Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 2:4b
In the day that the LORD God made. An idiom meaning when, not a calendar entry.
Genesis 2:4, in every translation this tool compares.
English can use day loosely: in the day of trouble means whenever trouble comes, not one sunrise. Hebrew does the same thing here, attaching day to an infinitive rather than a date, and the whole clause simply means when.
Because the same verse that opens with a genealogical heading closes with a phrase, in the day, that many readers take as a strict twenty-four-hour marker, and the construction is not built the way a plain calendar date is built.
Most versions read when or in the day that, both compatible with either a literal day or a summarizing when. Some readers press day here toward a literal twenty-four-hour marker, which the construction does not by itself require.
בְּיוֹם beyom (יוֹם yom) · H3117
Beyom is yom, day, prefixed with the preposition and followed by an infinitive construct, asot, making. This beyom-plus-infinitive pattern is a standard Hebrew idiom meaning when or at the time that, attested roughly seventy times in the Hebrew Bible, including at Genesis 5:1 itself. It is a different construction from the numbered yom echad, yom sheni pattern used through chapter one for the six creation days.
English when can carry any duration; English day cannot. Beyom's idiomatic when-sense and yom's literal daylight-sense both get carried by the same English gloss, so a reader cannot see from the translation alone that this construction is not making the same kind of chronological claim the numbered days of chapter one make.
A preposition-plus-infinitive built on yom is a set idiom meaning when, distinct from yom used with a number or the definite article for a specific day. Check which construction is in front of you before treating day as a chronological claim.
No serious lexical dispute; grammarians widely recognize beyom plus infinitive as an idiom for when. The disagreement is theological, about how much weight the idiom should be allowed to carry into the six-day debate of chapter one, which this verse does not by itself settle either way.
- beyom plus infinitive as a when-idiom, attested roughly seventy times: standard Biblical Hebrew grammars
- Same construction at Genesis 5:1, 'beyom bero elohim adam', in the day God created man
- Discussed at length by both young-earth and old-earth commentators on Genesis 1-2
