As we mentioned last time, Day Four seems to be the day in the second half of Creation Week that corresponds to Day One, the day in the first half of Creation Week when light was created.
The big difference, of course, is that now we perfectly understand how there can be an evening and a morning. There is a sun, to set in the evening and to rise again the next morning. Somehow this effect was achieved, up until now, by the light created on Day One.
I will leave it to the people in the physics department to figure out how the Day One light might interface with the lights created on Day Four, which are obviously the same ones we now see in the sky, if both existed at the same time. Suffice it to say that Jewish tradition understands that the otherworldly light from Day One was a special creation that no longer exists — or rather that it still exists but is hidden away.
I’ll confess that I have no idea what the original writer of Genesis 1 intended us to think about morning and evening before the sun was created. I presume that the 6 + 1 days of Creation Week are an organizing principle rather than a series of factual notations. I suggested when we first looked at Day One that the creation of light and its separation from darkness to yield Day and Night implied that Day One was intended to mark the creation of time.
But what was the nature of that original light? If, like me, you are interested in how our universe really was created, you know where to learn more about it — through astrophysics and the study of the Big Bang and the background microwave radiation it left behind. “The Sky recounts the glory of God and the cupola tells His handiwork” (Ps 19:2). If I were running a religious seminary, I’d make sure all the students did their best to understand what the Sky is telling us.
But as we saw on Day One and on Day Three, Jewish tradition likes to use these speed bumps in the story for its own purposes. At their best, rabbinic sources do three things at once:
They resolve difficulties in the text by connecting two texts from different places in the Bible.
They unite them by filling in the gap between them with a newly invented sequence of events.
They communicate a moral, ethical, or spiritual value with their new creation.
In today’s case, the far-away verse we’ll connect with Genesis 1 comes from the book of Psalms:
Light is sown for the righteous • Psa. 97:11 • א֭וֹר זָרֻ֣עַ לַצַּדִּ֑יק
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Bible Guy to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.