sun in the morning and the moon at night (v. 16)

Reading through the story of creation

In our last post, we saw God make two big lights.  Yet immediately one of them is called “the big light” and the other is called “the small light.”  It’s clear that [cue music] ♬ one of these lights is not like the other ♬, but rabbinic literature focuses on the words of the text, and that means that they saw a problem here.  At the beginning of the verse, the moon is “big,” but immediately afterward it is “small.”  What happened?

Rashi, the 11th-century French Jewish commentator who has shaped the Jewish understanding of both Bible and Talmud for the last 1,000 years, explains:

They were created equal, but the moon was diminished for contending, “Two kings cannot wear a single crown.”

Rashi is getting this idea from the Babylonian Talmud, where it is explained more fully:

Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi raises a contradiction between two verses. It is written: “And God made the two great lights” (Genesis 1:16), and it is also written in the same verse: “The greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night,” indicating that only one was great. Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi explains: When God first created the sun and the moon, they were equally bright. Then, the moon said before the Holy One, Blessed be He: Master of the Universe, is it possible for two kings to serve with one crown? One of us must be subservient to the other. God therefore said to her, i.e., the moon: If so, go and diminish yourself. [Hullin 60b, Koren translation with interpolated explanation]

The moon points out that having two powers of equal authority is an inherently unstable situation.  They will certainly find themselves in conflict, and the moon figures it would be a good idea to nip that possibility in the bud.  Her thanks for making that observation is to become the solution rather than the problem.  She is the one who will be made smaller.

Can you say “anthropomorphism”?  Rabbinic tradition loves to add a human touch to places in the Bible that don’t seem to have it.  But there’s also an astronomical problem here.  The sun is to have dominion during the day and the moon at night.  Yet we all know that it is not that simple.  The sun is only around during the day, of course; the sun is what creates the day.  (We’ll come back to that in another post.)  But there is certainly such a thing as a moonless night, and we have all, even in the midst of a big city, seen the moon during the day.

The moon is not synchronized with the sun, and it actually shows up a bit later each day over the course of a month.  Genesis 1 doesn’t care about that, but our Talmud passage does:

She said before Him: Master of the Universe, since I said a correct observation before You, must I diminish myself? God said to her: As compensation, go and rule both during the day along with the sun and during the night. She said to Him: What is the greatness of shining alongside the sun? What use is a candle in the middle of the day? God said to her: Go; let the Jewish people count the days and years with you, and this will be your greatness. She said to Him: But the Jewish people will count with the sun as well, as it is impossible that they will not count seasons with it, as it is written: “And let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years” (Genesis 1:14).

And there is more, since (as the talmudic text notes) “God saw that the moon was not comforted.”

You may remember that on Day Three, the Greek translation added an extra expression that is not in the Hebrew text, calling in v. 11 for the plants to reproduce by species (as indeed they do in v. 12, both in the LXX and in the MT).  Jewish tradition resolved the difference between the two verses by explaining that the plants figured out on their own what needed to be done.

Those thoughtful plants were on Hullin 60a, just before the conversation between God and the moon.  The Talmud is not a commentary on the Bible, but one does sometimes find a continuous section of a biblical text under discussion in it, and that is the case here.  But it is not a systematic, phrase-by-phrase commentary.  In this case, the Talmud continues by pointing to a contradiction between the Genesis 1 version of creation and the Genesis 2 version.

It goes without saying that the Talmud itself is extremely worthy of the same kind of close reading we are doing to the Bible.  I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, so let me just point out that the יָרֵחַ (yareaḥ ‘moon’) is female in this story.  In Biblical Hebrew, yareaḥ is a masculine noun; it is שָֽׁמֶשׁ (shémesh ‘sun’) that is usually grammatically feminine. That strikes me as a change worth looking into — for a scholar of rabbinics.

Next time, we’ll continue our discussion of Day Four by noting some of the unexpected differences between God’s idea and how he carried out that idea.