What does Gen 1:5 mean?

Reading through the story of creation

We’ve now read and discussed all of Gen 1:5, which concludes this way:

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

וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם אֶחָֽד׃ פ

We saw that this sequence of evening and morning must explain what happened when God “distinguished light from darkness” in v. 4. No matter how we translate yom eḥad, an evening and a morning that add up to one day must mean a period of 24 hours.

This, of course, is not how our planet, let alone our universe, actually came into being. Even more obviously, we live on the surface of a sphere. When it’s evening on this side, it is simultaneously morning on that side. “An evening” and “a morning” can co-exist, but they can only be observed from far above the earth’s surface. And as we have seen, the repetition of va-yehi tells us that this evening and this morning are not simultaneous, but occurred in sequence.

But that leaves us with an important question that is hard to answer: Are we or are we not being told at which moment this first day ends?  This matters because – spoiler alert, and cue music – ♫ one of these days is not like the others ♫:  The seventh day will be treated differently than the other six, as a day of rest.  Clearly, when the sixth day ends the seventh day will begin.  But at what time of day does the “day” end and the seventh day, the day of rest, start? 

If creation began at evening, then it must have been 12 hours later (ignoring for the moment the fact that not all days have an equal balance of day and night) that morning occurred.  It would still take another 12 hours before the day was complete, just before the second evening of the world.  Or did 12 hours pass from the creation of light until the first evening, after which another 12 hours passed before there was a first morning, at which time Day One was complete?  The assertion that “there was an evening and then there was a morning” is much more difficult to understand than it seems.

R. Samuel b. Meir (“Rashbam”), the 12th-century commentator, explains how he understands our verse:

And there was evening and there was morning. This does not say “And there was night and there was day,” but “And there was evening and there was morning.” The first day drew toward evening and the light receded; subsequently, at the end of that night, the morning dawned, and the first of the “six days” during which “the LORD made heaven and earth and sea” (Exod. 20:11) was complete. Then, in the morning, the second day began, and “God said, ‘Let there be an expanse’” (v. 6).¹

This comment was in fact removed from Rashbam’s commentary in a recent edition of traditional Jewish commentaries, since it “could not” have actually been written by him.

Why? Because that would mean the Sabbath should begin on Saturday morning and not, as it traditionally does, on Friday evening. A Sabbath beginning on Saturday morning was actually observed at around Rashbam’s time by a group of Byzantine Jews called the Mishawites.

Rashbam himself most certainly observed a Sabbath that began on Friday evening along with all the other members of the community of French Jews he led in Rouen. He does not explain to us what he learns from the difference between the straightforward explanation he gives in his Bible commentary and the traditional understanding that he follows in his actual life. This is an issue that has remained unresolved, in Rashbam’s writing and in Jewish tradition generally.

Nor is it clear whether he is correct about what the text says in plain Hebrew, or why the text would tell us something dependent on the sun before the sun has actually been created. (Hebrew erev ‘evening’ and ma’arav ‘west’ both come from the same root, because evening occurs as the sun sets in the west. The same Semitic root in its Arabic pronunciation gives us the name Maghreb for North Africa from Algeria to the Atlantic, the far west from a Middle Eastern perspective.)

It is another of the many cases we will encounter in the Bible where the words could not possibly be clearer, but the meaning remains obscure. If there could not have been an evening and a morning of the kind we have now until the 4th or 5th day of creation … if on the first day there was no earth for light to shine on and no sun in the sky for it to shine from … then Genesis is giving us a very clear indication that the “day” it describes is not the kind of day we now know.  I will wait until we’ve read through all seven days of creation before commenting further on that.

Next time, we’ll take a step back and look at the whole of Day One of the first creation story to get our bearings before the story resumes with Day Two.

1. Translation by Michael Carasik from The Commentators’ Bible: Genesis.