Silent Running

 

Still, one of the standing problems of the text, and a source of embarrassment from patristic times forward, is that the light is divorced from the stars. How can it be, asked those to whom rabbis, Church Fathers and even Reformation theologians replied, that there was light beside and before that of sun and moon? How can it be, later skeptics inquired, that a day passed when the earth did not rotate once around the as-yet uncreated sun? To resolve the tension, one need only bring to Genesis 1 the assumptions of a Hellenistic doxographer, namely, that this most orderly of all texts is systematic in intention.

The opening line of Genesis 1 contains a geography of the cosmos…Light is the first new element. Light is also fire, as the two are not divorced in any ancient cosmology.

Yhwh next installs a “firmament.”…This is “the plate,” or vault…The birds “of the skies” will fly “across the surface of the plate of the skies” (1:20), never just “across the surface of the skies.”

The light is above the upper part of the tohu. The plate separates it from the lower part of the tohu. As of the second day, then, no light penetrates below the plate, and darkness still enshrouds the inhabited planet. On the third day, Yhwh drains the waters that are below the vault into a single basin; land emerges from the primordial muck. The land then brings forth terrestrial vegetation. The terrestrial vegetation seeds itself in the absence of light, just as seeds germinate in the dark.

God said, let there be luminaries in the plate of the heavens, to distinguish between the day and the night, that they be for signs, both for festivals/appointed times/seasons and for days and years, and that they be luminaries in the plate of the heavens, to throw illumination on the earth. And it was so. God made the two large luminaries, the large luminary for governing the day and the small luminary for governing the night, and the stars. And God put them in the plate of the heavens to cast illumination on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to distinguish between light and dark (Gen 1:14-18).

The light remains above the plate of the sky. And no new light is created on the fourth day. The term for the luminaries is not the causative participle, “shiners”, but a noun with either a passive or a locative sense. That is, the luminaries, which rotate into position each day or year or period of years, permit the light that penetrates the upper waters to filter through the plate of the sky onto the earth. Light exists independently, previously, behind the plate, and these “lighted things” or “places of light” transmit it to the earth. So, these entities “in the plate of the heavens” must be intermediaries, functioning as membranes, which regulate how much light negotiates the division between the extracosmic region of Yhwh and his light and the cosmic region between the earth and the shy. This is why Yhwh sets the luminaries into the plating of the sky (1:17), as opposed to where birds fly: across the surface of the plating of the sky (1:20; cf. 1:1, across the surface of the deep/water).

If the luminaries are merely membranes set into the plate of the sky, then the plate itself must be in motion relative to the plate of the earth. The stars, sun and moon would rotate in fixed positions on the plate of the sky.

In this cosmological system, the stars and planets…are merely holes.

B. Halpern, From Gods to God: The Dynamics of Iron Age Cosmologies (Mohr Siebeck 2009), 429-433

By way of comment:

i) Although he himself doesn’t draw the connection, Halpern’s analysis dovetails with the cosmic temple interpretation which scholars like Beale, Kline, Levenson, Walton, and Vogels have advanced.

ii) Apropos (i), on this view the cosmic “plate” would be an architectural metaphor.

Keep in mind that there are Hebraists like Victor Hamilton who don’t think raqia means a hard surface. But even if it did, that could be figurative.

iii) On the face of it, Halpern’s explanation is only partially successful in solving the problem he posed at the outset. His analysis would account for the preexistence and independence of light (on day 1) in relation to the skylights on day 4.

However, it fails to explain the diurnal cycle on days 1-3. If sunlight didn’t reach terra firma until day 4, when the skylights were cut into the cosmic plate, then how does he account for the alternation of morning and evening, day and night prior to the fourth day?

iv) One possible explanation, although he himself doesn’t offer this explanation, would extend the architectural imagery. On this view, the sequence is structural rather than chronological. The narrative spatializes time. You have to roof the temple before you can put skylights in the roof to provide natural illumination, even though there was day and night outside the building. Likewise, you have to erect walls before you can have clerestory lightning.

v) BTW, it’s difficult for a modern reader to read Halpern’s description and not visualize a combined greenhouse and planetarium. I imagine the geodesic greenhouses floating in outer space, in Silent Running.