There are different types of literature in
the Bible.
There’s Poetry, as in the Psalms.
There are parables, Jesus used those as teaching
tools.
There’s Prophecy—as in the books of the
last section of the Old Testament (Isaiah
to Malachi).
There are Letters—as in the New Testament
epistles written by Paul, Peter, John, and
the others.
There’s Biography—as in the Gospels.
There’s also Autobiography—like in the
book of Acts where the author, Luke, is recording
events that he is participating in.
And there are historical records—as in the
books of first and second Kings, and many
other books of the Bible that contain accounts
of events that actually took place, like the
birth, life, death and physical resurrection
of Christ.
So what’s Genesis?
If it’s poetry or meant to be understood
as some kind of metaphor, then perhaps the
millions of years we hear so much about could
just be a part of how God created.
English poetry often features rhythm and rhyme,
in other words, sound patterns.
Those features are hard to translate into
another language.
The great thing about Hebrew poetry, like
in the Psalms, is that it features different
kinds of parallelism and a particular verb
structure that translate well into other languages.
Hebrew scholar Dr Steven Boyd, whose PhD is
in Hebraic and Cognate Studies, performed
statistical comparisons of verb type frequencies
between historical and poetic Hebrew texts.
And he came to the conclusion that Genesis
1 is clearly historical narrative, not poetry
with a 99.997 percent probability.
So, not 50/50, right? No. Not, well, maybe it’s poetry, maybe it’s describing real historical events;
could go either way. Pretty conclusive.
It’s crystal clear that the author of Genesis
was describing actual historical events.
