"Day One" (Gen 1:5)

Reading through the story of creation

Now we have an evening and then a morning, and the first stage of creation has been finished. We know this because the final phrase of the paragraph (marked by the פ at the end of the verse, telling scribes to leave a blank space from there to the end of the line), gives us the answer.

5 There was an evening and there was a morning: Day One.

וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם אֶחָֽד׃ פ

Day One י֥וֹם אֶחָֽד This is yom eḥad, a more difficult phrase to translate than it might seem.

Once again we have not one, not two, but three possible translations — perhaps even four, depending on how you want to count.  We already know the word yom, but we were told this was the name given to “light.” Here, however, it seems rather to be used in the more comprehensive way the word is found (both in Hebrew and in English) nowadays. This yom is not just the light, not “daytime,” but “day” in the sense that includes both light and darkness, “evening” and “morning” together.

אחד eḥad means “one,” so the most literal translation here is “Day One.” And that is a quite natural translation for the Hebrew words yom eḥad.

I have been calling the days of this creation story Day One, Day Two, and so forth as a shorthand way of referring to them.  As we will see when we get to Gen 1:8, the Bible does not use that terminology for the other days. Since “one” is treated like an adjective in Hebrew, yom eḥad is also the standard way to say “one day.” Perhaps that translation would match the continuation of the chapter better?

Now another alternative. In the comment on “evening” and “morning” I said that Hebrew does not have indefinite articles like “a” and “an.”  Kidding!  There is such a word: as in French (une femme, un homme) or Spanish, “one” in its various forms can be used that way.   Both the story of Samson’s birth in Judges 13 and the story of Samuel’s birth in 1 Samuel 1 begin with the following introduction:  “Once upon a time there was a man” – and “a man” is ish eḥad.  Don’t misunderstand me; this usage is much, much rarer in Hebrew than in French or Spanish; you don’t expect to see it.  But it does occur once in a while, so yom eḥad could certainly mean simply “a day.”

And there is one more possibility. 

The other days of creation are described with ordinal numbers: “a second day” (v. 8), “a third day” (v. 13) and so forth.  It’s not impossible that yom eḥad really means “a first day.”  In Gen 8:5, when the tops of the mountains again become visible after the Flood recedes, the date is noted – and this occurred on eḥad la-ḥodesh ‘the first of the month’.

It’s possible, of course, as the medieval Jewish commentator R. David Kimhi says, that we should not translate this as a “first” day because that might be taken to imply the existence of a second day, which has not yet in fact occurred.  But rishon, the Hebrew word for “first” in biblical times as it is now, is not actually used for “first” days very often in the Bible.  It does sometimes refer to the “first day” of a seven-day festival (on which work is forbidden), and in modern Israel yom rishon is the standard name for the first day of the work week, Sunday.  But we would not necessarily expect to see it here.

So we have three possible translations for yom eḥad:

         - “a day”

         - “a first day”

         - “Day One” or “one day”

Unlike ruah-elohim in v. 2, the different possible translations here have slightly different nuances, but all of them share the same basic meaning.  There is no substantial barrier to our understanding what has happened:  A day has occurred, and that has never happened before.  As we have already seen, this is harder to comprehend than it seems; before the creation of the sun, a “day” cannot mean what it does now.

The language here is relatively simple, so it is clear (once we think about things as slowly and carefully as we’ve been trying to do these last few weeks) what has happened. That is — what in fact was created on Day One? Light, and with it energy, but for a particular purpose, which is not fulfilled until God distinguishes the light from the darkness. The creation of the first day is the creation of time.

There is still one important question that is harder to answer, though: Are we or are we not being told at which moment this first day ends?  We’ll discuss this, and why it matters, in the next post on Gen 1:1-5.