Creation in Seven Days?<p> <META HTTP-EQUIV=”template”CONTENT> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Author" CONTENT="petepet@lineone.net"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Date" CONTENT="June 6th 2004"> <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Creation,Bible, science,Messiah,Jesus,Christ,New,Testament,Old,Testament,Genesis,Revelation"> <META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Creation,Bible,science,Messiah,Christ,New,Testament,Old,Testament,Genesis,Revelation,Bible,Helps,articles,correspondence,courses,Bible,word,search,question,answer,research,links,Bible,Help,links,Christian,Web,Search,faith,facts,repent,Holy,Spirit,Creation,use,numbers,old,new,testament,love,forgiveness,Jesus,teaching"> </HEAD> <body> <p><H4>IS THERE SOMETHING IN THE BIBLE THAT PUZZLES YOU?</H4> <p><b> If so please EMail us with your question and we will do our best to give you a satisfactory answer.<A HREF=mailto:jonpartin@tiscali.co.uk>EMailus.</A> <p> <b> FREE Scholarly verse by verse commentaries on the Bible. <p><a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ultra2/pp2000ad/index.html"> THE PENTATEUCH</a> <P><a href="/genesiscommentary/"> GENESIS</a> ---<a href="/genesiscommentary/">EXODUS</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/leviticus1.html"> LEVITICUS 1.1-7.38</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/leviticus2.html"> 8.1-11.47</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/leviticus3.html"> 12.1-16.34</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/leviticus4.html"> 17.1-27.34</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/numbers1.html"> NUMBERS 1-10</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/numbers2.html"> 11-19</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/numbers3.html"> 20-36</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/deuteronomy1.html"> DEUTERONOMY 1.1-4.44</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/deuteronomy2.html"> 4.45-11.32</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/deuteronomy3.html"> 12.1-29.1</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/deuteronomy4.html"> 29.2-34.12 </a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/joshua.html"> THE BOOK OF JOSHUA </a>---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/judges.html"> THE BOOK OF JUDGES</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/psalms1to8.html">PSALMS 1-17</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/ecclesiastes.html">ECCLESIASTES</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah1.html"> ISAIAH 1-5</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah2.html">6-12</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah3.html">13-23</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah4.html"> 24-27</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah5.html"> 28-35 </a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah6.html"> 36-39 </a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah7.html"> 40-48 </a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah8.html"> 49-55</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah9.html">56-66</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/ezekiel.html"> EZEKIEL</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/daniel1.html"> DANIEL 1-7</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/daniel2.html">DANIEL 8-12</a> ---<p><a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/nahum.html">NAHUM</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/habakkuk.html">HABAKKUK</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/zephaniah.html">ZEPHANIAH</a> ---<a href="/zechariahcommentary/">ZECHARIAH</a> ---<a href="/jonpartin/"> THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW </a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/mark.html">THE GOSPEL OF MARK</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/petepartington/"> THE GOSPEL OF LUKE </a> --- <a href="/johncommentary/">THE GOSPEL OF JOHN</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/petepartington/acts.html"> THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES </a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/1corinthians1-7.html"> 1 CORINTHIANS 1-7</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/1corinthians8-14.html"> 8-16</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/2corinthians1-7.html"> 2 CORINTHIANS 1-7</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/2corinthians8-13.html"> 8-13</a> -- -<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/galatianscommentary.html">GALATIANS</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/ephesianscommentary.html"> EPHESIANS</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/colossians.html"> COLOSSIANS</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/1thessalonians.html"> 1 THESSALONIANS</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/2thessalonians.html"> 2 THESSALONIANS</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/planet/matthew1/index.html"> 1 TIMOTHY </a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/planet/matthew1/index.html"> 2 TIMOTHY </a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/planet/matthew1/index.html"> TITUS </a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/hebrewsa.html"> HEBREWS 1-6</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/hebrewsb.html"> 7-10</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/hebrewsc.html"> 11-13</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/planet/matthew1/index.html"> JAMES </a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/1john.html"> JOHN'S LETTERS</a> ---<a href="/revelationofjohn/"> REVELATION</a> <p>---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/planet/lifetruth/index.html"> THE GOSPELS </a> <p> <H4>IS THERE SOMETHING IN THE BIBLE THAT PUZZLES YOU?</H4> <p>If so please EMail us with your question to jonpartin@tiscali.co.uk and we will do our best to give you a satisfactory answer. <A HREF=mailto:jonpartin@tiscali.co.uk>EMailus.</A> <p><h2>Creation in seven days?</h2> <p><b>One problem that the Bible suffers from at the hands of its readers is that they do not take the trouble to ask what the writer meant. They assume that he thought and wrote with the same attitudes as we have today. Take for example the question of whether the Bible teaches that creation took place in seven days. At first the answer seems easy. It says so! But does it? <p>What we overlook, I repeat, is the question of what the writer meant. The difficulty is that we live in a "scientific" age. When we use a number, it means quantity, nothing else. When we speak of a day it means twenty four hours because we are scientifically oriented. Our minds are no longer flexible, they are fixed. <p>In the ancient world it was very different. Numbering was not a common facility. Time was a vague general idea thought of in terms of darkness and light, and phases of the moon. The thought of a scientifically fixed day was not even considered. <p> Even today you can go to aborigines in Australia, head hunting tribes in New Guinea and jungle tribes in South America and find that their ability to count is limited, in many cases to the level of three! In other words, they cannot count. They just do not think in terms of number. <p>It was the same in the ancient world. The Egyptian word for 3 also meant "many" looking back to a time when that was also the limit of counting to them, and 'everything else' was called "three". <p>The ancient Sumerians (descendants of Shem) who ruled in the Near East for over a thousand years,and whose writings are the earliest of which we have records (even if we cannot translate the earliest), developed their number system with 1 being the same word as 'man', 2 being the same word as 'woman' and 3 the same word as 'many' meaning 'everything else'. In their eyes the world was made up of themselves, their wives and the rest of creation. All without exception look to a time in their history when their counting, and their numerical thinking, was limited to three. And for the majority it remained thus for many centuries. <p>This situation is one we find almost impossible to comprehend. <p>Not that the Sumerians remained innumerate. Their learned men developed numbers to a highly sophisticated extent for business and other purposes, and used them in historical documents, yet in all their religious literature, and we have a good quantity of it, they only ever used the numbers three and seven. Why? Because those numbers signified to them not quantity but quality. Three was the number of completeness, seven the number of divine perfection. Quantity was irrelevant, what mattered was significance. <p>We have examples in the Bible of a similar position on numeracy. When the woman of Zarephath told Elijah she was "gathering a few sticks" (1 Kings 17.12), she used the word that also represented "two". When we are told (in the hebrew text) that Saul was one year old when he began to reign and reigned two year (1 Samuel 13.1) it was before the court had become sophisticated and had its own 'recorder'. It meant that he became king while he was in the first stage of life and reigned only until the second stage of life, he did not live to "three" i.e. to old age. There are still parts of the world where an old man will proudly tell you he is three years old! <p>Of course by this time scholars could count, as we have seen. But it was not a facility used often by common people. Interestingly we still retain traces of this ourselves. We say "I have a hundred (or thousand) and one things to do" meaning a lot. Or "I've got dozens of them' when we mean quite a lot. We don't expect anyone to count them, and hold us to account. We are using the numbers as adjectives not literal number words. <p>With the ancients that was how the common people used numbers all the time. In all ancient accounts of creation in the ancient Near East creation took place in "seven days". Why? Because this meant a perfect and complete divine work. Just as the seven gates to Sheol (the world of the dead) signified an impassable barrier to anyone who wanted to come back! Expressing it in these terms meant only one thing to the reader, the divine completeness of the work. The seven pattern was imposed to bring out that fact. <p>So when we come to the account of creation we have to consider the question as to whether there also the ‘seven days’ are to be taken as indicating the perfection of God’s handywork or as literal diary. Did God bind himself to seven periods of around twenty four hours, or is the pattern one deliberately used by the writer to convey the perfection of God’s handywork? <p>All too often this question is considered as though it were either a challenge to orthodoxy, or a yielding to science, and one is left wondering whether the heat with which some argue for ‘a literal seven twenty-four hour days’ (which means scientifically established days!) lies more in a fear of being seen as making concessions to science than as a genuine attempt to face the question on the evidence. <p> Part of the problem lies in the fact that once the concept of an almost universally agreed twenty-four hour day was established it gradually began to become pre-eminently the scientifically established meaning of the term ‘day’. We still, of course, call the period of light ‘day’ as opposed to ‘night, and we speak of long months of uninterrupted light in the Arctic circle as an ‘Arctic day’, but the twenty-four hour day is pre-eminent because it is scientifically exact. To us that fixed period is a ‘day’. This is very different from the situation in the ancient world when the term had no such scientific definition, and people’s minds were more flexible to ideas of time. <p>The term ‘yom’ (now translated ‘day’) itself could be used in various ways. It could refer to a period of time, whether long or short, for example, the ‘yom’ when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens (Genesis 2.4), - consider also ‘the day (yom) of the Lord’ (Isaiah 13.6,9 and often in the Old Testament), where the idea is again of a period and an appointed time, - it could refer as with us to a period of light as opposed to darkness, it could refer to a time-period or a moment of time (it is translated ‘time’ 64 times in AV), and even to a year (14 times in AV). And these were not, as with us, just a metaphorical exension of the usage of a term with a specific meaning. These were different variations on the meaning of ‘time-period’. <p>And even when applied to the period from evening to evening it was not specific. There was a period between evening and evening of indefined length, depending on the setting of the sun. Sometimes it would appear to go quickly, sometimes slowly, but they had no clock by which to keep an eye on the time and it was recognised that days would be of differing lengths, partly because of weather patterns and partly because time seemed to go more or less slowly. The word ‘hour’ does not appear in the AV Old Testament except in Daniel. It is a late concept. The concept of a ‘a twenty four hour day’ was thus totally unknown. A day in the sense in which we would normally understand it was to them an indefinite period between evening and evening, which varied in length without division apart from the movement of the sun, albeit for men marginally. Their minds and ideas of time were not fixed like ours. <p>It must be recognised that the ancients did not look on time as we do. There is no Hebrew word for the chronological concept of time as such. They did not think of time in that way. There were words for an appointed time, the ‘right’ time, and so on (one of which was ‘yom’), and they had words which could represent longer or shorter periods of time such as ‘year’ (measured by the seasons coming round and in tems of moon--periods), ‘month’ (moon-period), ‘day’ (sunrise to sunset), and so on, but these also were fluid. There was no fixed length of a year. Although a 365 day year is witnessed to in Palestine, it was not a standard norm. Thus the prophets can think in terms of 360 (12 x 30) days to a year, and even this is longer than most actual years which were for twelve lunar months (of 28-29 days per month), with an occasional thirteen month year required. <p> So ‘years’ varied and actual ‘months’ were seen as determined by the cycles of the moon, although they could be thought of as for approximately thirty days. Days also were evening to evening, not for an exact twenty four hours (an unknown concept). Nothing was precise. So the ancients did not think of time precisely. It is true, of course, that when speaking of ‘days’ in this sense, a general idea of its length in day to day life would be in mind, but Joshua’s long day (Joshua 10.14) was still recognised as being one day, albeit unique. Thus when the Psalmist says of God, ‘For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as watch in the night’ (Psalm 90.4), he was merely recognising that with God time was even more fluid, and that a ‘yom’ for God was of even more undefined length. <p>We should consider in this regard that in the Creation account the establishing of the approximate length of days did not occur until the ‘fourth yom’. It was then that the sun and moon were called on to establish ‘signs and seasons, days and years’. This means that the writer is specifically telling us that the length of an earth day was not determined by the sun until the ‘fourth yom’, and he would not have, as with us, the problem of stepping outside of or into a scientifically defined time period. Thus if we claim that God did limit Himself to such ‘days’ prior to that, and we cannot see why He should have, we must recognise that it certainly had no connection with ‘natural days’. It was purely arbitrary. It is not a natural reading of the account (or would not have been for the early reader). <p> This counts heavily against those who say ‘the account naturally reads as though it were seven natural days’. It only does to us because we are scientifically programmed to think like that. We could indeed argue that the account naturally suggests the opposite, that the days cannot be natural days as natural days had not been established until the fourth ‘day’. It is of course always theoretically possible to argue that God did limit Himself to the equivalent of natural days, and that He was free to do what He wished, but it is difficult to see why He should have done so, or why He should ‘speak’ and then wait an arbitrarily fixed length of time before doing so again. The truth is that it only appears to be the natural way of reading it because we approach it from a modern viewpoint. It is certain that the ancients did not have the same difficulty. <p> Let us think of God preparing to create. His Spirit awaits His command, His Word is at the ready. All is darkness, perpetual darkness. There has never been light in the universe. It is not an ‘evening’ for there has been no day. (So ‘there was evening and there was morning one day’ can not be intended literally). Then God speaks and instantly light comes into being, the electro-magnetic waves which will be a basis of the universe. What on earth significance has an arbitrary period of time to such a scene? But wishing to draw attention to an end to the period the writer calls it a ‘yom’. <p>The fact is that we must ask ourselves the question as to what alternative words the writer had available in order to convey his meaning of seven ‘time periods’ of God. He had before him the mythical representations of creation as ‘seven-day’ events, where the essential meaning was of a perfectly created world, and he also wished to represent God as completing His work in the perfect time-scale, which he clearly saw as God’s working week of six ‘God-days’ ending with the day of rest. The early Hebrew language did not have a multiplicity of time words with which he could express himself, and any other description than that of seven ‘yom’ would have been unnecessarily vague to his readers. To them it would be clear, a God-day. <p> Nor would any other word have so well fitted the probable pattern of the yearly feast for which the account may well have been written (all creation accounts in the outside world had as their raison d’etre their importance for recital at festivals where the gods had to be manipulated. While God did not have to be manipulated, the celebration of the covenant which bound Him to His people did have to be carried out). He was not trying to be sophisticated. He was trying to express a divine pattern. <p>It seems perfectly reasonable, and in accordance with ancient ideas of time, that his intention was that his readers should think in terms of ‘days of God’ as meaning periods in which God acted, without limiting Him to the length of earthly ‘days’, the latter being an idea which in the beginning had no place until the fourth period (except to mean something else). As we have seen men considered that a thousand years were to Him but as yesterday, which was another way of saying that to God time was almost an irrelevance. <p> So just as man would do a ‘day’s labour’ and then cease for the night, commencing next day and resting on the seventh, he decided to describe God’s activity in a similar way. This also had the advantage that it enabled the application of his record to the seven days of a religious festival, which was a common use of creation stories. But it must be considered extremely doubtful as to whether he wanted to restrict God to the length of earth days. What he was much more concerned to do was portray the activity in a sevenfold pattern to bring out the divine perfection of the work. <p> The very ‘first day’ is a problem to the twenty four hour day theory, for it has no recognised commencement other than the act of creation. The phrase ‘the evening and the morning were of the first day’ cannot be taken literally for there was no evening. All began with darkness. Are we really to believe that God created that which was ‘waste and empty’ in total darkness, and then ‘hovered’ by His Spirit for a period of about eight or so hours before His incredible work of creating light? <p>And once this light pervaded the universe, are we to believe that in a period of twelve hours or so He ‘separated the light from the darkness’? As light has replaced darkness this must mean that during that first ‘day’ He made periods of both, for it is natural to read the account as though the division between light and darkness, taking place after light had been created, took place before the coming evening of the second day. Are we then to believe that having established such a period of light (a ‘day’ within a day) and of darkness (was this not an evening before the evening?), which were surely themselves a ‘day’ according to Hebrew conception, He again waited before once more speaking with power? And that afterwards He deliberately altered light and darkness in accordance with the pattern the sun would later establish, until He made use of the sun for the purpose? We may ask, did He also at the same time ensure that daylight varied at different periods of time around the world? If not these were no standardised days. <p>Yet such a scenario is surely artificial. It is far more reasonable to believe that the writer intends his framework of ‘the first day’ to be an indication of a period of activity by God, which now comes to completion with the universe vibrant with light, and with periods of light and darkness clearly established, a period of unknown length, whether of a brief second or of a thousand years. By ‘the evening and the morning was of the first day’ He is indicating metaphorically, in a picturesque fashion, that God had completed the first of His six periods of activity in a succint and recognised way. <p> We should in fact note that the whole creation account, while patterned in a clearly structured way, is to some extent artificial. On the first day light is brought into being, on the fourth it is controlled by sun and moon, on the second day the seas and atmosphere are brought into being and on the fifth they are populated by fish and birds, on the third day the dry land and vegetation appear and on the sixth the animals and man who populate it and eat from it. The division is simplistic and does not take into account the complexity of many aspects of the creative work. For example, the birds need to eat and nest and needed dry ground as well as air and water. What the writer is really drawing out is that God made His provision before advancing His work. While it is always a remote possibility, and I rate it no higher than that as a concession to the beliefs of others, that God chose to work in a pattern restricted to earth time, it is far more likely that the pattern is one of man’s devising under God’s guidance which was not intended to be taken as literally representing a week as experienced by men. <p>So in my view the ‘yoms’ are ‘yoms’ of God, not ‘twenty four hour’ days, and they represent whatever time God chose to use in fulfilling His work. They are seven so as to convey the idea of divine perfection, and it is this sevenfold pattern that determines the dating of the Sabbath and not the other way around. And this is on the basis of the text and of the Hebrew meaning of words and concepts of time. <p>So when the writer sat down, to write down under the inspiration of God his account of the creation of the world, he first visualised the process and general order and fitted it into a ‘seven’ group to portray its perfection. His pattern is clear to see. <p>First he created the heavens and the earth. <p>On the first day light is made. On the fourth light is controlled with regard to earth. <p>On the second day the atmosphere and seas are made, on the fifth birds and fish populate them. <p>On the third day the dry land and vegetation is made and on the sixth the living creatures that will live on it and eat of it. <p>Finally on the seventh day no further work is needed and God ceases to work. <p>So every ancient reader realises that His perfect work is complete and final for it is a ‘seven day work’. <p>Here are God’s activities, then, brought into effect by His word. Each is then seen as the product of one God-day, without any thought as to how long it was. The emphasis was more on its magnificence. The writer’s interest is not in how it happened, or what processes took place. He is concerned in Who did it and what He provided. In the end he knew it was all through God’s powerful word. <p>The ancients never tried to be scientific (with the exception of a few very ‘learned’ men who lived far from Palestine). They did not have a scientific world view, either true or false. They did not try to work out what the earth was like in relation to the universe. They accepted things as they were. Attempts to build up a picture of how they visualised the world are based on the false assumption that they tried to do it. But they did not. They simply described what they saw, when they saw it, sometimes in highly metaphorical language. <p>Just as we describe the sun as rising and setting (although it does neither), so they described what they saw without even considering what lay behind what they said. They looked at the sea and saw the bottom of the sea underneath, and likened it to a house with foundations. They did not ask what lay below the foundations. They left that in the hands of God. They looked at the sky and likened it to a canopy. But they did not speculate on what kind of canopy. <p>Thus we should think carefully before we read into numbers and time-words in ancient literature the meaning that is commonplace for us today. They were not 'wrong'. They just did not express things in the same way. <p>For a fuller treatment of the subject of numbers covering the above in more detail see The Use of Numbers in the Ancient Near East & Genesis. <p><center><a href=index.html>Go to Home Page for further interesing articles</a></center> <p><H4>IS THERE SOMETHING IN THE BIBLE THAT PUZZLES YOU?</H4> <p><b> If so please EMail us with your question and we will do our best to give you a satisfactory answer.<A HREF=mailto:jonpartin@tiscali.co.uk>EMailus.</A> <p> <b> FREE Scholarly verse by verse commentaries on the Bible. <p><a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ultra2/pp2000ad/index.html"> THE PENTATEUCH</a> <P><a href="/genesiscommentary/"> GENESIS</a> ---<a href="/genesiscommentary/">EXODUS</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/leviticus1.html"> LEVITICUS 1.1-7.38</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/leviticus2.html"> 8.1-11.47</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/leviticus3.html"> 12.1-16.34</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/leviticus4.html"> 17.1-27.34</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/numbers1.html"> NUMBERS 1-10</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/numbers2.html"> 11-19</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/numbers3.html"> 20-36</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/deuteronomy1.html"> DEUTERONOMY 1.1-4.44</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/deuteronomy2.html"> 4.45-11.32</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/deuteronomy3.html"> 12.1-29.1</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/deuteronomy4.html"> 29.2-34.12 </a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/joshua.html"> THE BOOK OF JOSHUA </a>---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/judges.html"> THE BOOK OF JUDGES</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/psalms1to8.html">PSALMS 1-17</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/ecclesiastes.html">ECCLESIASTES</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah1.html"> ISAIAH 1-5</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah2.html">6-12</a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah3.html">13-23</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah4.html"> 24-27</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah5.html"> 28-35 </a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah6.html"> 36-39 </a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah7.html"> 40-48 </a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah8.html"> 49-55</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/isaiah9.html">56-66</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/ezekiel.html"> EZEKIEL</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/daniel1.html"> DANIEL 1-7</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/daniel2.html">DANIEL 8-12</a> ---<p><a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/nahum.html">NAHUM</a>--- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/habakkuk.html">HABAKKUK</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/zephaniah.html">ZEPHANIAH</a> ---<a href="/zechariahcommentary/">ZECHARIAH</a> ---<a href="/jonpartin/"> THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW </a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/mark.html">THE GOSPEL OF MARK</a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/petepartington/"> THE GOSPEL OF LUKE </a> --- <a href="/johncommentary/">THE GOSPEL OF JOHN</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/petepartington/acts.html"> THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES </a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/1corinthians1-7.html"> 1 CORINTHIANS 1-7</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/1corinthians8-14.html"> 8-16</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/2corinthians1-7.html"> 2 CORINTHIANS 1-7</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/2corinthians8-13.html"> 8-13</a> -- -<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/galatianscommentary.html">GALATIANS</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/ephesianscommentary.html"> EPHESIANS</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/colossians.html"> COLOSSIANS</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/1thessalonians.html"> 1 THESSALONIANS</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ok/bibleteaching/2thessalonians.html"> 2 THESSALONIANS</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/planet/matthew1/index.html"> 1 TIMOTHY </a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/planet/matthew1/index.html"> 2 TIMOTHY </a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/planet/matthew1/index.html"> TITUS </a> --- <a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/hebrewsa.html"> HEBREWS 1-6</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/hebrewsb.html"> 7-10</a> ---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/hebrewsc.html"> 11-13</a> ---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/planet/matthew1/index.html"> JAMES </a>---<a href="http://uk.geocities.com/jonpartin/1john.html"> JOHN'S LETTERS</a> ---<a href="/revelationofjohn/"> REVELATION</a> <p>---<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/planet/lifetruth/index.html"> THE GOSPELS </a> </body></html>