John MacArthur’s Study Bible includes a statement about Genesis 1:5 where he claims, “Day” with numerical adjectives in Hebrew always refers to a 24 hour period.”
This line from MacArthur is repeated over and over by YEC's. You can find it parroted in places like Answers In Genesis. The problem though is that MacArthur's claim doesn't seem to be accurate. According to other sources, a 24 hour reference has the number prefixed by the Hebrew letter “hey, equivalent to h”, meaning “the.”
So, in other words, a 24 hour day reference should read, "the first day, the second day, the third day." But we don't see this in Genesis. In the passages that are claimed to be 24 hours, the text is without the article. It is true that the King James version translates this as: "And the evening and the morning were the first day."
However, "the" is not in the actual Hebrew text. There is also no "the" with evening or morning. You can probably see this better if I copy the KJV Genesis 1:1-8 and strikeout the articles that are not in the actual Hebrew.
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Above you can clearly see that articles are used sometimes and other times are not. You can also see that counted days as well as morning are used completely figuratively in Hosea:
1 Come, and let us return unto the Lord:
for he hath torn, and he will heal us;
he hath smitten, and he will bind us up.
2 After two days will he revive us:
in the third day he will raise us up,
and we shall live in his sight.
3 Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord:
his going forth is prepared as the morning;
and he shall come unto us as the rain,
as the latter and former rain unto the earth.
You can see the same poetic use of time in Psalms 90:
5 in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.
6 In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up;
in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.
This reference is to: "ye children of men." The comparison to grass is figurative rather than literal. However, even grass does not grow and get cut in one day.
We can see this same exaggeration of time in Jonah 4:
6 And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.
10 Then said the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night
There is no real gourd that grows high enough in a single night to deliver shade. We can also see in Jonah 4:11 the problem with large numbers. The KJV reads:
more than sixscore thousand persons
That's not really what the Hebrew says. It actually reads, "two ten ten-thousand". This means:
(2 and 10) ten-thousands or 120,000. Notice that there is no word for 100,000.
