1.4 Third Day

by Ulrich Utiger

Abstract

On the third day, a new earth is created, which implies, according to rule number three, a third restriction because the word erets is used again inside a restricted smaller context. This is why the third day’s first reference implies a restriction (or transition) to the whole planet Earth because it is tied to the next stage described by the second day’s second reference, which summarizes the phase when the primitive Earth consisted of a magma ocean mixed with water and an opaque upper atmosphere containing silicate vapor, carbon dioxide, steam and other gases. The third day’s second reference summarizes a similar process limited to Earth’s surface after the stage described by the second day’s third reference, as required by table 2.

Contents

The Big Rain
The First Continents
Celestial and Terrestrial Plants
References

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1.4.1 The Big Rain

God said: ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered unto one place, and let the dry land appear.’ God called the dry land ‘earth’ and the gathering together of the waters he called ‘ocean’. And God saw that it was good. […] And there was evening and there was morning, the third day (Gen 1:9-13).

From the previous context (sec. 1.3.2), one has to conclude that “the waters under the heavens” refers to this magma ocean mixed with water, although it is somewhat embarrassing to call waters such a mix because it contains mainly silicates. This must be understood in the context of the next sentence “and let the dry land appear” (Gen 1:9). In the Hebrew text, only “the dry” (hayyabbasah) is mentioned without “land”. Thereby, this sentence does not necessarily refer to land masses above sea level. It is rather the verb appear (raeh) that is referring to the emergence of the continent above sea level. A drying process indeed involves water and another material that is initially kind of wet from the presence of the water. Consequently, the waters must be mixed with this other material before the drying occurs. Thereby, “the waters under the heavens” in the present context must be understood as a mixture of water and minerals that will later form the continent.

Liquids can dissolve gases. It is well known, for instance, that the water of rivers, lakes and oceans contain oxygen, enabling fish to live in them. However, when liquids become solid, they exsolve their gaseous content, which is why one should never forget a bottle of champagne in the freezer: the carbon dioxide dissolved in the water will be released and the bottle explodes (Reeves 1988 p. 142). Analogously, when the magma ocean cooled and began to solidify, it degassed its dissolved volatile content. This happened from the bottom to the surface, as will be discussed below. So during the planet’s cooling after the rock vapor condensed, volatiles formed bubbles deep in the mantle and raised to the surface, where they joined the dense and boiling atmosphere that possibly already existed from the previous impact melting of the hydrated silicates during Earth’s accretion, unless it has been stripped away by strong stellar winds and/or the Moon-forming last giant impact, which is still a subject of debate (Kasting & Catling 2003 p. 431; Condi 2011 pp. 202-203; Baines et al. 2013). In any case, those volatiles consisted mainly of steam and carbon dioxide (Elkins-Tanton 2008).

The release of water vapor and other volatiles caused by the solidification of the mantle can be considered a drying process: during a literal drying, when water is leaving another mass by evaporation, it effectively gets to another place and is henceforth separated from the other mass. The solidification of the mantle is, of course, not such a literal drying by evaporation, but it is nevertheless an analogous process. One only has to replace evaporation by degassing. Hence, the gathering of the low waters driven out from solidifying minerals into the steam atmosphere was a first step in the direction of the final gathering of the waters in the primordial ocean. In the atmosphere, the water vapor was indeed still mixed with other gazes, especially with carbon dioxide, and thereby did not yet constitute a single constituent.

This is why a second step in the drying process took place with further cooling: the steam condensed and fell on the ground in the form of a torrential rain. This dried out the atmosphere and gave birth to the primitive ocean, which was already salty. The totality of the waters thus collected on the ground is called ocean (Gen 1:10), which must effectively have covered the whole surface of the planet at some stage, because the surface of the young Earth was still more or less regular when the outermost layer began to solidify. Maybe there were volcanic islands, but certainly no continents, mountains or other major irregularities, which can only form if there is a solid crust after millions of years of tectonic activity (Zahnle et al. 1988 p. 63; Allègre 2001 pp. 189-196; ; Condie 2011 pp. 203-204, 219-220; Elkins-Tanton 2011).

This torrential rain has some similarities with a mini big bang: if the universe is assumed to be an expanding spherical surface (sec. 1.1.2), then this must have been the case since the beginning. The primitive Earth is our limited universe and also constantly grew as a sphere during accretion. Inside the supposedly spherical space of the whole universe, the big bang produced mainly hydrogen as an analog to water, as discussed in section 1.2.1. The different steps from clouds to the primordial ocean are summarized on the last row of table 2. So this was also a process taking place on Earth’s spherical surface. This is why it is adequate to call big rain the torrential deluge that produced Earth’s primitive ocean. There are also other similarities we will discuss further on.

The bottom of the mantle lies at a depth of about 2900 km, resting on the outer iron/nickel core (Rothery et al. 2011 p. 31). This is almost half of Earth’s radius of 6371 km. According to these numbers, the mantle occupies almost 84% of Earth’s volume. So the solidification of the mantle, the degassing of its volatiles and the formation of the primitive ocean cannot be considered a process taking place near Earth’s surface but involves the major part of the globe, as required by table 2. In addition, the core may also have contributed to Earth’s water budget, even though this is difficult to quantify (Drake & Campins 2005; Peslier et al. 2017; O’Brien 2018).

As for “let the dry land appear”, this refers, of course, to both the first oceanic and continental crust, and the emergence of the latter above sea level. Rocks of oceanic crust are called mafic, whereas rocks of continental crust are termed felsic. This distinction is regardless of whether these rocks are below or above sea level but refers to their chemical composition. Mafic minerals have a predominantly basaltic chemical composition and are somewhat denser in comparison to felsic minerals, which are chemically more variable but similar to granite (pp. 31-32; Rothery et al. 2011 p. 46). It is probable that the first crust was mafic because the underlying mantle has a similar chemical composition (Condie 2011 p. 269).

There is debate over when the first crust formed on Earth. The oldest dated rock on Earth is a 4031 ± 3 Ma tonalitic gneiss from the Slave Craton (north-western Canada), which is of felsic composition (Gradstein et al. 2012 p. 318). But still older rocks may have been destroyed by remelting during the late accretion and by subduction processes. Testimonies of such rocks may be zircons, which have been found in sedimentary rocks on the Yilgarn Craton (Western Australia) with ages ranging back to 4404 ± 8 Ma (Mojzsis et al. 2001; Wilde et al. 2001; Valley et al. 2014), even though there are authors who claim that the oldest confidently dated zircon is 4363 ± 20 Ma (Kamber 2015).

Zircons are zirconium-silicate crystals that are very resistant to heat and pressure. So it comes as no surprise that they have survived the late accretion and thereby are Earth’s oldest minerals. They form together with mafic or granitic rocks and preserve the history of formation through small inclusions of various isotopes, even if the host rocks later disappear by remelting or weathering. So the zircons from Australia do not provide information about the sedimentary rocks in which they were found but about their long gone host rocks. Besides the age of formation of at least 4.4 Ga, they also tell geologists that the host crust was granitic and formed in the presence of liquid water, so at a time when the oceans were already in place.

This sets an upper limit for Earth’s temperature, which again implies that the influx of impactors must have been relatively low and that the Hadean was possibly not so “hell-like” at this time, in other words, that there has indeed been an increase in the influx of impactors only later around 4 Ga (sec. 1.3.3), destroying this early continental crust but not the zircons they hosted (Valley et al. 2002; Rogers & Santosh 2004 pp. 43-46; McCarthy & Rubidge 2005 p. 70; Zahnle et al. 2007; Hopkins et al. 2008; Condie 2011 pp. 263-268). However, some authors caution that at least some zircons may also have formed by impacts from meteorites and other mechanisms (Kenny et al. 2016).

The details of how the first crust formed is also a topic of debate since no rocks from the Hadean have survived the late accretion. This is why research in this domain must largely rely on theoretical models. What seems to be evident is that the mantle solidified from the bottom upwards because the melting point of silicates increases with increasing pressure. Furthermore, denser materials normally also have higher melting points and density decreases from the bottom upwards (Zahnle et al. 2010; ; Lebrun et al. 2013). On the other hand, cooling happened at the surface by radiation of heat into space. So pieces of crystals also began to solidify at the surface, despite having the lowest density as well as pressure and thereby the lowest melting point there. By comparison, when water cools down, its density decreases, which is why ice floats on liquid water. Thereby, water basins freeze from above downwards. However, this is an anomaly because the density of most materials increases when they solidify. Thereby, frozen pieces of silicates did not swim above the magma ocean but sunk down and remelted (Elkins-Tanton et al. 2003; Elkins-Tanton 2008).

This is why smaller pieces of rock stabilized on the surface only when the mantle became viscous enough after sufficient cooling to prevent them from sinking. Whether this stage led to a so-called stagnant lid covering the whole planet, as on the other terrestrial planets, or to plate tectonic is less clear, also to what extent continental crust and land above sea level was formed (Elkins-Tanton 2008; Condie 2011 p. 268; Kamber 2015; O’Neill et al. 2018; Schaefer & Elkins-Tanton 2018).

However, it seems that according to the latest research in the field (Korenaga 2021a; Korenaga 2021b; Morrison et al. 2023; Guo & Korenaga 2023), the Earth rapidly moved to a plate tectonic regime after mantle solidification. In other words, slabs of basaltic crust began to form instead of a coherent lid. This situation being unstable because the slabs were colder and thereby denser than the underlying mantle – the ductile asthenosphere – they tended to sink slowly into it, which finally led to the onset of plate tectonics and subduction, whereby slabs of lithosphere are pulled down at plate boundaries because of gravity. At the other end of the slabs, ocean ridges were opened producing new oceanic crust out of upwelling magma driven by convection currents initiated by the same subducting slabs. Hadean subduction could have produced widespread continental crust and thereby even a substantial part of exposed land above sea level. Earth is the only planet in the solar system where plate tectonics occurs (Condi 2011 pp. 156-157, 397-398).

 

1.4.2 The First Continents

A second reference of the third day is made in the context near the Earth’s surface, including the crust, ocean and troposphere. Here we are not after the stage described in the previous section but after the one summarized by the second day’s third reference, as required by table 2: the late veneer brought additional materials and water to Earth’s surface by hydrated impactors, which released their volatiles through the heat caused by the impact. They were too small to melt the entire Earth but large enough to vaporize the ocean and a silicate layer, leading again to a big rain. This also implies that the Hadean crust was largely destroyed and thereby crust formation was reset to zero (Sharma & Pandit 2003; Rothery et al. 2011 p. 62). So here we have a similar departing situation as for the stage described in the previous section. Its subsequent unfolding must be analogous too, that is, it also has to be a gathering of “The waters under the heavens” and an emergence of the “dry land”.

In fact, instead of a solidification of the entire mantle, we are in front of a solidification of the melted silicate layer, whereby the minerals released their dissolved water and other volatiles into the atmosphere, from where the steam condensed and rained out. As in the previous context, this is a drying process, leading again to a crust and the emergence of continents after about 4 Ga. This is the time of the Archean, the beginning of which indeed corresponds to the age of the oldest rock found in the Slave Craton, as mentioned in the previous section (Gradstein et al. 2012 p. 360). Remnants of younger preserved Archean crust can be found on all continents (Allègre p. 192f.; Condie 2011 p. 266). On the other hand, oceanic crust has not survived because it is short-lived, being constantly recycled into the mantle (Condie 2011 pp. 273-274).

When Europeans began to colonize the Americas and drew maps of their conquests, they noticed a similarity between the western and eastern borders of the Atlantic, for which they suggested rather bizarre explanations. In 1912, Alfred Wegener proposed what he called continental drift, that is, continents splitting from a large landmass – presently called supercontinent – and moving around the Earth. His proposals led to a series of oppositions, controversies and investigations that occupied much of the 20th century. But his theory is now widely accepted as plate tectonics (Rogers & Santosh 2004 pp. 3-12).

There was indeed only one continent in the beginning. Later, it broke apart into several plates, which slowly drifted away from each other over millions of years and then again came together on the opposed hemisphere of the Earth. It is thought that there have been at least seven supercontinents in the past. The first supercontinent was Vaalbara dating back to about 3.6 Ga. Evidence for its existence comes from cratons in South Africa and Western Australia, which have survived up to the present despite continued destruction through plate tectonics. The last supercontinent was Pangea, which formed 300 Ma and, around 200 Ma, began to drift to the present-day constellation of five continents (Africa, America, Antarctica, Australia and Eurasia), as will be discussed in section 3.3.3.

However, there is an ongoing debate about how, when and to what extent continents emerged after 4 Ga, even though the geological record for the Archean is more complete than for the Hadean. What is agreed upon is that felsic rocks form through so-called partial or fractional melting of a parent material, mostly basaltic crust, which contains different minerals that melt at different temperatures. Minerals with low melting points are mostly also less dense. Thereby, if the temperature is such that some minerals begin to melt, but others remain solid, the molten ones begin to migrate upwards to shallower depths through the interstices that form between solid crystals. The same happens when a whole melt cools such that some minerals solidify but others remain in the liquid phase, which is named fractional crystallization (Rogers & Santosh 2004 pp. 39-40; Condie 2011 p. 7; Rothery et al. 2011 pp. 89-90).

Partial melting occurs in several possible situations. For instance, if a slap of basaltic crust is gravitationally driven deep into the mantle in a modern subduction zone, seawater is mixed with the mantle silicates, which reduces their melting points. As a result, they partially melt such that all kinds of less dense minerals are produced. Thereby, they rise and form volcanic island arcs (Rogers & Santosh 2004 pp. 20-23; McCarthy & Rubidge 2005 pp. 44-47; Zheng & Chen 2016). Island arcs mainly consist of basaltic crust that is not very different from mantle minerals (Condi 2011 pp. 90-91). So a second stage is needed to finally produce felsic continental crust (Hawkesworth & Kemp 2006). This can happen in collision zones where terranes like island arcs and oceanic plateaus are merged together to cratons and finally to continents. In such collision zones, crust is also thickened through mountain building (Condi 2011 pp. 92-99).

These are very varied and complicated mechanisms that cannot be discussed in detail here. Furthermore, they are not entirely understood and Archean continent creation may have been different from modern formation (Stern 2004; Condi 2011 pp. 273-276; Gradstein et al. 2012 p. 317; Nagel et al. 2012; Hynes 2014; Dhuime et al. 2015; Hastie et al. 2016; Gillard et al. 2017; Johnson et al. 2017; O’Neill et al. 2018; Korenaga 2021b; Arndt 2023). In any case, the first land masses have emerged out of an ocean covering the whole planet as suggested by Genesis 1:9. The mechanisms involved certainly took place in considerable depths, but compared to Earth’s radius of 6371 km these can nevertheless be considered near-surface processes.

The ocean and the continents form a new duality heaven/earth, the smallest within the material evolution. In fact, the waters (mayim) are named ocean (yam), which resembles heaven (shamayim) because both the ocean and heaven are characterized by an apparently infinite transparency and vastness. defying the law of gravity similar to birds flying around in an aerial heaven and to angels moving about in a spiritual space. On the other hand, the primitive continent is called earth (erets), which here implies a limitation to Earth’s surface (sec. 1.2.4), which perfectly reflects the material and earthy aspect of the ground on which we live.

 

1.4.3 Celestial and Terrestrial Plants

And God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.’ And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good (Gen 1:11-12).

The creation of plants on the third day is the first mention of life in Genesis. The simplest existing life forms are archaebacteria (or archaea for short). Many of them are thermophile, living around hot springs in volcanic regions. Others thrive deep in the ocean in hydrothermal vents along mid-ocean ridges. They do not use light as a source of energy but chemistry by oxidation of hydrogen sulfide into sulfate, or inversely by reduction. Methanogens, on the other hand, derive their energy from fermentation and produce methane gas. Most of these archaebacteria live in an environment with low oxygen levels and many prefer hot environments. Even though there is no formal proof, it is thought that these simple organisms were the very first microorganisms, which is why some researchers argue that life may have existed on Earth at 3.8 Ga or even before (McCarthy & Rubidge 2005 pp. 167-170; Condi 2011 p. 370; Gradstein et al. 2012 pp. 167-169). So life may have appeared for the first time when there was still no or very little sunlight penetrating the thick cloud layer, which would explain why Genesis mentions life before the fourth day, in other words, before the Sun was created (Gen 1:14-19). As will be discussed in section 1.5.1, this does not contradict the fact that the Sun was the first celestial body that formed in the solar system.

These archaea neither belong to the vegetable nor the animal kingdom but constitute a separate domain. Some of them are chemolithoautotrophs, which means that they derive energy from inorganic chemicals in rocks and can synthesize organic compounds from carbon dioxide on their own (Madigan et al. 2019 p. 402). Furthermore, their food supply does not depend on other living organisms (autotroph). In this sense, they are closer to plants rather than animals even though they are not able to photosynthesize like most plants. In contrast, chemolithoheterotrophs are not able to synthesize organic compounds and thereby require an organic carbon source from other living organisms (Kuenen 1999 p. 238). In this sense, they are rather similar to animals. So chemolithoautotrophs seem to be less evolved than chemolithoheterotrophs. Since life evolved from simple to more complex species, one may conclude from this that the first evolved before the second (Allègre 2001 pp. 253-254), even though there is a lot of uncertainty and speculation regarding the first life forms.

The next step in biological evolution was the appearance of microorganisms capable of anaerobic photosynthesis, which does not produce oxygen. The energy used for this kind of photosynthesis still does not come from the Sun but from infrared radiation released in hot hydrothermal environments. Cyanobacteria were the first to use sunlight for oxygen-producing photosynthesis. The oldest evidence for their presence in the past comes from stromatolites of the Pilbara Craton in Australia (Condi 2011 pp. 376-377; Gradstein et al. 2012 p. 324) and the Isua supracrustal belt in Greenland (Nutman et al. 2016). They date to 3.5 and 3.7 Ga respectively. Stromatolites are finely laminated sediments composed chiefly of carbonate minerals that have been formed by cyanobacteria (Condi 2011 pp. 242-244). Other less certain evidence comes from putative fossilized microorganisms from the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Canada (Dodd et al. 2017).

Since cyanobacteria need sunlight, their environment was not limited to hot environments but thrived in shallow waters of the oceans. They became thus the dominant life form in the Archean and transformed carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into breathable oxygen, even though precipitation of calcite in the oceans was also a process that removed carbon dioxide. In fact, calcium washed out from continents reacts with carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans to form mineral calcite, which finally is deposited on the sea floor (McCarthy & Rubidge 2005 pp. 171-173; Gradstein et al. 2012 p. 331). Another precipitate from this time was iron oxide, forming large so-called banded iron formations, which can be unearthed today to produce steel. The chemistry was similar to that of calcite: iron atoms dissolved in sea water react with oxygen produced by cyanobacteria to form reddish iron oxide that is not easily dissolved in water. So it precipitates out and sinks to the sea floor. Thereby, banded iron formations are important witnesses of the so-called Great Oxidation Event induced by cyanobacteria, which slowly transformed an opaque Venus-like atmosphere into a transparent present-day one containing essentially nitrogen and oxygen (Allègre 2011 pp. 246-248; Condie 2011 pp. 410-412).

Cyanobacteria are prokaryotes that do not have a membrane-bounded nucleus and organelles like, for instance, mitochondria and chloroplasts. These are features that evolved later in eukaryotes sometime in the Paleoproterozoic (2500-1600 Ma) when the atmosphere was sufficiently oxygenized even though there are claims – based on indirect evidence of biomarkers – that the first eukaryotes may have appeared earlier. This is controversial though (McCarthy & Rubidge 2005 pp. 173-174; Knoll et al. 2006; Gradstein et al. 2012 pp. 343-344; Hartwell et al. 2015 pp. 6-7; French et al. 2015). In any case, plants evolved before animals since the first are at the food chain basis of the second.

However, Genesis 1:11-12 refers to plants not growing in water but on land, in particular to seed plants, fruit trees and grasses. The oldest evidence of terrestrial life comes from microfossils that are about 2.8 Ga old, and their appearance coincides with the emplacement of large continental masses in the late Archean (Beraldi-Campesi 2013). Because subaerial plants reduce CO2 from the atmosphere, indirect land colonization by photosynthetic organisms can also be inferred from low 13C/12C ratios recorded in carbonate rocks. There is no known mechanism for significant lowering of these ratios in the absence of land plants in recent settings. For instance, such ratios attributed to photosynthetic microorganisms exist in paleokarsts of the Mescal Limestone in Arizona dated to roughly 1.2 Ga (Horodyski & Knauth 1994).

The first multicellular photosynthesizers living on land may have been blue-green algal mats (Kenny & Krinsley 1998; Ishizaki 2017). Other eukaryotic assemblages of cells have been found in the Stoer Group of the Torridonian (Scotland) dated to 1199 ± 70 Ma (Cloud & Germs 1971; Turnbull et al. 1996; Prave 2002; Wellman & Strother 2015). It is unlikely that these were randomly associations of solitary cells because they are enclosed in wall-like structures (Strother et al. 2011). These primitive multicellular life forms were not widespread. This is why only when higher evolved plants like mosses, fungi and liverworts emerged, carbonate rocks started to record low 13C/12C ratios around 850 Ma (Knauth & Kennedy 2009). Seed plants and fruit trees evolved even much later, while grasses or Poaceae, as they are called scientifically, probably appeared in the Cretaceous as the oldest fossils found have age estimates of up to 129 Ma (Prasad et al. 2011; Wu et al. 2017).

So here we have again an apparent anachronism if Genesis 1:11-12 is exclusively referred to highly evolved plants because the context on the third day on Earth’s surface is the Hadean/Archean, during which life conditions were not favorable to seed plants. May the author of Genesis, who was Moses according to the tradition, be responsible for this anachronism because of his lack of modern scientific knowledge? This is unlikely because in his time one certainly knew that plants cannot live without daylight. So if Moses had written the account basing himself on the knowledge of his time, he would certainly not have made such a mistake. This paradox is consequently too noticeable to suppose that it is simply due to a distraction of the author or some hypothetical revisers. Thus, this claims for attention, which implies that we need to scrutinize deeper and widen the context.

As we have seen in section 1.1.1, the anachronism of shamayim and erets is only apparent because these words have several meanings on large and small scales including the spiritual world, which amounts to a vertical chronology as explained in section 1.2.4. In a similar way, the plants created on the third day have several meanings too. They represent the whole evolution of plants from plantlike autotrophic archaebacteria, which need no sunlight, up to fruit trees and grasses, which furthermore echo the celestial plants of paradise created in the very beginning long before our physical world. In fact, Genesis 2:8-9 describes herbs and celestial trees and a garden of Eden with a tree of life similar to the one of the knowledge of good and evil. The description of the paradise in the book of Revelation also mentions and on all other cohabitants (Rev 21:23, 22:2-5; Is 60:19-20).

God created these celestial plants together with the celestial world. They may have roots in a celestial earth and grow towards the light of a celestial heaven just like their counterparts on Earth’s surface. So heaven, earth, plants and light are entities that are tightly associated. As a result, if the words shamayim and erets refer to several heavens and earths, the words used in Genesis 1:12 to designate plants have several meanings as well. This is not to say that there are plants on every level of all possible heavens and earths. But there are plants in the spiritual world and on Earth’s surface because the latter is an image of the former. The other heavens and earths listed in table 2 are intermediate forms in a figurative state. So there is no need that plants grow in these spaces too.

One can therefore assume that the creation of the day (Gen 1:3-5) also refers to celestial days even though we have no chance to determine their length, except that they must be much longer than terrestrial ones because celestial things always largely surpass their terrestrial counterparts. Our short terrestrial days mentioned in Genesis 1:16 are just an analogy of the creation days. So they do not stand at all in contradiction with a 13.8-billion-year-old universe. If the world had been created in six twenty-four-hour days, a view vehemently defended by young-earth creationists, the relationship between time and the stages of evolution would be linear. It may console them that in the logarithmic graph of figure 8 this relation is indeed nearly linear.

the material, biological and cultural evolution is almost linear in a logarithmic plot.

Figure8: The material, biological and cultural evolution is almost linear in a logarithmic plot, which shows that the time from one step to the next decreases nearly exponentially.

Because of the multiple meanings of the plants created on the third day, their time of creation cannot be located as a point on a timeline but refers to just another vertical chronology such as those outlined in table 2, stepping over several stages. So this is allowed and nothing to worry about. The accent is nevertheless given to first biological life forms, which happened in the Archean or perhaps even in the Hadean. This context corresponds to the emergence of the first autotrophic archaebacteria not depending on light some 4 billion years ago or possibly earlier when the first crust appeared but sunlight was still unable to pierce through the thick cloud layer surrounding our early planet.

One could argue that the creation days are another apparent anachronism: their first mention on the first day would be too early if all six creation days were equated to terrestrial 24-hour days because these are determined by both the rotation of the Earth around itself and the position of the Sun. However, the creation of the Sun is only mentioned on the fourth day. This does not imply that the fourth day itself is such a day. The Hebrew word yom standing for day can indeed have different time lengths: a 24-hour days (Dt 16:8) but also a long undetermined length of time (Gen 26:8; Num 20:15). So here again we have several meanings, which is why each of the six creation days has its own almost exponentially decreasing duration (fig. 8). As a result, no anachronism is present in Genesis 1:5.

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