Genesis begins with a verse about God’s making Heavens and Earth, but in the description of the week of creation He doesn’t make Heavens and Earth until the second and third days, respectively. God creates with speech (אָמַר), then beholds (רָאָה) what He has created. These are ordinary verbs of saying and seeing, made extraordinary by the Speaker and the Beholder.
What follows is my translation of the first four days. I translate טוֹב as fine instead of the customary good because the quality of creation described here is not so much moral as it is beautiful.1 The Septuagint uses a similar word: καλός.
Rashi reads it morally and doesn’t mention beauty at all. In his commentary on the fourth verse he cites the Talmud (“He saw that the wicked were unworthy of using it (the light); He, therefore, set it apart (ויבדל), reserving it for the righteous in the world to come.”) before explaining the ‘plain meaning’:
But according to the plain sense explain it thus: He saw that it was good, and that it was not seemly that light and darkness should function together in a confused manner. He therefore limited this one’s sphere of activity to the daytime, and this one’s sphere of activity to the nighttime
Rashi has another interesting gloss about the end of the first day, which in the Hebrew (and my translation) ends with יוֹם אֶחָֽד, one day instead of first day:
According to the regular mode of expression used in this chapter it should be written here “first day”, just as it is written with regard to the other days “the second”, “the third”, “the fourth”. Why, then, does it write אחד “one”? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, was then the Only One (Sole Being) in His Universe, since the angels were not created until the second day.
Now, my translation:
He said, “Light” so light came and He saw it That all was fine He cut the light from the dark He called the light day And the dark He called night An evening and a morning one day He said, “Sky” and so sky came between the waters So that the water above was cut from the water below And thus He saw it and so it was The sky He called heavens An evening and a morning second day He spoke again And brought the water below together in one place He could see dry land then and so it was The dry land He called earth And the water He called sea And He could see that all was fine He spoke of plants That they have for themselves the seeds of their future And so the earth made them And so made, He could see that all was fine An evening and a morning third day He said, "Lights in the heavens for the day and for the night" That they would be signs for the days and the seasons and the years Lights in the heavens to shine upon the earth A greater light for the day A lesser light for the night and the stars With lights in the heavens to shine upon the earth He cut the light from the dark And so they were cut, and He could see that all was fine An evening and a morning fourth day
I translate the verses into verse, even where the original is prose, in order to make the beauty and brevity of the Hebrew apparent in English. Further, I’m attempting an English translation that is out from the shadow of the KJV, which dominates the field so much that all English translations tend to resemble each other.
If this approach to Bible translation is interesting to you, please:
Forgive the excessively long footnote that follows, but today I found the opening paragraphs of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord apposite: “Beginning is a problem not only for the thinking person, the philosopher, a problem that remains with him and determines all his subsequent steps; the beginning is also a primal decision which includes all later ones for the person whose life is based on response and decision. God’s truth is, indeed, great enough to allow an infinity of approaches and entryways. And it is also free enough subsequently to expand the horizons of one who has chosen too narrow a starting point and to help him to his feet. Whoever confronts the whole truth—not only man’s truth and that of the world, but the truth of a God who bestows himself on man, the truth not only of the historical Gospel and of the Church that preserves it, but the truth of the growing Kingdom of God both as it now is in the fulness of God’s creation and also in the weakness of the grain that dies in me and in all my brothers, in the night of our present and in the uncertainty of our future: whoever, I say, confronts such wholeness of truth desires to choose as his first word one which he will not have to take back, one which he will not afterwards have to correct with violence, but one which is broad enough to foster and include all words to follow, and clear enough to penetrate all the others with its light.
The word with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a word with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes. It is a word that has never possessed a permanent place or an authentic voice in the concert of the exact sciences, and, when it is chosen as a subject for discussion, appears to betray in him who chooses it an idle amateur among such very busy experts. It is, finally, a word from which religion, and theology in particular, have taken their leave and distanced themselves in modern times by a vigorous drawing of the boundaries. In short, this word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one’s treasure will not win one anyone’s favours; one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone’s camp. Yet if the philosopher cannot begin with this word, but can at best conclude with it (always assuming that he has not forgotten it under way), should not the Christian for this very reason perhaps take it as his first word? And since the exact sciences no longer have any time to spare for it (nor does theology, in so far as it increasingly strives to follow the method of the exact sciences and to envelope itself in their atmosphere), precisely for this reason is it perhaps high time to break through this kind of exactness, which can only pertain to one particular sector of reality, in order to bring the truth of the whole again into view—truth as a transcendental property of Being, truth which is no abstraction, rather the living bond between God and the world. And finally: since religion in our modern period has renounced that word, it would not be idle to investigate at least this once what countenance (if we can still speak of a ‘countenance’) such a denuded religion may exhibit.
Beauty is the word that shall be our first.”