I Saw the Light

Many readers of the creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:3 have wondered why God creates light on the first day but doesn’t create the sun, moon and stars until the fourth day. Now, the ancient Hebrew may not have had a very sophisticated understanding of astronomy, but he must have had some idea that light came from the sun. How does one explain this obvious blunder?

Creationist Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis explains it this way: “God created light first. He then created the sun to be the light-bearer for earth.” Thanks for clearing that up, Ken.

Reviewing other creationist websites, the most common explanation is that the light created on Day 1 emanated from a source other than the sun. Perhaps it was a cosmic light coming from God. At any rate, it alternated in some fashion with the darkness to provide Day and Night. (There was no rotation of the earth because, as we previously discussed, the ANE concept of the cosmos was of a flat, unmovable earth.) The sun, moon and stars were created on Day 4 as sources for the light that had already been created on Day 1. (For the time being we're going to ignore that the moon only shines by reflected light from the sun.)

In fact, some creationists argue that the counter-intuitive order of light before sun is “a hallmark of authenticity” because if the story had been made up, the author would have God creating the sun on the first day. “Having ‘day’ without the sun would have been generally inconceivable to the ancients.” The problem with that statement is that it was very conceivable to the ancients.

In 1849, archaeologists digging through the ruins of a library in in Nineveh (modern-day Mosul in Iraq) discovered thousands of fragments of clay tablets from various texts. One of these texts was a Babylonian creation myth called Enuma Elish, after its first two words. In 1000 lines on seven tablets, the epic tells the story of the god Marduk who slayed the sea monster Tiamat and, after using her carcass to create a new world, established the city of Babylon where Marduk was celebrated as king of the gods.

On line 38 of the first tablet of Enuma Elish, one god complains to another: “By day I cannot rest, by night [I cannot lie down]”. The account of Marduk creating the stars of the zodiac, moon and sun is on the fragmentary fifth tablet. The stated purpose of creating the zodiac was to regulate the months and the moon was appointed “to determine the days”. And therein lies a very important clue. The cosmic light that alternated with darkness provided a sense of Day and Night, a degree of order over the chaos of darkness that existed prior to light’s existence. But without sun, moon and stars, there was no way to know if the day had just begun or was about the end. No way to know if it was time to plant crops or if winter was coming. By creating the heavenly bodies, Marduk was really creating a way for humans to reckon Time.

This matches up with how the Bible describes the purpose of the heavenly bodies. According to Gen 1:14, the sun, moon and stars were created to “be signs for the seasons, the days and the years” (v. 14). But why couldn’t the astral bodies have been created on the first day?

To the ancient mind, it would have been impossible for God to have created them on Day 1 because the prerequisites were missing. On Day 1, there was nothing but the watery abyss and darkness. At a minimum, God needed to create the dome of sky in which to place the heavenly bodies. But, you also have to consider that the end goal of the Genesis author was to provide justification for the Sabbath rest. That required a regime of creative activity spread out over six days. When you start off with only primordial darkness, the first creative act has to be the creation of light in order to begin the cycle of Day and Night. And, as the Enuma Elish shows, the idea of light existing prior to the heavenly bodies was certainly an option. But why wait until Day 4 to create sun, moon and stars?


Sunrise on the Florida shoreline (photo by author)

Genesis 1:1-2:3 has an orderly, parallel structure that the rambling Enuma Elish lacks. Many have noticed that in the first three days, God creates: 1) light, 2) the firmament to separate the waters above the sky from the waters of the sea, and 3) dry land. During the next three days, God creates: 1) moving bodies of light, 2) living creatures to inhabit the sky and sea, and 3) living creatures and humans to inhabit the dry land. At the end of the third day, God creates vegetation on the new earth, and on the sixth day, he gives the vegetation over to his creatures as food. (God’s original intent was that there would be no killing for food. That would only come later, after the Flood.) Finally, on the seventh day, God rested.

The creation of the light-giving bodies on Day 4 parallels the creation of light itself on Day 1. The prerequisites are now in place: light alternates with darkness to give us orderly days, the dome of sky separating the waters will provide the location for the astral bodies, and the dry land will be the dwelling place for humanity. From the earth, humans will be able to track the motions of the light-giving bodies as they move through the sky so they can know when it is time to celebrate the Sabbath and other religious feasts.

Far from being a goof, creation of light prior to the sun was a logical necessity once you understand the goal behind the creation account in Gen 1:1-2:3 and the ancient concept of the cosmos.

A Day in the Life

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of The Beatles. “A Day in the Life” from their Sgt. Pepper album is a quintessential Lennon-McCartney song. Beginning with John Lennon's dark musings (“I read the news today, oh boy”) about a man who “blew his mind out in a car” and watching a war movie, we transition to an upbeat Paul McCartney ditty about the life of a bloke who “woke up, got out of bed” and started daydreaming on a bus, only to return to Lennon counting “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.” Lennon and McCartney wrote two separate songs, but merged them into one with some chaotic orchestration patching the seams. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

We see a similar process at work in much of the Bible where strands of multiple sources are edited together to form a unified whole. No better is that demonstrated than in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis.

The very first chapter of Genesis has the familiar six-day creation story. Throughout the chapter, appears the formulaic “And God said…” followed by some command (“let there be light”, “let the waters be gathered together”, and so on), words indicating the fulfillment of the command (“it was so”), and an assessment (“God saw that it was good”). In Gen 2:3. God blessed the seventh day because that is when he rested (shabat, in Hebrew, the basis of the noun sabbath). The main point of the story is an explanation of why we should rest on the Sabbath. A secondary point is a polemic against rival religions by showing that God is the creator of objects like light, astral bodies, and animals that were regarded as divine beings in other cultures.




"Creation of Sun and Moon" on the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo

Gen 2:4 begins the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. At first it appears to be a recapitulation with specificity of events occurring on the sixth day of creation, but Gen 2.5 points out that at this point there was “no plant of the field” because there were no humans to till the ground. So the Lord God formed “the human” (ha’adam) from “the ground” (ha’adamah) and, only then, “made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” (v. 9). Not wanting his creature to be alone, the Lord God formed out of the ground animals and birds (v. 19), but they were not suitable companions for the human, so the Lord God finally made a woman from the side of the human (v. 22). Indeed, the second creation story reaches its peak when the woman is brought to the human and he recognizes “bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh”. The point of this story seems to be that human beings are not meant to be alone but in community and the core of community is the special relationship between men and women.

Gen 2 is an entirely different creation story from Gen 1. The order of events in Gen 1 are plants-animals-humans (male and female). The order of events in Gen 2 are human (male)-plants-animals-human (female). In Gen 1, God orders something created and it is done. In Gen 2, the Lord God “formed” humans and animals out of the ground. Even the words for the deity are different. In Gen 1, the deity is referred to as “God” (elohim) but in Gen 2, the deity is called the Lord God (YHWH elohim).

In most English translations, “Lord” sounds like an honorific title (for example, “Lord Byron”), but it is actually the deity’s personal name, Yahweh (written in Hebrew using only the consonants YHWH). Jews do not utter the deity’s personal name, so in synagogue readings, they will say “my Lord” (adonay) wherever YHWH appears in the text. English translators followed this tradition, and put “Lord” is small caps to indicate that YHWH is being translated. Elohim is the common noun used to refer to a deity. The combination YHWH elohim only appears in Gen 2-3 (except for Exodus 9:30 where it may be a scribal mistake).

So what we have here are two creation tales that were joined together at some point. In the first, we have a heaven-centered viewpoint with Elohim, the universal deity, creating by divine fiat. In the second, we have a much more human-centered viewpoint with YHWH, the personal name of Israel’s deity, forming humans and animals from the ground the way a potter fashions earthern vessels. When the two stories were placed together, the redactor added the common noun Elohim after personal name YHWH in Gen 2-3, possibly to make the transition less jarring or to subtly indicate that the personal deity of Israel is the same universal deity of creation.

Continuing to read through the remaining chapters in Genesis and the other books of the Pentateuch, we will continue to notice the jump from Elohim to YHWH and back again. Using different names for the deity is one of the clues that we are dealing with different traditions or sources. Other clues are names (Israel vs. Jacob, Sinai vs. Horeb), distinctive vocabulary, or favored themes (rituals, laws, dates and numbers). Much like a detective identifying four different individuals at the scene of the crime from the clues they left behind, biblical scholars have identified at least four different traditions that were combined to make up the first five books of the Bible. This theory of composition is usually referred to as the documentary hypothesis.

There are some detractors of the documentary hypothesis. Some are fundamentalists who believe that the first five books were written by Moses because Jesus said it was (e.g., Luke 24:44). Others are critical scripture scholars who think supporters of the documentary hypothesis have developed an overly-complicated theory or doubt that individual traditions can be separated into individual continuous sources. Whether an editor combined completely separate sources or just fragments of various traditions together, there does seem to be overwhelming evidence that we are dealing with multiple sources and not just a single work by one author. Just like with “A Day in the Life”, the end result is a harmonious composition, but the individual components come from separate artists...and sometimes the seams show.