Evening & Morning (Gen 1:5)

Reading through the story of creation

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.

  The verb forms are again consecutive — after God separated light and darkness, then there was an evening, after which there was a morning.  Grammatically, each phrase is exactly the same as “and there was light.”  But … did evening occur immediately after light and darkness were separated?  How long after the evening came into being did the morning come into being?  Can “there was an evening” and “there was a morning” refer to these (now) natural phenomena simply occurring?  When “there was light,” that was certainly not a natural occurrence, but the result of a decision God made.  It seems that evening and morning here are also (somehow) the results of God’s distinguishing light and darkness, as follows:

• God thinks, Let there be light.

  • result: “And there was” light.

• God distinguishes between light and darkness, and names them.

  • result: “And there was” an evening, “and there was” a morning.

Note that darkness, bringing on the evening, clearly comes first, and morning with its light comes only afterward. (Unlike their simultaneous naming, here the second statement has its own consecutive verb form.) Now remember that the original condition of things before creation began: there was “darkness over Deep.”

I am imagining that when light came into being it banished darkness from the world. God then distinguished them by separating light into its own realm and restoring darkness to its original primacy … but (as they say in the ads) “for a limited time only.” Then light was given its own limited time.

There are two more points that cannot go without saying.  The first is a very obvious one.  In today’s world, evening and morning are phenomena that accompany the setting and rising of the sun (really the spinning of the earth on its axis, but let that go for now).  Yet the sun will not be created until Day Four of our story, so this “evening” and “morning” must be something qualitatively different from what those words mean in normal language.  (In case you are wondering, erev and boker are the same words used in Hebrew today for “evening” and “morning.”)

Another point is less obvious.  That actual planet we live on is spherical, and only one side of it faces the sun at a time.  When it is evening here, it is simultaneously morning on the other side of the world.  Yet here we have an evening and then (grammatically) a morning – but as yet we don’t have a location for it to be evening or morning at.  Even the sky, let alone the earth, has not yet been created, so we certainly cannot be “in” the Garden of Eden.

What has in fact happened? The final phrase of this paragraph, which we’ll discuss next time, I think gives us the answer.