"to shine on the earth" (Gen 1:15)
Reading through the story of creation
15 And they shall become lights in the Sky cupola to shine on the earth. And it was so.
וְהָי֤וּ לִמְאוֹרֹת֙ בִּרְקִ֣יעַ הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם לְהָאִ֖יר עַל־הָאָ֑רֶץ וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן׃
As I pointed out a couple of posts ago, היה (hayah), the verb to be, has a slightly different meaning when it is followed by the preposition ל. Although that can mean “to be [used] for” something, it is also the standard way to say in Biblical Hebrew not be but become. Since I’m trying to think carefully about the text rather than repeat the traditional words that are in my head as if I perfectly understood them, I’ve translated the second phrase in v. 15 to say that this day’s creation will “become” lights.
As I said in that earlier post:
If I were being interviewed about Day Four of creation, I might explain that the lights were to begin distinguishing light from darkness immediately, but only later would become the timekeepers they are for us now.
But we now learn that they have a third function – the one that is most obvious to us today:
to distinguish Day and Night
to be for calendar dates
to shine on the earth
In my previous post, I pointed you to a discussion of astronomy in the Babylonian Talmud. In actual, ancient Babylonia — a millennium or two before the Talmud was compiled there — a tremendous amount was known about astronomy. The reason we are sometimes able to date ancient history so precisely is because the ancient Babylonians kept records of eclipses. Since the sun, moon, and stars really do run more or less like clockwork (that’s how planetariums work), we can date those eclipses precisely on our calendar.1
All of which is to say that astronomy (the science) is not the subject of Day Four. Instead, Day Four seems to be doing two things. First, it is the day that matches Day One in the symmetrical telling of creation. We’ll discuss that when we get to the end of the week. Perhaps I should make that The Week, since on the blog we may not get to it until a few months from now.
The second function of Day Four, I believe, is similar to what we saw earlier about Deep and about the Seas. It is no secret to any of you that some people in the ancient world worshipped the sun and the moon. I realize some of us still call ourselves sun-worshippers, but that’s not what I mean; I mean that the sun and moon were treated as gods — individuals with names and with an existential nature of some sort that ranked them above human beings.
I’m not qualified to discuss what this sort of religious belief / behavior really meant or how it was actually practiced. But the Bible has a lot to say about it:
Deut. 4:19 And when you look up to the sky and behold the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole heavenly host, you must not be lured into bowing down to them or serving them. These the LORD your God allotted to other peoples everywhere under heaven [NJPS translation].
One of the major implications of Day Four is certainly to say, as earlier days have also said, that these are created beings and not gods with independent powers. I should emphasize something that many people nowadays don’t seem to realize: Much of the Bible, and certainly not the Torah / Pentateuch / Five Books of Moses, does not deny that there are other gods. It merely insists that these other gods rank below the God of Israel. Tom Paxton’s song “My Dog’s Bigger than Your Dog” (that’s where the dog-food commercial comes from) presents a child’s perspective on this kind of competition, but Genesis 1 is not bragging. It is asserting a bold theological claim.
Note that what Deut 17:2-4 calls “abhorrent” is “turning to the worship of other gods and bowing down to them, to the sun or the moon or any of the heavenly host, something I never commanded.” An Israelite who worships them is committing a crime, but believing they exist is no crime. Genesis 1 is making clear that these lights, whatever their nature, are created beings.
And it was so. וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן
By now, we are used to seeing the assertion that what God thought should happen did happen. We’ll talk about how this happened next time.
An Israeli scholar who taught at the Weizmann Institute and at MIT named Ari Ben-Menahem published an article (QJRAS 33 [1992]: 175-190) attempting to date a number of different biblical events with similar precision.