Does Genesis 1:14-15 indicate God making the light (stars) instantaneously shine on the Earth?

Question

We read:

“God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs to indicate seasons and days and years, and let them serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” It was so.” ‭‭Genesis‬ ‭1:14-15‬ ‭

“It was so”, sounds instantaneous.

Q: Does Genesis 1:14-15 indicate God making the light (stars) instantaneously shine on the Earth?

NOTE: I’m not necessarily asking for a scientific method here, but doesn’t the text indicate that God made the light shine on earth immediately, from the stars?

Answer 1

I'd like to elaborate a little on Dottard's good answer

Questions of Instantaneous and completeness of works

Genesis is ambiguous. In Gen 1.1, "God created the heavens and the earth". If that was completed, then why did God create light in verse 3? And why was the earth "without form" and void? That doesn't appear like a completed work.

Some say that between Gen 1.1 and Gen 1.2, a number of events happened, for example Satan fell, there was war, and the end of that age was a formless and chaotic earth that had to be rebuilt. The issue isn't whether this is true or not, but that this is a common interpretation in rabbinical traditions suggests that the language of Genesis allows this reading. Maybe it was completed in 1.1 or maybe the subsequent versus contain the completion of the work outlined in 1.1 -- both interpretations are reasonable.

As another point, a pattern in Genesis is

1. God says
2. God does (or someone does)
3. God names (often translated as "calls")

For example:

• (v 3) "Let there be light"
• (v 4) "God divided the light from the darkness"
• (v 5) "God named the light 'Day'"

A lot of people put emphasis on the "yehi", which means "and it was". But you have the yehis all over:

God said, "Yehi light"

Light yehi.

[...]

And God named the light day and the darkness he named light.

yehi evening

yehi morning

Evening and Morning only get an "it was so" after they are named. Each yehi is a completion in some sense.

Now what's strange is how could God see the light if it was still mixed in with darkness and not yet divided from it? Well, let's say in God's eyes he could see it - God can see the light mixed in with darkness - but man could not yet see it.

But then in what sense is the work of creation of light "completed" in verse 3? In God's sense, it's completed. But then perhaps not in man's sense.

But now we get to verse 14:

"And God said, [Let there be] lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and [let them be] for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:"

The "let there/them be" is the same yehi as "Let there be light".

So grammatically, there is no distinction between "let there be" in verse 1, except the word for "lights" is meoroth -- light sources. Like lamps. As opposed to light as a category.

So did God create the category in verse 3 and the actual lamps that provide a source of light in verse 14? Or did God create the lamps in verse 3 and they were only seen on earth in verse 14? Or did God create everything in verse 1, and God wanted to rekindle the light in verse 3 and then make it visible on earth in verse 14?

Moreover it is only in verse 14 that we see that darkness is divided from light. Was darkness divided from light as a category in verse 4, and then realized in verse 14, or was the work of dividing light from darkness only completed in verse 14? Or is God still dividing light from darkness even now, just in different places?

For example, say this separation in day 4 refers to the atmosphere clearing up so that the sun and stars could be seen, and this clearing up of the atmosphere is as a result of oxygen produced by green vegetation in day 3 -- then this would be an example of the separation that was declared among categories in verse 3 being realized on earth in verse 14.

It is with an appreciation of this ambiguity that we have to be careful when saying "in which verse did something happen?", as this is observer dependent, and so we need to pay attention whether the observer is God or creation generally, or man. Was the light seen by God, or in the universe, or on earth, or even in us? These are different notions of completeness for when God says "Let there be light".

Answer 2

"and it was so" occurs a number of times throughout Gen 1, such as V7, 9, 11, 15, 24, 30, etc. It each case, an act of creation is brought to its completion/fullness.

In the case of the fourth day, we need to be careful and observe that the record in Gen 1 is entirely phenomenological - it is described from the point of view of an observer on planet earth simply watching and recording what happens without any attempt whatever to understand the cause, apart from Divine working.

Now, let me offer my literal translation of Gen 1:14-17 to see what the passage is saying:

14 And God said, let there be light in the firmament of the heavens to divide between the day and the night - and let them be for signs and seasons, for days and years. 15 And let them lights in the firmament of the heavens to shine upon the earth and it was so.

16 And God [had?] made two great lights - the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to shine upon the earth.

We observe several things about this remarkable passage:

• While Hebrew has perfectly good words for sun and moon, both are assiduously avoided in the passage - it is only the light from the sun and moon that is discussed.
• the "firmament" here is, according to V6, 7 the space between the waters above (clouds etc) and the waters beneath (rivers, lakes and seas). This firmament is defined as "the heavens" in V8. It is also the space where birds fly, V20. That is, the "firmament" is what we now call the sky or atmosphere.
• According to V14-16, the light is placed in this firmament of the sky. Now we know that the Sun and Moon do NOT exist in our atmosphere but are actually situated well beyond it, but their light fills the atmosphere giving a blue color during the day and and a deep, dark blue during the night.
• There is nothing here in Gen 1 that actually says that God created the stars in day 4, only that the light from the stars would help to rule the night; or possibly that the moon's light would rule (outshine) the stars, which is obviously true.

CONCLUSION

There is nothing in Gen 1 demanding that the sun, moon and stars were created in Day 4, simply that their light became/was made visible on day 4. The actual heavenly bodies could have been created at some previous time by God and that their light in the terrestrial atmosphere became visible then.

APPENDIX - Starlight and Time

Many creationists have been troubled by the creation of the Sun, Moon and Stars on Day four (despite the Gen 1 record not saying this) precisely because the closest star is more than 4 light-years away and thus, its light could not have reached earth in less than 24 hours. Most stars, even in our Milky-Way Galaxy are many tens of thousands of light-years away.

So, did God create "light in transit" to enable starlight to appear on earth on Day 4? He is certainly capable of doing this. However, I believe this is unlikely for two reasons:

1. Those listed above - the record does not actually say this
2. It makes great difficulties with a number of things we actually observe.

Here is a simple example - SN1987A is a supernova (star explosion) in the large Magellanic cloud observed briefly in 1987. It was at a distance of 168,000 light-years from earth; that is, the light we observed has taken 168,000 years to reach earth and the event we thus observe actually occurred 168,00 years ago. If we assume that all the stars were created in day 4 with "light in transit", this supernova explosion would have been part of that "light in transit".

We have the same "problem" with all the other phenomena (including thousands of other supanovas), suggesting that these events did not occur but are the result of God creating fictitious events with "light in transit".

Answer 3

In Genesis 1:15, Ken כֵן = "So" indicates that actions already occurred like in [Genesis 6:22] Ken Asah כֵּן עָשָׂה = "So he-did". | When reading Bereshit 1:15, Va-Yehi Ken וַ-יְהִי כֵן (And-[It]-was So) as a phrase indicates the infinitive action לְהָאִיר Le-Ha'ir (To-Illuminate) occurred after the command "Let there be" יְהִי Yehi caused the luminaries to start shining during the timespan of יוֹם רְבִיעִי day four as affirmed in Genesis 1:19 by הוּא צִוָּה וְנִבְרָאוּ, in [Psalm 148:5].

Answer 4

The text plainly implies that the light from all three of these sources (sun, moon and stars) had reached the earth before the end of the fourth day of creation. "It was so" implies that the sun had begun ruling the day, etc. On the fifth day God moves on to other things. Within that we may make our own individual suppositions. I do not find it necessary to analyze the Hebrew to reach this conclusion.

The initial phase of the moon is not given in the text, nor is the relative order in which the sun, moon and stars were created made explicit. The Hebrew simply joins their clauses with 've-et' ('and') in verse 16. They could have appeared in any order or simultaneously without falsifying the text.

Because each day of creation begins with evening, we may imagine that the light from the stars would have been visible everywhere on the earth before the sun was placed within the expanse - if they were actually created in that order. Since we now know moonlight to be reflected sunlight, it stands to reason that if the moon were created first, it would have been fully dark until the sun was placed. Possibly we might infer that initially the moon was actually giving off light, therefore it was not initially at zero phase. And we might infer that some parts of the earth received no light other than from the stars and possibly the moon on the fourth day, if the previous light was withheld that did not come from these natural sources. But there was no man or animal alive yet to see any of this light, so these minor questions are purely academic.

The events of the third day also transpire in far less time than the natural order would normally permit. So it should not be any greater surprise to us that the light from the stars would reach the earth on the same day the stars were created. Many kinds of trees grow to full maturity and bear fruit on the third day itself:

The earth brought forth vegetation: seed-bearing plants of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that this was good.

More noteworthy to me is the absence of any specific mention of the five visible planets (the 'wandering stars'). All the modern scholars who try to explain the Torah as an organic outgrowth of Egyptian, Sumerian or other pagan cultures must be scratching their heads. The wandering stars are just stars, not gods, not natural forces or elements, and not of enough significance to deserve special mention in the creation narrative.

Let us not get hung up on trying to find any correspondence to modern cosmological fashions. We have "evening and morning" for one full day before the 'firmament' or 'expanse' was created (the waters [mayim] initially covering the entire earth somehow not being set apart from the 'waters above' [shamayim] where the stars now dwell), and three full days before the sun was created.

We have dry land and flourishing plant life on day three; the sun, moon and stars on day four; aquatic animals and birds on day five; and the first land animals and insects on day six, along with man. Even the relative time order, much less the time scale, of the two cosmologies are completely divergent.

Nor should we pretend that the ancient Jewish people had substantially less reason than we do to see this narrative as totally differing from the natural order we experience every day. Trees do not sprout from the earth, reach maturity and bear fruit containing seeds in a single day, but Genesis says they did. The sun was created on the fourth day, so how was there light on the previous three? If there was no sun, how could there be alternating evening and morning? What does it mean for the earth [ha-aretz] to be "formless and void", and to still be the earth? How exactly did the scribe learn any of this? These are obvious questions for us, and would have been equally obvious and puzzling to the ancient people. That they believed it anyway should be informative in itself.

The six days of creation are exceedingly miraculous events. We should neither seek to explain them away through natural process, nor be troubled at our own inability to explain or imitate them through our own understanding.