I have no reason to assume that a day in Genesis was any longer than a day in 2026. I would need to see it in scripture.
You do and it does.
Genesis 1:21 places
great sea creatures, sea monsters and dragons on
Day Five.
Humans are then created on
Day Six in Genesis 1:26–27.
The sun isn't even appointed to govern the day until Day Four. So insisting that Days 1–3 must already be rigid 24-hour solar days is not “just reading the text”; its importing a modern clock into the passage and then pretending Genesis put it there.
Genesis does
not force
yôm (“day”) to mean exactly 24 hours.
Genesis 2:4 uses the same word much more broadly: “in the
day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens”
There,
yôm summarizes the
whole creation event itself, not one literal 24-hour period (day). So the same Hebrew word used for the creation “days” can also mean a broader span of time within Genesis itself. Context determines the meaning; the word alone doesn't prove a 24-hour period.
Even Irenaeus, a student of Polycarp who had known apostles who broke bread with Christ didn't treat the creation days as having only a simple 24-hour significance; he gave the six-day creation pattern a thousand-years-per-day typological meaning.
Genesis 3:1 calls the serpent -
nāḥāš -
“more subtle/crafty than any beast of the field.” It (which was created before humans) reasons, speaks, persuades, and deliberately deceives Eve.
So the biblical text itself gives you
great tannînîm in creation and then afterward, an extraordinarily crafty, speaking
serpent in Eden.
And ancient biblical and neighboring traditions repeatedly portray serpent, dragon, and sea-monster figures as more than mindless reptiles; sometimes crafty, sometimes supernatural, and sometimes conscious enemies of God or divine order.
So Scripture itself places the great tannînîm before mankind and then introduces a nāḥāš capable of reasoning, speech, persuasion and deception. Whatever modern categories we impose upon those descriptions, the ancient text is plainly stranger than a world containing nothing but the unintelligent reptiles familiar to us today.
And this is where the pattern becomes extraordinarily difficult simply to wave away. The Hebrews were not remotely alone. Across enormous distances and radically different civilizations, culture after culture preserved traditions of immense serpent-like or dragon-like beings associated with intelligence, supernatural power, the waters or heavens, and interaction with mankind.
Ancient Hebrews / Israelites
Sumerians
Akkadians
Babylonians
Ancient Egyptians
Canaanites / Ugaritic peoples
Ancient Persians / Iranians
Ancient Indians
Hindu traditions
Buddhist South Asian traditions
Tibetans / Himalayan peoples
Khmer / Cambodians
Thai peoples
Lao peoples
Balinese / Javanese / Indonesian peoples
Chinese
Japanese
Koreans
Vietnamese
Filipino peoples
Ancient Greeks
Romans
Norse peoples
Germanic peoples
Slavic peoples
Balkan peoples
Welsh / Celtic peoples
Teotihuacanos
Mexica / Aztecs
Maya
Andean peoples
Cherokee
Muscogee / Creek
Pueblo peoples
Hopi
Australian Aboriginal peoples
Māori
Fon / Dahomey peoples
Other West African serpent-tradition cultures
Genesis places the animals before humanity in the creation sequence, and then Genesis 3 presents a nonhuman serpent capable of understanding God’s command, reasoning about it, contradicting it, persuading Eve, and successfully deceiving her.
So stripped down to the rudiments:
nonhuman creatures existed first → the serpent was among the creatures → the serpent displayed intelligence sufficient to deceive a human who was made afterwards.
You can argue about what the serpent was, what animated it, or how literally to understand its form. What you can't honestly argue is that Genesis presents the earliest world of mankind as containing nothing but mindless animal life.
Genesis does not read like a modern biology textbook. It reads like an ancient account of a world in which humans appear into a creation that already contains powers, creatures, and intelligences they don't fully understand.