Daaaayyyyy OH!?!?
I came across an interesting factoid the other day which challenged on of my assumptions about space-time. Although I knew that the rotational velocity of the earth is slowing, I didn’t consider how that may have had an impact on the creation story. Genesis 1:5 says: “And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” The Hebrew word used here is yom (ש”ע) יום .
According to the article on Wikipedia; The length of one day about 4.5 billion years ago was about six hours. It was 21.9 hours 620 million years ago as recorded by rhythmites (alternating layers in sandstone). Because of the way the second is defined, the length of a day is increasing by about 1.7 milliseconds per century.
Depending on how literal you want to be about the creation story, this would have the effect of speeding up the “daily” rate of progress on the infant earth by about 400%, since a day is the time interval between light and darkness.