There was an evening and there was a morning: a day, the sixth.
וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם הַשִּׁשִּֽׁי׃ פ
The big issue here is the last phrase of the chapter, yom ha-shishi. I won’t go into the details here (find them in Lesson 7 of my Hebrew course if you want them), but the chapter ends, as it began, with an apparently ungrammatical phrase:
not יום ששי* yom shishi — “a sixth day”
not היום הששי* ha-yom ha-shishi — “the sixth day”
but יום הששי yom ha-shishi — ?
I’ve translated this as if it were grammatical, in the only way that makes it possible to do so — by separating the two Hebrew words. But really the punctuation tells us not to put a comma after “day” but to keep going, as with the identical phrase at the ends of the first five paragraphs. The Masoretes punctuated these two words as if they were a grammatical phrase, but left us to figure out its meaning on our own.
Gary Rendsburg, whom I’ve mentioned before, identifies it as “variation to mark an ending.” But why wouldn’t the second grammatical phrase above have achieved this? A second, third, fourth, and fifth day, followed by the (concluding) sixth day.
Another problem with that suggestion, of course, is that this is the last verse of Genesis 1, but not the ending of this section of the text — this pericope (four syllables, like Penelope), to use the scholarly term. I’ve discussed elsewhere the fact that the biblical chapters were invented barely eight centuries ago, 1,000 years after the final words in the Bible were written. So Gen 1:31 is not actually an ending.
But that still leaves us with the grammatical problem. I have heard it explained by saying that the first letters of these two words + those of the first two words of Genesis 2 spell out the Tetragrammaton, God’s personal name (more about that when we get to Gen 2:4). That would explain why shishi has to begin with a ה while yom can’t have one. Yet though the Bible does have acrostics — verses whose first letters spell out the alphabet — I’m not aware of any example where the first letters of a phrase were intended to spell anything.
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