"let there be light" (Gen 1:3)

Reading through the story of creation

We’ve started working on the verse in which creation actually begins. As we saw last time, the first action in the Bible (after the background information that we’re given in Gen 1:1-2) is that God made a decision:

3 God thought, Let there be light, and there was light. 

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר׃

And now we move on to what God actually decided.

Let there be light יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר  The decision that starts the creation of sky and earth involves neither of them.  It is too early for that.  But Jer 4:23 hints at what is missing – and at where it will go:

I have seen the earth and it is a tohu-bohu

רָאִ֙יתִי֙ אֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ וְהִנֵּה־תֹ֖הוּ וָבֹ֑הוּ

And the sky – but its light is gone.

וְאֶל־הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ין אוֹרָֽם׃

Creation must begin with an infusion of energy, very much resembling the Big Bang with which we now know our universe began.  It is hard to think of any better word that Biblical Hebrew might use for “energy” as a concept than the word or – “light.”

And this is indeed an energy field. The “lights” that will be created on Day Four are מאורות me’orot (singular מאור ma’or) – this is a word that refers to an object. Our word, אור or, refers to (if you’ll excuse the anachronism) electromagnetic radiation.

I’m not going to write here about God speaking Hebrew. There’s a charming, hard-to-find book by Noah Jonathan Jacobs called Naming Day in Eden that discusses, among other things, the argument about which was the “original” human language. (One professor decided it must have been Hungarian, because apparently the Hungarian word for ‘scissors’ is ollo, which as you can see actually resembles a pair of scissors. Coincidence?)

But I would like to share with you this comment by the biblical scholar Ed Greenstein:

When God creates light, he says, “Let there be light,” speaking the name, light, of something that he had not yet brought into existence.  God has the name in hand prior to the existence of that which the name signifies. [emphasis added]¹

I’m not sure how else one could tell this story – how light could be invoked without God’s somehow knowing in advance what it is – but this seeming Catch-22 adds another layer to our realization that the beginning of Genesis is a beginning in medias res, as the Latin phrase has it – in the middle of things, and not at the “very” beginning, the ultimate beginning. Some physicists think the same of the creation that science describes: Our universe began at a moment, but there was perhaps something already infinitely old providing, if nothing else, at the very least the laws of physics from which such a universe could spring up.

What creates a universe? Energy – in our story, light. Where did it come from? Again, we don’t know. And the end of v. 3, which we’ll talk about next time, does not clarify things at all.

1. Edward L. Greenstein, Theory and Method in Bible Translation, 112.