Many liberal theists have made the claim that the ancient readers of the Bible never believed Genesis was meant to be literal. When I hear people make this claim, I've often asked them what literary clues are present that identify Genesis (or other relevant passages) as figurative and how can we distinguish them from simple narrative. The usual responses I get are a swift change of the subject (red herring), links to liberal scholars who have made the same claim (appeal to authority), or an avalanche of literary terms that have absolutely no substance (argument by verbosity). I intend to write a more detailed discussion of this criticism in the future but on this occasion of Rosh Hashanah, I wanted to point out a simple fact that might shine some light on the matter.
Our Gregorian calendar was intended to count the years since the birth of Christ. The AD in 2022 AD is an abbreviation of the Latin term, Anno Domini, which literally means, “year of our Lord.” There was a little goof in our math but, for the most part, it's been approximately 2,022 years since the birth of Christ (give or take a few years).
Now
the Jews, of course, do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah of
Scripture and so their calendar doesn't count the years since His
birth. Instead, they have counted the years since creation. So, what
year is it on the Jewish calendar? It's 5783.
Hmmm. Is it just a coincidence or is that not too far off from the typical creationist's understanding of the age of the earth? The claim has been made that creationists like myself are simply fanatical fundamentalists who take a hyper-literal view of Genesis that is not intended by the text. It seems to me that the Jewish calendar agrees with me. If they are counting the years since the creation, they are far closer to my estimate of the earth's age than any evolutionist's estimate. I guess that means the ancient Hebrews were also young earth creationists!
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