Day and Night have now been named, and the work of Day 1 of creation is now finished — but two more things still happen before the paragraph describing it concludes:
5 There was an evening and there was a morning: Day One.
וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם אֶחָֽד׃ פ
(Careful readers will note that I’ve slightly changed the translation I originally posted for this verse, which I have also updated. This commentary is a work in progress!)
There was an evening and there was a morning וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר The very first act of creation (preceded by God’s decision to inaugurate creation) was introduced by וַֽיְהִי va-yehi ‘and there was’. Now, without further preliminaries, two more things come into being: עֶ֥רֶב erev ‘evening’ and בֹ֖קֶר boqer ‘morning’. (In the verse itself this word is read voqer because it is so closely preceded by a vowel sound.) Now a grammatical point that requires a somewhat longer comment.
Hebrew has a definite article (like the English word “the”) but no indefinite articles (like “a” and “an”). “The king” is ha-melekh, but “a king” is just melekh. Some translations of this phrase say “there was evening and there was morning”; there is no grammatical distinction to tell us whether my translation or one of these translations is “right” and the other “wrong.” I have chosen a less common translation to help us focus on what this phrase might actually mean.
And that is a quite difficult question to answer. But it’s important, because at last — it seems — we have learned what it meant for God to “distinguish” light from darkness.
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