In the Beginning Read online

  At the present stage of the Universe, with a billion trillion stars shining, there is light everywhere (with a few exceptions I will get to), and there is no darkness. To be sure, if one were at a spot in space between the galaxies, where even the nearest galaxies were so far away that the intensity of their light was dimmed by distance to a level indetectable by the human eye, one would be in darkness. That would be a subjective decision, however, for instruments more delicate than the eye could detect the light, so that one would not be in darkness at all, but only in excessively dim light.

  Light might also be absent because it was physically blocked by an opaque barrier. On Earth we are accustomed to a far more intense level of light than we would be in the Universe generally, because of the closeness of one particular star, the sun. The level of light during the day, when we are on that portion of Earth’s surface facing the sun, is so much higher than the level when the surface turns so as to face us away from the sun (with the bulk of the opaque Earth itself blocking its light) that we think of the night as representing darkness. If the sky is clear, however, there is the light of the stars and possibly of the moon, so it is not truly dark; it only seems so by comparison.

  A cloudy night is darker still, and, of course, we reach the level of virtually zero light if we descend into a deep cave and make no use of artificial light.

  The equivalent of a deep cave in open space would be the center of a cloud of dust and gas that does not include an actual star and is not too close to a star. Such clouds actually exist and are called dark nebulas. We can see them when they hide the stars behind them and appear as an area of blackness against a background of bright stars on all sides. If one were in the middle of such a cloud, there would he no light in the sky, only darkness.

  Finally, if we imagine the Universe continuing to expand forever, there will come a time when all the stars will have ended their lives as glowing objects, when all will be dark in a final victory of Chaos.

  But all these arguments in favor of the special cases in which darkness might exist depend on our narrow definition of light. In actuality, light is a wave phenomenon, the product of a rapidly oscillating electromagnetic field. The oscillation can take place with any period, and waves can be produced with any wavelength.

  Our eye happens to be sensitive to certain wavelengths that our brain interprets as light. Those wavelengths make up only a small fraction of the whole, and there are wavelengths both longer and shorter that cannot be detected by our eyes and that do not appear as light.

  All matter radiates these wavelengths in a wide range, the peak level being at some particular wavelength determined by its temperature. Matter not hot enough to produce wavelengths short enough to appear as light will produce longer wavelengths of infrared light or still longer wavelengths of microwaves or yet longer wavelengths of radio waves. To all of these we are not naturally sensitive, but we can detect them with appropriate instruments.

  All matter that is not actually at absolute zero (and nothing is ever at absolute zero) produces such radiation. We could therefore detect infrared or radio-wave radiations in the deepest cave (since they would be radiated by the walls of the cave or by the air itself) or in the thickest and darkest cosmic cloud (since they would be radiated by the particles of matter in the cloud).

  If we consider light as merely one representative, and the most easily noticed, of electromagnetic radiation, then, in a broader sense, there is no darkness anywhere in the Universe, no place anywhere and at any time, even during the ultimate chaos at the end, in which there is/will be a complete absence of electromagnetic radiation.

  Thus, it would seem that scientific conclusions are against the notion of light-dark dualism and are more in accord (at least metaphorically) with the Biblical notion of God (“light”) as absolute master.

  5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.18 And the evening and the morning 19 were the first day.20

  18. God is described as giving the two phenomena of light and darkness specific names, Day and Night (Yom and Lilah in Hebrew).

  This is in accord with the natural notion of most people that words have some natural existence, some objective meaning. To people who have never heard but one language it is always astonishing (even today) to come across anyone who cannot understand it. How can anyone fail to realize that something that is X is called X? It is even more astonishing to encounter another language in which every object, action, quality, and so on is called by apparently meaningless and nonsensical sounds that nevertheless convey meaning to others who speak the language.

  The Biblical writers lived in a time when there were many languages, and they knew that fact. As most people do, they naturally assumed their own language, Hebrew, was a special one, the original one. Certainly, if we accept the Bible as literally true, then God speaks in the language in which the Bible was originally written. Hebrew becomes God’s language.

  It would seem from this verse that God created individual words and therefore the Hebrew language just as he created light. And he created language even before he created light, for the command to create light is put into Hebrew words.

  It followed from this, and was assumed by Biblical writers (and by many later people who accepted the Bible literally), that Hebrew was the exclusive language of human beings well into historical times.

  In actual fact, of course, languages have evolved in very complex fashion, and if there was any such thing as an original language, it is lost in the mists of time. Philologists can judge the past only from the relationships of present-day languages, and these can be carried back in time only as far as the writing of deciphered scripts exist. That takes us back only five thousand years at most, by which time languages were already numerous, complex, and vastly differentiated.

  Nor is there anything unique, in the linguistic view, either in age or quality, about the Hebrew language or any of its words.

  19. The twenty-four-hour period known as “day” offers us the possibility of confusion, since the lighted portion of that period is also known as “day” in contradistinction to “night,” and is referred to as such in this very verse.

  It is because of this possibility of confusion that the verse does not merely describe the creation of light and the separation of light and darkness as having occurred on the first day, but carefully refers to “the evening and the morning” to indicate that the full twenty-four-hour period is meant.

  We moderns have the day (the twenty-four-hour period) begin and end at midnight, a convenient scheme, if a somewhat artificial one, which is made practical only because of the existence of clocks that are cheap enough to be in every household and accurate enough to give the time to the minute.

  Before the days of cheap and accurate timepieces, it was much more natural (and, indeed, inevitable) to start the day either at sunrise or sunset, times that could be marked independently of clocks.

  It might seem to us that of the two, sunrise and sunset, it is sunrise that marks the natural beginning of the day. It is certainly the beginning of the workday. It seems that in those portions of the Bible that reached their present form before the Babylonian captivity there are occasional indications that sunrise starts a new day.

  Thus: “And the flesh of the sacrifice of his peace offerings for thanksgiving shall be eaten the same day that it is offered; he shall not leave any of it until the morning” (Leviticus 7:15). The “morning” is not the same day, apparently; it starts a new day.

  It was the Babylonian system, however, to start the day at sunset, which meant the day began with evening and morning was the latter part of that same day. The writers of the P-document were influenced by this Babylonian custom and adopted it, so that they described the full twenty-four-hour day by saying, “the evening and the morning” rather than the reverse.

  This custom of beginning the day at sunset continued into New Testament times and thus into some traditional holidays. “Christmas Eve” and “New Year’s Eve”
are by no means the evening before Christmas and New Year’s. They are the beginning of Christmas and New Year’s by Biblical tradition if not by the calendar or present-day recognition. In the same way Halloween (“All-Hallows Day eve”) on October 31 is the first part of All-Hallows Day celebrated on November 1.

  And of course the Jews still celebrate their holidays beginning at sunset of the “day before.”

  20. The acts of creation listed in the first chapter of Genesis are divided into separate “days.”

  Until the nineteenth century, there was never any question about this. It was universally assumed that the days referred to were literally days-twenty-four-hour periods—and that the heaven and the earth were created, and the job completed, in just a few of them. This did not seem to be overly short to anyone since God was involved. There was no question that if God had but willed it, the whole could have been created and completed in a few hours, or in an instant of time.

  In the nineteenth century, however, it became more and more clear that Earth was millions of years old, and in almost the first retreat from the literal acceptance of the Bible, there began to be some hesitancy about those “days.” Must they, after all, refer to a specific period of time?

  Some Biblical scholars therefore began to wonder whether in this chapter day might not refer to some vague period, as though one were to say that the coming of light and its separation from darkness represented the “first stage” of the process of creation and that this stage might have lasted a million years, or a trillion, if God so willed it. What is time to God?

  And yet the Bible seems to be specific. As though there were some chance that the word “day” might be misinterpreted, the P-document carefully states “the evening and the morning,” as though to emphasize that it was one twenty-four-hour period and no more. The day referred to in this verse is still taken to be the familiar twenty-four-hour day and nothing more by Jewish and Christian fundamentalists today.

  6 And God said, Let there be a firmament 21 in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.22

  21. The order in which God creates objects in the Universe during the remainder of this chapter is precisely the order in which the gods create them after the destruction of Tiamat in the Babylonian Creation-myths, something represented in the P-document by the creation of light and the subjection of darkness to limits.

  First comes the creation of the firmament.

  The first syllable of the word “firmament” is “firm,” and that gives an accurate idea of what the writers of the P-document had in mind. The firmament is the semi-spherical arc of the sky (it looks flattened on top and rather semi-ellipsoidal, but that is an optical illusion), and it was considered a hard and firm covering of the flat earth. It was considered very much like the lid of a pot and was assumed to be of much the same material as an ordinary lid would be.

  The word “firmament” (Latin firmamentum) is a translation of the Greek stereoma, which means “a hard object” and which is, in turn, a translation of the Hebrew rakia, meaning a thin metal plate.

  From the scientific view, however, there is no firmament; no sky to be viewed as a material dome. What seems to be such to our eyes is merely space stretching out indefinitely.

  There is, to be sure, an “end” to space. As our telescopes and other instruments penetrate farther and farther out into space, we can detect objects as far as twelve billion light-years away. Since the light from such distant objects left them twelve billion years ago, we see them as they were comparatively soon after the big bang.

  We could see objects that were farther away still, but we do not. Apparently, if we penetrate further still into the past, we reach the stage where the Universe had not yet cooled off to the point where enough matter had settled out as galaxies and where enough energy had been converted into matter to let us see space as truly transparent. Beyond the last objects we can see, we see only the haze of the earliest primeval days after the big bang, and that, in a sense, represents the end (as well as the beginning of the Universe).

  Clearly, though, this hazelike region that we cannot penetrate, which exists in every direction and which forms a sphere about us at a distance of more than twelve billion light-years, is not anything like what the priestly writers had in mind when they spoke of the firmament. It would take a metaphorical mind, indeed, to see the equivalence.

  The Biblical firmament was not viewed by the early Jews as very far above Earth’s surface. It had to clear Earth’s mountains, of course, but it might very well not be much higher than that.

  In the Greek myths, the giant Atlas had to support the sky as a kind of living pillar, and at one time, Hercules, by standing on a mountaintop, was able to take over the load temporarily—that seems to have been a typical ancient view of the sky, its distance and its solidity.

  In the old legend of Jacob’s dream, the sky could be reached by a ladder: “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:12).

  22. Rain is essential to agriculture, as much to early man as to ourselves, and yet direct experience with rain was not always common. The early farmers who first made agriculture into a large-scale enterprise lived in the lowland valleys of great rivers in the Middle East—the Nile River in Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq, and the Indus River in Pakistan.

  Generally, these were not areas where it rained frequently (along the lower Nile it almost never rained). The rivers themselves supplied the water necessary for man, animals, and crops, and great effort had to be put into irrigation procedures to make sure that a good harvest could be achieved.

  The river was fed by rains, yes, but those rains were likely to occur in the mountainous regions where the rivers originated, and the farmers near the mouth of the river had no direct experience with that.

  When people from these dry farming civilizations did encounter rain, they were likely to be amazed at water falling from the sky—a kind of gift from the homes of the gods, since such falling water would water plants without the hard work of irrigation.

  In those early days, than, it was natural for people to assume that there were two sources of water, the rivers and the rain, which were separated from each other by the firmament.

  7 And God made 23 the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: 24 and it was so.

  23. When God said, “Let there be light,” there was instantly light, and that was that. However, light is an immaterial object, and human beings could see no way of fashioning it. The firmament is, however, a material object, at least in the view of ancient humanity, and therefore, after God says, “Let there be a firmament,” the P-document goes on to say, “And God made the firmament.”

  This might be viewed as simply a restatement of the remark “Let there be a firmament,” as indicating that God made the firmament merely by speaking the necessary words. On the other hand, it certainly gives the impression of God actually hammering out a thin metal shell, fitting it over Earth, and fastening it down.

  That would be an unsophisticated way of looking at the Creation, but in the Babylonian Creation-myth, the gods seem to have fashioned the Universe in the human sense, and a little of that may have crept into the wording of the P-document.

  This remnant of the Babylonian outlook might even explain why it was necessary to have God take days to do the job. If it were a matter of will alone, then the job could be done in an instant; if it were a matter of arduous metalwork, then it is an adequate indication of God’s superhumanity that he could complete the entire sky in only one day.

  24. Here is the direct indication that not only was there water below the firmament (the familiar water we en-counter on the surface of Earth), but water above the firmament as well (the water that falls as rain).

  It did not seem to occur to anyone to wonder whether the water supply
above the firmament might someday be used up; or, for that matter, whether the water supply below the firmament might build up to the point where it would fill all the space available.

  We now know, of course, that since there is no firmament in the Biblical sense, there are no waters above it. All the water that exists on Earth exists on Earth and nowhere else. The sun warms the ocean, producing water vapor, which precipitates as tiny water droplets, which gathers in clouds, which are blown by the wind, and which, under appropriate conditions, collect into larger drops and fall as rain, which then (if it falls on land) drains back into the ocean.

  The entire cycle is an extremely complicated one and is hard to predict in detail (as any weather forecaster knows by experience), but it is a completely closed cycle, and the rain is as much “below the firmament” as the seas and rivers are.

  8 And God called the firmament Heaven. 25 And the evening and the morning were the second day.

  25. Here is a clear indication that the first verse of Genesis is simply a summary of what is to follow. The first verse reads, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” but, actually, “the heaven” is described as being created on the second day.

  In this verse, “heaven” is specifically described as the name given to the firmament. Later in the Bible, it is occasionally used as a word for the dwelling place of God somewhere above the firmament. Thus: “The Lord is in his holy temple, the Lord’s throne is in heaven” (Psalms 11:4).

  Such a notion is found only in the latest-written portions of the Old Testament. Earlier, God was more likely to be thought of as living in Mt. Sinai or in the Ark of the Covenant. By New Testament times, however, the notion of a heaven as God’s dwelling place above the firmament had become common so that the Lord’s prayer begins: “Our Father which art in heaven” (Matthew 6:9).

  Nowadays, when it is well understood that the firmament, in the Biblical sense, does not exist. Heaven is made use of solely as God’s dwelling place, though that, too, plays no part in the Universe subject to scientific observation and measurement.