Dates, days, & years (Gen 1:14)

Reading through the story of creation

14 … They will be for calendar dates – that is, days and years

וְהָי֤וּ לְאֹתֹת֙ וּלְמ֣וֹעֲדִ֔ים וּלְיָמִ֖ים וְשָׁנִֽים׃

Once again, I have chosen a somewhat unusual translation to help me focus on thinking about what the Hebrew words of the Bible mean.  The KJV translation that so many of us English speakers have in our heads translates the Hebrew words this way:

let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years

There are three major differences between this translation and mine:

• “let them be for” vs. “they will be”

• “signs and seasons” vs. “calendar dates”

• “and” vs. “that is”

First, “they will be.”  Of my go-to English translations, the common ones I regularly turn to, only the New Jewish Publication Society translation says “they shall” here (and so does Robert Alter’s new translation).  The others, including the Old JPS translation of 1917, all use some variation of “let them be.”  But this, unlike so many of the differences between translations, is not really a choice; it is simply a mistake.

Without going too deeply into the grammar (those who wish to do that should look at Lesson 25 of my Hebrew course), I’ll just say that Biblical Hebrew can sometimes differentiate between two future-looking meanings: “it will happen” and “let it happen.”  The Hebrew does so here, clearly choosing the first of those meanings.

In other words, the “let there be” of this episode has already been expressed in v. 14 with יהי yehi.  Now God is explaining what “will be” the result of the lights coming into existence.  (For those of you scoring at home, “let them be” would have been expressed here as וְיִהְיוּ instead of וְהָי֤וּ.)

Something else that’s worth noting:  The ל preposition used here can mean to or for or as, but it is also used with היה hayah to change it from to be into to become.  It sounds  awkward to me to combine both those meanings of the ל, but I would if I could.  If I were being interviewed about Day Four of creation, I might explain that the lights were to begin distinguishing light from darkness immediately, but only later would become the timekeepers they are for us now.

That brings us to the next difference in my translation, the “calendar dates.”  Again there’s one important thing that you need to know whether you accept my translation or not: the “seasons” of the King James translation have nothing to do with the seasons of the year (summer, autumn and so forth).  The Hebrew word מועד mo’ed used here refers to a moment in time, not a period of time.  Its purpose is to fix a time for something to happen, like a dental appointment or a pilgrimage festival.  The biblical “Tent of Meeting” is the אהל מועד ohel mo’ed because that is where you (or at least Moses) would be able to meet with God on a regularly scheduled basis.

Now let’s back up a moment to אות (that’s ōt, with a long ō).  In Modern Hebrew it is the word for a letter of the alphabet, which is certainly a “sign” as I suppose they use the word over in the Department of Semiotics.  When — spoiler alert — God puts a rainbow in the clouds (Gen 9:12-13) as a “sign” of his promise never again to bring a world-wide destructive Flood, it is certainly an ot.

Off the top of my head I don’t recall any occasion when the sun or moon serves as a sign of this kind.  What they definitely are, however, are the lights that keep track of the calendar so we can know when the festivals will occur. And that is what mo’adim means in Leviticus 23 and elsewhere, the dates of the festivals.  So, like many translators and commentators, I’ve chosen to understand the combination of otot and mo’adim as a hendiadys – a combination of two words to mean a single thing (like our phrase “sick and tired”).  What the phrase is telling us is that these lights will be used to correctly indicate the calendar dates.

Now, for my third different translation, in the phrase וּלְיָמִ֖ים וְשָׁנִֽים.

Just about the first thing anyone learns about Hebrew of any era is that the letter ו (vav), when it’s attached to the front of another word, means and.  We are all grownups now, so I must tell you that the Hebrew conjunction ve- and the English conjunction and do not perfectly overlap.  Hebrew vav can also be used for but and for or and, perhaps surprisingly, for i.e. – introducing not something additional but something that explains a previous expression.

Amuse your friends at parties with the fancy grammatical name for this: the vav explicativum or “explicative vav.”  The textbook example of the vav explicativum is in the Ten Commandments.  God explains that he visits guilt upon even the 3rd and 4th generation of “those who hate Me,” but lavishes kindness to the thousandth generation on “those who love Me, that is (ו), those who keep My commandments” (Exod 20:6, Deut 5:10).

Back in Gen 1:14, notice that there is no ל in front of “years” as there normally would be when listing things in Hebrew. In English we say “for Tom, Dick, and Harry,” but the equivalent Hebrew phrase would be “for Tom, for Dick, and for Harry.” The preposition is normally repeated. That’s another clue to me that the vav introducing this phrase is doing some work other than just saying and.

V. 14, then, is saying that the lights in the sky will be used to keep track of the calendar — “that is,” in plain Hebrew, the days and the years.

However … no matter how you choose to translate v. 14, and knowing what we do about those lights in the sky, there is something missing here.  We’ll talk about that next time.