of Moses, the mediator of the Sinaitical legislation, to the circle of
ideas of which that account of the creation so entirely belongs, the
thought is expressed which is also taken up in the second letter of St.
Peter, with its developed cosmological conceptions: namely, the thought
"that one day _is_ with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years
as one day."

With that exegesis of the seventh day as one still remaining up to the
present, we are in clear accord with the more developed theology of the New
Testament, and with the interpretation which it itself give