There’s so many Old Tes­ta­ment sto­ries that seem like they’re mostly para­bles. Is the Old Tes­ta­ment even lit­eral? Maybe most of the Old Tes­ta­ment is full of fab­ri­cated sto­ries that Chris­tians and Jews have used as illus­tra­tions for spir­i­tual concepts.

For exam­ple, the biggest Old Tes­ta­ment story under fire right now is that of cre­ation. There’s no way that could be lit­eral, right? It has to be a para­ble used to describe a com­plex sys­tem of evo­lu­tion over mil­lions of years. I even have a Bible that hints at this in the footnotes.

Who do we want to ask first? Let’s start with the author of the first five books of the Bible, that Jews and Chris­tians can agree on. I hate to start with cre­ation, as it’s such a con­tro­ver­sial topic, for some rea­son. If you want to do this as in depth as I did, pull out a par­al­lel Hebrew-English Bible and grab a Hebrew dic­tio­nary. Famil­iar­ize your­self with the Hebrew alpha­bet and writ­ing style so you know how to find things in the dictionary.

Okay, look at Gen­e­sis 1:3 – 5, par­tic­u­larly 5. The first thing God cre­ated was light, and sep­a­rated night and day. Then, He named it one day. The Hebrew word translit­er­ated as “yom” means “day.” Yom/day means either a 24-hour period, the light part of the 24-hour period, or an unspec­i­fied period of time, depend­ing on context.

“God called the light [Yom]” refers to the light period of the day, obvi­ously. But, what does yom mean in the rest of Gen­e­sis 1? The obvi­ous answer is 24-hour period. It doesn’t seem to be midnight-till-midnight like our day, but morning-morning. The day starts at sun­rise, con­tin­ues after sun­down, then ends as the sun rises for the next day. That’s why the day fol­lowed this pro­gres­sion: “there was evening, and there was morn­ing, one day.” The first day had to be a lit­eral 24-hour period. The day was estab­lished before the sun or earth were even cre­ated. How could a mil­lion years of evo­lu­tion be referred to as a cycle of light, then dark, evening, then end­ing at morn­ing, if no sources of light were in the atmos­phere yet?

Then, we find in Gen­e­sis 2:2 – 3 that “on the sev­enth [yom] God fin­ished His work which He had made; and He [shabbat]ed on the sev­enth [yom]” and “God blessed the sev­enth [yom], and hal­lowed it; because that in it He [shabbat]ed from all His work” For­give my trans­lat­ing of Hebrew, I’m not exactly flu­ent. The impor­tant thing here, though, is not know­ing how to trans­late the past tense of “shab­bat,” but know­ing that it was the Hebrew word for “rest.” This “Shab­bat” is also known as “Sab­bath,” a day that’s lit­er­ally kept by Jews every seven (lit­eral) days. What we find is that Moses used this lan­guage lit­er­ally, rather than figuratively.

So, let’s jump for­ward a few thou­sand lit­eral years made up of lit­eral days, to ask Jesus. If you want to do the same thing, this time pull out a par­al­lel Greek Bible and a Greek dic­tio­nary. In Matthew 12, first we see Jesus’ dis­ci­ples get­ting razzed for work­ing on the Sab­bath. But, Jesus demon­strates the mercy of God that the Phar­isees didn’t under­stand. He explains that the Sab­bath isn’t a day of judge­ment, but a day of grace. First in regards to the dis­ci­ples gath­er­ing food, then by heal­ing a man’s with­ered hand. He didn’t tell them that the Sab­bath wasn’t intended to be a lit­eral day. Jesus still believed the Sab­bath to be a lit­eral sev­enth day.

Then, in verse 40, Jesus refers to the three (lit­eral) days that Jonah was in the whale, and explains that it’s going to be three (lit­eral) days after He dies that He will be risen. Clearly, Matthew 12 is an account of Jesus ref­er­enc­ing the Old Tes­ta­ment in a lit­eral sense.

So, now that we had some­one in the Old Tes­ta­ment, and then Jesus, let’s jump ahead another few decades to the author of Hebrews. Hebrews 11 breaks it down in the eas­i­est way to under­stand yet. “By faith we under­stand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are vis­i­ble.” Seen/visible here refers to things we can observe (i.e. tan­gi­ble). This is what sci­en­tists are study­ing. Things which are seen. Seen with the eye, or even invis­i­ble things that can be observed. God made all of this out of things which can’t be seen with the eye, or even observed. That is to say, God made every tan­gi­ble sub­stance, force, etc. out of the intan­gi­ble (we might say “non-existent”).

These are just a few of many ref­er­ences which refer to the Old Tes­ta­ment as being lit­eral. I’m going to go ahead and let you research that and form your own beliefs. I can’t force you to believe any­thing, I can’t even form a per­sua­sive enough argu­ment to sway you into believ­ing any­thing. Ulti­mately, if you don’t see this day as a lit­eral 24-hour period, There’s not really any rea­son to believe the rest of the Old Tes­ta­ment lit­er­ally, because you’ll be stuck under the belief that it’s all fig­u­ra­tive to explain con­cepts that were beyond the old Israelites or Chris­tians’ sci­en­tific knowledge.