"God made the two big lights" (Gen 1:16)

Reading through the story of creation

16 God made the two big lights

וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִ֔ים אֶת־שְׁנֵ֥י הַמְּאֹרֹ֖ת הַגְּדֹלִ֑ים

God made וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִ֔ים

When God thought, Let there be light (v. 3), what happened?  “There was light.”  It just came into being somehow.  We’re not told how.  Since then, instead of “and there was light” (va-yehi or) each element of creation has been followed by “and it was so” (va-yehi khen), the phrase that ended v. 15, and then by an explanation of how it became so.

Now, for a second time, the way it becomes so is that God simply “makes” the necessary object.  On Day Two, it was apparently a cupola of hammered sapphire; now, it is “lights” to be placed in that cupola.

We saw in vv. 11-12 that fruit trees were intended to have the power to “make” future trees of their own species.  Is it going too far to suggest that God “makes” things that somehow share his own nature?  Remember that Day One and Day Four belong together in the symmetrical structure of Creation Week.

the two big lights  אֶת־שְׁנֵ֥י הַמְּאֹרֹ֖ת הַגְּדֹלִ֑ים

Spoiler alert: these are the “big” lights because there are going to be some little lights too, though they are not called that.  Nor are these lights called what they really are: the sun and the moon.

We saw that on Day Three that “the gathering of water” was named Seas — yammim, in the plural.  I mentioned there the possibility that it was not called Sea in the singular because Yamm in the singular is the name of the Canaanite sea god.  The scholar that made that suggestion is Gary Rendsburg of Rutgers University, and he thinks a similar reason lies behind calling these “the two big lights” rather than giving them their obvious names.  (You can read about these suggestions in his book How the Bible Was Written and hear him discussing them at greater length in this podcast interview.)

In the book he puts it this way (I have slightly simplified his transliteration):

[N]owhere in these verses does the author use the common nouns שֶׁמֶשׁ shemesh 'sun' and יָרֵחַ yareaḥ ‘moon’. The reason is almost without a doubt due to a desire to avoid these words, because they evoke the names of pagan deities, worshipped in the local Canaanite culture as Shamash and Yarikh, the sun and moon deities, respectively, as known most importantly from the Ugaritic myths that feature both characters. That is to say, the author of Genesis 1 did not wish for an innocent reader to come away with the impression that the single God whom the people of Israel worshipped was responsible for the creation of pagan deities.

Gary knows a lot more than I do.  But I disagree with him on this.  As I’ve mentioned in commenting on v. 2, I see a quite opposite perspective in this chapter.  The writer does allude to alternative creation stories, unmistakably so to those who know them but invisibly to those who don’t.  The whole point — for those who are in the know — is that all these beings that others worship are completely under God’s control, so much so that God did even create some of them. 

In this case, everyone would certainly understand that these lights are the sun and the moon, and everyone would know the normal Hebrew words for sun and moon.  It seems to me that what’s going on here is precisely avoiding saying their names.  Later in the Bible, there is an explicit rule about this:

וְשֵׁ֨ם אֱלֹהִ֤ים אֲחֵרִים֙ לֹ֣א תַזְכִּ֔ירוּ Exod 23:13 You must not mention the name of other gods

Nahmanides, the 13th-century Spanish-Jewish commentator, says this, explaining the continuation of the Exodus verse:

 They shall not be heard on your lips. Even if you do not call them gods, you must not mention Milcom or Ashima at all. Instead, you must call them by some insulting name such as “the abomination of Moab” (1 Kings 11:7), or “the detestable thing of the Ammonites” (2 Kings 23:13).

William Propp, in his Exodus commentary in the Anchor Bible series, explains:

Like the later Rabbis, the legist of Exodus appears to be erecting a “fence” around the basic principle of monotheism: don’t worship other gods, don’t praise them, don’t even mention them.

I think that’s the reason we don’t read sun or moon in the telling of Day Four.

Did the priestly writer of Genesis 1 know the laws of Exodus 21-23?  I’ll have more to say about that later in this series (or perhaps elsewhere), but my short answer to that question is: Yes.

In the meantime, we’ll see as v. 16 continues that these “lights” have yet a fourth task given to them, one that in fact seems appropriately divine.  We’ll talk about that in the next post.