Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Day four: lights for signs and seasons
Genesis 1:14-19
14 God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs to mark seasons, days, and years; · WEB
The sun and moon are made on the fourth day, given a job rather than a name, and the job is to measure the days the chapter has been counting.
The fourth day fills the sky that was divided on the second, and the correspondence between the two halves of the week becomes visible here. What was formed on day one — light and dark — is now populated with light-bearers.
The purposes given are four and each is functional: to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs to mark seasons, days, and years, and to give light on the earth. They are appointed to a task and are answerable for it. Two of them are said to rule, which is the language of a delegated office rather than of an independent power.
What the chapter conspicuously withholds is their names. Every other major work of the week is named — day, night, sky, earth, seas — and the two great objects in the sky are called only the greater light and the lesser light. In a world where the sun and the moon were among the highest gods, and where their names were the names of deities, this account declines to use them. They are lamps that God made and hung, and the stars are added in four words at the end of a sentence, as an afterthought to the sentence rather than to the making.
That reticence is doing theological work. The whole apparatus of astral religion is dismantled here without a word of polemic, simply by describing the objects as manufactured and employed.
The clause about signs to mark seasons, days, and years also settles a question the chapter has been raising. The unit the sun and moon were made to measure is the day, and the account has already counted three of them before the instruments existed. Whatever a day is in verse five, it is the same thing the sun is appointed to mark in verse fourteen, since the writer uses the one word for both and gives no hint of a change. A reading that makes the six days long ages has to make the same word mean two entirely different things within nine verses, and has to do it without any signal from the text.
The seasons named are, in the Hebrew, the appointed times — the word later used of the festivals God fixes for his people. From the fourth day of the world there is a calendar, and the calendar exists because God set the lights to keep it.
settled What this mark means