"a second day" (Gen 1:8)
Reading through the story of creation
8 … There was an evening and a morning: a second day.
וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם שֵׁנִֽי׃ פ
We don’t need to discuss “There was an evening and a morning” here; if you’re new to the blog and want to read more about that translation, you can do so here. We’ll read exactly those same Hebrew words later in the chapter for a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time. The end of the seventh day is not recorded in this same way.
a second day י֥וֹם שֵׁנִֽי But we do want to speak for just a moment about the phrase that ends v. 8. There is really no translation choice to be made here, though some English versions do translate it as “the second day.” But this is interpretive rather than literal. Because this will become a live issue when we reach v. 31, a quick grammar note is called for. As I wrote in my original post on “there was an evening and a morning”:
Hebrew has a definite article (like the English word “the”) but no indefinite articles (like “a” and “an”). “The king” is ha-melekh, but “a king” is just melekh.
Now I can add that -ה ha- would need to be added both to the noun (here, י֥וֹם yom ‘day’) and to its adjective (here, שֵׁנִֽי sheni ‘second’) for this literally to say “the second day.” As you understand from our discussion of Day One and from the situation in general, this is indeed “the” second day described in the Bible, but our text doesn’t say precisely that. Whether there are any larger consequences to this is something we’ll discuss when we get to v. 31.
And now let’s zoom out for a moment and look at Day Two as a whole, and in comparison with Day One.
Here’s how we’ve translated it (go to the link if you want to see or hear the Hebrew text):
6 God thought, Let there be a cupola in the middle of the water, and let it be a separator between water and water. 7 God made the cupola and it/he separated the water below the cupola and the water above the cupola. And it was so. 8 God called the cupola Sky. There was an evening and a morning: a second day.
The beginning of Day One (Gen 1:1-2) was background information. After that, the two texts proceed similarly:
On Day One …
God thought, Let there be light
there was light
God saw that the light was good
God distinguished light from darkness
God named the light Day and the darkness Night
There was an evening and a morning: Day One.
On Day Two …
God thought, Let there be a cupola
God made the cupola
it/he separated the water below the cupola and the water above the cupola (and it was so)
God called the cupola Sky
There was an evening and a morning: a second day.
For 10 points, compare and contrast!
It’s clear that on both days …
God planned the day’s creation
The creation came into being
There was an act of separation or distinction (remember that both of these are וַיַּבְדֵּל in Hebrew)
God named the creation.
Nonetheless, we’ve also seen quite a few differences between the two days. Some of these may be artifacts of how the text has come down to us (see here and here), and some may be artifacts of translation. Number 3 above may suggest that it is definitely God who is the subject of the “separate” verb, not “it,” the cupola. (See here for our discussion of that problem.)
That’s not certain, however, since at least some of these differences are clearly deliberate. It’s also worth noting that neither light/Day nor Sky was created using the Hebrew verb ברא, the verb describing creation as only God can do it, and (as the second word in the Bible) the verb specifically used to describe the creation of Sky and Earth in the title of our story.
It’s time to put some solid ground beneath our feet, and we’ll do that next time by beginning our discussion of Day Three.
The two links about the artifacts of how the text came down to us seem to be private.