"days, ____ and years" (Gen 1:14)
Reading through the story of creation
Is it just me, or is there something missing at the end of this verse?
But let’s take the long way around to answer that question by starting with a brief excursus on ancient astronomy.
We now understand that the 24-hour day is a result of earth’s rotating on its axis. But that’s not our experience of it. Instead, we feel the earth standing still and see the sun moving. But … where does it go?
There are really only two choices, as the Talmud explains:
The Sages of Israel maintain: The sun travels beneath the sky [= רקיע, the “cupola”] by day and above the sky at night; while the Sages of the nations of the world maintain: It travels beneath the sky by day and below the earth at night. Said Rabbi: And their view is preferable to ours, for the wells are cold by day but warm at night. [B. Pesachim 94b, Soncino translation]
Go to that page for a much broader discussion of astronomy as people of the mid-1st-millennium CE understood it. The Koren English version has lots of colorful diagrams and notes elucidating the talmudic discussion.
Now back to that gap I’m imagining at the end of our verse. What we see there are “days” and “years,” both of which are indicated by just one of the lights that are about to be set to work. But there are two other units of time that our calendars normally mark.
Weeks are certainly a calendar phenomenon in our world, but there is nothing astronomical about them and the lights in the sky do not mark them (though Abraham ibn Ezra, the 12th-century commentator and polymath, asserts that they correspond to the phases of the moon). What’s missing here are months. I have no doubt this is significant, but I have no idea what the reason for their absence might be. (That will not stop me from offering a couple of possible answers.)
Months are essential to every calendar system I’m aware of, and one of the major “lights in the Sky cupola” is what determines them. Days and and years would be the same if earth had no moons or five of them, but months would be completely different or missing altogether. The Bible actually has three different naming systems for the months (see p. 290 of my book The Bible’s Many Voices), and the festivals are pegged to them. Why aren’t they mentioned here?
Rashbam, Ibn Ezra’s 12th-century French contemporary (and Rashi’s grandson), suggests that mo’adim in this verse — the “dates” of my translation “calendar dates” — is the word that implies the months, since as Ps 104:19 asserts, God “made the moon for the mo’adim.” His 13th-century Spanish counterpart Nahmanides uses a slightly different argument:
The years are completed as they move through their circuits back to their starting points and then continue on for a “second” time (sheni), from which “years” (shanim) is derived. The plural “years” (or better “cycles”) in our verse therefore refers both to the 365–day year of the sun and also to the 30–day cycle of the moon.1
To me it seems that neither of these explanations – even if they are correct – is enough to answer the question of why the word “month” is missing. I can come up with two not entirely satisfying explanations:
One of the biblical words for a month, חֹדֶשׁ ḥodesh, is commonly used with what must have been its original meaning, referring specifically to the New Moon, the beginning day of the month, which might have been considered inappropriate or confusing here. (As you know, Jewish and Muslim months still do begin with the new moon.)
The other biblical word for a month, יֶרַח yeraḥ, sounds uncomfortably like יָרֵחַ yare’aḥ ‘moon’ – and our story carefully avoids the words “sun” and “moon.” More on that when we get to v. 16.
We have been watching the days of Creation Week get progressively more complex. As we’ll see next time, these lights in the sky will have another task besides marking time.
The translation is adapted from my Commentators’ Bible: Genesis volume.