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:
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