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.
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