"lights in the Sky" (Gen 1:14)

Reading through the story of creation

Let there be lights יְהִ֤י מְאֹרֹת֙

Though we have already had three “days,” each with an evening and morning of its own, this has all happened (somehow) without there being a sun to create the difference between them.  All that will change now, on Day Four.

The lights are me’orot, singular ma’or.  Just as in English, this is a word that is clearly related to the or ‘light’ that came into being in v. 3, but referring to an object: not light but a light.  Like so many of the familiar words from this story, it is not at all as common in the Bible as one might expect.  It does seem to refer to “light,” the immaterial substance, in Ps 90:8, radiating from God’s face, and metaphorically in Prov 15:30 to the “light” in a happy person’s eye.

In Ezek 32:8 and Ps 74:16 it also refers to the lights above our heads.  But in all 15 of its other occurrences, it refers to artificial light, and specifically the light (always singular) that illuminates the Tabernacle.  Isaac Abarbanel (b. 1437 in Portugal, fled Spain in 1492, d. 1508 in Venice) notes in his commentary on Exodus 25 that implicitly “the construction of the Tabernacle alludes to the form of the world.” If the Tabernacle is a world in miniature, the use of ma’or there may be a way that the text reflects this likeness.

It will be a while before this column gets to the book of Exodus, let alone to the Tabernacle, but much of the language at the end of that book seems to point to the creation of the Tabernacle as a second stage of the creation of the world.  Other biblical voices understand the very formation of the Israelite people as a new stage in creation. (See Psalm 114 for one example; I hope to discuss this psalm one day in a book or course on biblical poetry.)

In any case, it’s worth noting that there seems to be a sort of symmetry in the six days of the week of creation. From that perspective, we’re now beginning the second half of the process, with the light of the sun, moon, and stars corresponding to the light that came into being in v. 3, on Day One. We’ll be keeping an eye on that symmetry from now on as we proceed through Days Four, Five, and Six.

in the Sky cupola בִּרְקִ֣יעַ הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם

This phrase is more commonly (and perhaps more poetically) translated as “in the firmament of the heaven” (KJV).  Remember, though, that according to v. 8, the firmament is “the heaven.”  In the language we’ve been using, the cupola is Sky. We are reading the story of the creation of Sky and Earth, and when God made the cupola, he named it Sky.

What that means is that the lights God is planning to have are not in Heaven in the sense of being in God’s own location; God was around before Sky was created.  Nor are the sun, moon, and stars of the Bible in outer space, which I suppose is where we would describe them being.

Instead, they are to be in that hard, sapphire-colored shell that domes the earth, separating the water above from the water below.  The medieval philosophers understood the sun, moon, stars, and planets to be located in solid, transparent spheres that rotated around the earth, and the picture that is being set up here seems akin to that one. (How all of them could be in the same, solid sphere and yet move with respect to each other is a question that Genesis does not answer.)

And now it’s time for a brief excursus from Ecclesiastes.

‏‎Eccl. 1:9

What was ‏ מַה־שֶּֽׁהָיָה֙

is what will be ה֣וּא שֶׁיִּהְיֶ֔ה

and what has been done וּמַה־שֶׁנַּֽעֲשָׂ֔ה

is what will be done. ה֖וּא שֶׁיֵּעָשֶׂ֑ה

There is nothing new under the sun. וְאֵ֥ין כָּל־חָדָ֖שׁ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּֽׁמֶשׁ׃

This expression “under the sun” (taḥat ha-shemesh), used by Kohelet¹ 29 times and occurring nowhere else in the Bible, has always struck me as the biblical way of expressing what the medieval philosophers would have called the “sublunar” world — that is, everything below the nearest of the "spheres."²

The sublunar world is the part that is material and changeable. Back in Genesis, we have seen that we’re not really being told about what might be happening on the other side of Sky. Rather than being unchangeable, though, as the philosophers would seem to have thought, that realm is simply beyond our grasp.

Sky is the boundary between our world and the unapproachable world of God. The “lights” that will be set in it — as we’ll see next time — have a purpose that is directed below. “What is above” remains beyond our reach.

1. קֹהֶ֫לֶת (Kohélet or similar alternate transliterations in the Latin alphabet) is the 1st-person narrator who gives the book of Ecclesiastes its name. Greek ἐκκλησιαστής is “a member of an assembly,” and the name is trying to mimic the apparent derivation of Kohelet from Hebrew קהל qahal ‘assembly, congregation’.

2. A wonderful way to learn more about this sort of thing is from a podcast called “The History of Philosophy without Any Gaps.” However, there is a large gap at the beginning of that series (which starts around 600 BCE with Thales of Miletus). There are certainly 2,000 years of philosophy before that date, and the biblical writers provided their share of it.