Genesis 1:4
Three facts. No declaration. The reader decides.
Teaching and Understanding the Paleo-Hebrew
Document 7 of 11
What follows is not an argument. It is not a theological declaration. It is three facts placed in sequence. Read them carefully. Then decide for yourself whose point of view Genesis 1:4 could have been written from.
A note on honesty: an earlier version of this document stated that December 1968 and the Apollo 8 crew were the first to observe the condition described in Fact Two. That was imprecise. Yuri Gagarin entered space in April 1961. Earlier unmanned satellites captured images from outside the atmosphere before that. The precise history of who first observed what from what altitude is something we hold with appropriate uncertainty and we correct the earlier claim here. What is not in doubt is the distinction between what is observable from within the atmosphere and what is observable from outside it. That distinction stands regardless of the precise date any human being first occupied the extra-atmospheric vantage point.
Fact One
What Every Human Being Has Ever Observed
For the entirety of known human history, from the first human being who opened their eyes on the surface of this earth to the last generation born before December 1968, darkness has been experienced as the absence of light. The gradual withdrawal of the sun below the horizon. The slow dimming of twilight. The gradual brightening of dawn. Between light and darkness there has always been a gradation, a zone of transition, a spectrum from full light through half-light through dimness through dark. No human being standing on the surface of the earth has ever observed an absolute edge between light and darkness. The atmosphere through which every human being has ever looked at the sky scatters and bends and diffuses the light, producing the gradation between day and night that every culture in every century has understood as the normal condition of the boundary between light and darkness. Darkness as the absence of light. This has been the universal human observation for all of known history.
Fact Two
What Is Observable From Outside the Atmosphere
From outside the earth’s atmosphere, at sufficient distance from the surface, the experience of light and darkness is fundamentally different from anything observable from the surface of the earth. The darkness of space is not the darkness any human being experiences on the surface of the earth. It is not the absence of light. It is an absolute condition, total, complete, without gradation. Alongside it, on the sunlit side of the earth, is an equally absolute condition of light. Not bright light fading toward darkness. Absolute light. And between the two, a line. Sharp. Precise. No gradation. No twilight zone. No spectrum of transition. Two absolute simultaneous conditions, light and darkness, divided by an edge so sharp it has no width. This condition was impossible to observe from the surface of the earth. It required a vantage point outside the atmosphere. The precise history of when human beings first occupied that vantage point, Gagarin in 1961, earlier unmanned satellites, subsequent missions, is something we hold with appropriate uncertainty and do not overclaim. What is not in doubt is that this condition existed throughout all of human history on the surface of the earth and was not directly observable from that surface. One further detail, the sun seen from outside the atmosphere is not the yellow color experienced from the surface. The atmosphere filters and scatters the light producing the familiar yellow-white of the sun as seen from earth. Outside the atmosphere the sun is white. Absolute white. And the darkness alongside it is absolute black. White and black. No yellow. No gradation. Two absolutes. Divided.
Fact Three
What Genesis 1:4 Says
Vayavdel Elohim bein ha’or uvein hachoshech. And Elohim divided between the light and between the darkness. The Hebrew word vayavdel, from the root badal, means to divide, to separate, to distinguish, to make a clear distinction between two things that are simultaneously present. Not to turn off the light to produce darkness. Not to allow the light to fade so darkness could gradually replace it. To divide between two conditions that exist simultaneously. Between the light. And between the darkness. Two absolute conditions. A division between them. Genesis 1:4 does not describe darkness as the absence of light. It describes light and darkness as two conditions requiring a division between them. The text was written in the Paleo-Hebrew script by Moshe in the wilderness approximately 1446 BCE. The condition it describes with precision, two absolute simultaneous conditions divided by a sharp edge, is not the condition any human being standing on the surface of the earth has ever observed. It is the condition observable only from outside the atmosphere.
Three facts.
The condition Genesis 1:4 describes, two absolute simultaneous conditions divided by a sharp edge, existed throughout all of known human history. It was not observable from the surface of the earth. It became observable only from outside the atmosphere, a vantage point no human being on the surface of the earth has ever occupied.
Genesis 1:4 was written approximately 1446 BCE.
The condition it describes precisely, not darkness as the absence of light but two absolute simultaneous conditions requiring a division between them, was not available to any human observer standing on the surface of the earth at any point in the three thousand four hundred years after it was written.
Whose point of view could this have been written from?
The reader decides.
Document Eight examines what the Paleo-Hebrew pictures of choshech, darkness,
declare about the nature of the condition Genesis 1:4 divides.
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
William Ethan Massengill • Michael Lilborn Williams • Daniel Thomas Rouse
Published by Audrey Williams