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.
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