[19] “This book is that of the origin of heaven and earth, when it came into being” (Gen. 2:4). (That is to say): “This perfect Reason, moving in accord with the number 7, is the primal origin both of mind ordering itself after the original patterns, and of sense-perception in the domain of mind (if the expression is permissible) ordering itself after those originals.” “Book” is Moses’ name for the Reason of God, in which have been inscribed and engraved the formation of all else.
[20] But that you may not suppose that the Deity makes anything in definite periods of time, but may know that to mortal kind the process of creation is unobserved, undescried, incomprehensible, he adds, “When it came into being,” not defining “when” by a determining limit, for the things that come into being under the hand of the First Cause come into being with no determining limit. There is an end, then, of the notion that the universe came into being in six days.