The Hebrew word 'olam' is the word which refers to a period of time and is translated Day, as in Day of the Lord.
Consider also that the text also says "God called the light, 'day', and the darkness he called 'night'." That's pretty literal language if it's meant to be just symbolism, isn't it?
My bottom line continues to be, why should I not believe in creation story in Genesis literally? And if I don't, does that mean that I don't believe the rest of Genesis literally? For me it's what we often call a 'slippery slope.'
I'm in total agreement with you, Guenevere.......God's power is amazing, and the Grand Canyon is a perfect example of it. He could make the mountains and the canyons with a fingertip, a flood, or even just a word! Awesome!!
Did you know that scientists now acknowledge that the Colorado River could, in no way have caused the Grand Canyon.......but that hasn't filtered down to the innocent children in public schools who are being force fed 'facts' about evolution that are in no way factual.
I am not challenging a "literal" interpretation of the story in Genesis. But, to me, to interpret "day," or even the components of a "day" ("evening" and "morning"), would imply that God has a domain analgous to that on Earth, which strikes me as being just a little arrogant on the part of us relatively insignificant creatures.
We know from scientific measurements that a "day" on Earth is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and some number of seconds in length.
We also know, applying the same concept of "day" as a rotation of a celestial body through a 360 degree of arc independent of any other movement, that a "day" on Mars is about 24 1/2 of our hours. Similarly, a "day" is little over 9 Earth hours on Jupiter, and nearly 88 terrestial days long on Mercury. In fact, on lonely Pluto, a day is many Earth years in length.
So the concept of "day" is already relative within our own human experience.
It does rankle my sensibilities a tad to suggest absolute knowledge of the length of a day in the life of the Almighty.
It could indeed be roughly 24 hours, it could just as easily be 24 seconds of our time, or several hundreds of millions of sidereal years.
I am comfortable with my interpretation as a Devine day being equivalent to hundreds of millions of sidereal days because it allows many of the things we insignificant humans have been allowed by His hand to learn to fit elegantly into His wonderful mosaic.