"God distinguished light from darkness" (Gen 1:4)

Reading through the story of creation

In Gen 1:4a — that is, the first half of v. 4, divided in two parts by the etnaḥta, the little punctuation mark under ט֑וֹב that looks like a caret (or in some fonts like a wishbone) — God saw that the light that had come into being as a result of his decision was good. Three things have now happened in our story: (1) God decided; (2) God’s decision went into effect; (3) God evaluated the result positively. Now something quite surprising happens.

4 God saw that the light was good, and God distinguished light from darkness.

וַיַּ֧רְא אֱלֹהִ֛ים אֶת־הָא֖וֹר כִּי־ט֑וֹב וַיַּבְדֵּ֣ל אֱלֹהִ֔ים בֵּ֥ין הָא֖וֹר וּבֵ֥ין הַחֹֽשֶׁךְ׃

and God distinguished light from darkness וַיַּבְדֵּ֣ל אֱלֹהִ֔ים בֵּ֥ין הָא֖וֹר וּבֵ֥ין הַחֹֽשֶׁךְ The verb va-yavdel is not a complicated one, but what it is describing is surprisingly hard to understand.  The root of the verb is the same as in the post-biblical noun havdalah ‘separation’, which gave its name to the ritual performed on Saturday evenings to technically end the Sabbath, separating it from the non-sacred week that begins when Sabbath ends.

Some translations say that what God did here was to “divine” or “separate” light from the darkness. This is clearly not describing how light came into being. The verb used here is another consecutive form; this is what God did next, after light had already come into being.  It’s important to note that the Hebrew idiom here is not “light from darkness” as I’ve translated it to make good English, but distinguishing “between the light and between the darkness” (בֵּ֥ין הָא֖וֹר וּבֵ֥ין הַחֹֽשֶׁךְ).  Light and darkness are balanced in this phrase.

But what can this mean?  Did the creation of light fill the world with light, after which God decided to limit or restrain the light so that the primordial darkness could still play a role in the world? When the lights go on, the darkness does not move anywhere. There is no darkness any more, because light and darkness are incompatible. Darkness is the absence of light. Yet somehow in this story they are intermingled.

It’s difficult to visualize, let alone to understand, what is actually being described here.  One thing we can say is that making distinctions of this kind is a characteristic theme of the Torah when priestly concerns are mentioned — and this verbal root will occur three more times in Genesis 1, and not again until the description of the Tabernacle in the second half of the book of Exodus.

If we were asked to name the major concern of the Israelite priests in a single word, we might select קֹדֶשׁ kodesh ‘holiness’.  And the Hebrew root קדשׁ implies keeping something separate from the mundane things of our ordinary life.

The priests are told in Lev 10:10 that their job is “to distinguish between sacred and profane [‏וּֽלֲהַבְדִּ֔יל בֵּ֥ין הַקֹּ֖דֶשׁ וּבֵ֣ין הַחֹ֑ל], and between impure and pure [וּבֵ֥ין הַטָּמֵ֖א וּבֵ֥ין הַטָּהֽוֹר].”  Both phrases uses the same “between X and between Y” syntax as our verse does. (Deut 17:8 uses a different form of this idiom, one we’ll see in Gen 1:6, to nod at the priests and then arrange for lay leaders to usurp as much of their function as possible.)

However we view the actual process described here in Gen 1:4, God, as the epitome of holiness, looks at the first created thing, light, and then makes the first distinction, between it and its opposite, darkness. Light and darkness must be kept apart.  The next thing to happen will be the creation of language in the form of the first two names that are given to anything in the world.