"and there was light" (Gen 1:3)
Reading through the story of creation
Last week we started to look at the very first thing that actually happens in the Bible: God had an idea, and the idea was that light should come into being. Now we move on to what happened after God made that decision, the second thing that actually happens in the Bible. Light does come into being:
3 God thought, Let there be light, and there was light.
וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר׃
וַיְהִי־אֽוֹר and there was light How? The Bible does not explain. From our external perspective, it seems to be a magic trick: God thought and light appeared. But that is not how the rest of creation will happen, so perhaps it is better to reserve judgment about what this means.
A quick grammatical note, for those who are learning Hebrew as we go. “Let there be light” is yehi or; “and there was light” is va-yehi or. (You can see it in Hebrew just above.) That וַ – va rather than normal ve – is a signal to flip the sense of the verb from “yet to be accomplished” to “accomplished.) See Lesson 11 of my Biblical Hebrew course for the Teaching Company for a more in-depth discussion of this. We’ll discuss this in more detail when we get to v. 5, in order to understand correctly what’s going on there.
The first act of creation, God’s decision that light should come into existence, must remain hidden in the depths of God’s mind. As Isa 55:8-9 tell us, the way God comes to such decisions is beyond our grasp. But light coming into being is the first visible (no pun intended) act of creation, the first thing that happens external to God’s mind.
The most important thing about this first external act of creation is that it seems to be a reversal, or at least a challenge, to the world as we saw it when the curtain rose on the story of creation. What we saw there, in v. 2, was “darkness over Deep.” We are not told what the light in this story is meant to do or what it is for. Jewish tradition says that God read the Torah to use it as a kind of instruction booklet, and we might assume that he needed the light to be able to read it. (The source of this creative legend is Prov 8:22-31, where Wisdom declares herself the first of God’s creations; Jewish tradition understands Wisdom in the Bible to refer to Torah.)
In the story as Genesis 1 tells it, though, the purpose of the light is not explained. But we take light to be the opposite of darkness, and vv. 4-5 will show us that this is the understanding of the biblical story as well. The purpose of light’s creation, therefore, would seem to be to counter the previously prevailing darkness. Perhaps this is why darkness is “over Deep” in v. 2 – it is being associated, at least literarily, with the divine enemy of the creation story that Genesis 1 does not want to tell.
Notice, however, that God does not create light. That word ברא bara – the second word of the Bible, the verb “create” – is used quite sparingly in our text. The biblical scholar Mark Smith explains:
It may be suspected that light in Gen 1:3 is not created as such. Instead, it may be some form of primordial divine effulgence. The writer of Genesis 1 perhaps allowed primordial elements prior to the creation proper to be assimilated into the process of creation (for example, darkness, Deep, and water in v. 2), and the light of v. 3 may also be one of these uncreated components.1
But, as Smith goes on to say, “by the same token,” it is quite possible to understand the text as saying that light was created by God.
Spoiler alert: Our chapter will go on to say וַיְהִי־כֵֽן va-yehi khen “and so it was,” six times. It is tempting, and everyone does fall into the temptation, to take וַיְהִי־אֽוֹר va-yehi or “and light was” of our verse as the first of seven such occurrences, since the beginning of chapter 2 lays such emphasis on creation’s being a seven-day process. We’ll keep an eye on this question as we move forward. We’ll start v. 4 next time.
Mark Smith, “Light in Genesis 1:3— Created or Uncreated: A Question of Priestly Mysticism?”, in Birkat Shalom, ed. Chaim Cohen, et al., 125-134. I have silently replaced his scientific transliteration of Hebrew words with their English equivalents. Emphasis added by me in bold.