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.
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