Hebrew Time

And God said, “Let luminaries be in the expanse of the heavens, to divide between the day and the night.  And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years.  And let them be for luminaries in the expanse of the heavens, to give light on the earth.  And it was so. Genesis 1:14-15

To Divide/ To Give – What is time?  Until we start to investigate this question, we commonly consider the answer to be obvious.   But once we try to articulate the idea of time, we almost inevitably start talking in terms of motion or space.  We talk about the past as something before now, the future coming after now.  We think in terms of the movement of the clock or the passage of days or years.  In other words, when we try to define time, we end up painting pictures of spatial relationships.  By the way, this isn’t true just in English.  It is common to all Indo-European languages.  Maybe that’s because the metaphysics underlying all these linguistic reference frames is the same as the thinking of the early Greek philosophers.  They also thought of time as a sequence, often describing time as if it were like a river where the past is downstream and the future is upstream.  Try it yourself.  Try describing time without using any spatial terms.  It’s not easy, is it?

Why does this matter?  The biblical imagery of time does not come from this metaphysics.  Just like the other thought processes in the Bible, the Hebraic view of time is radically different than the concepts that we commonly accept.  Hebrew is phenomenological.  It describes the world as it appears.  That means we need to try to unhook ourselves from this Greek-based metaphysics and try to see the world through Hebrew eyes if we are going to understand how the Bible describes the world.

We can start this process by noticing that God’s creation story already changes our conception of temporality.  Notice the verbs that are associated with these verses.  What is their purpose?  It is not to provide us with an astronomical clock.  In fact, if we really think about this verse, we immediately see that the day and the night are never the same length any day of the year.  God doesn’t create a standard day of twenty-four hours.  He doesn’t create the astronomical clock that we use to regulate our lives.  From the creation perspective, the purpose of the luminaries is to divide day from night.  The Hebrew verb, badal, means “to separate, to divide.”  Why divide day and night?  We might consider the implications for worship.  We might think of the relationship to Israel’s requirement for separation.  But most of all, the separation of day and night regulates the life activity of the community.  What does this mean?  It means that God provides the sun for life, growth, warmth and sight as signs of His kindness.  When I experience the beginning of a new day, no matter what “time” it is, I experience God’s goodness.  My life starts again.  I awake to His world.  I am experientially engaged.  The clock time is irrelevant.

Notice the other reason God created these luminaries.  They are to give light on the earth.  One kind of light is provided during the day.  Another is provided at night.  These are gifts from God.  In fact, the word translated “give” is really the word “light” turned into a verb.  “To light the earth.”  God gives the light so that we can live, but the focus is on Him, not on the light itself.

Finally, we should notice that the temporal sequences in Hebrew are governed by God’s festivals and are completely independent of astronomical time.  The festivals happen according to divine appointment, not according to a fixed calendar.  For example, Christmas is an astronomical date, not a Hebraic festival date.  That’s why it occurs on December 25^th every year.  The only fixed sequence in Hebraic time is Sabbath, and God is the one who fixed that.  It is independent of all human arrangements.

This opening discussion of Greek-astronomical time versus Hebraic-experiential time helps us adjust our reading of the Bible.  The implications are deep.  We can begin application of the Hebraic idea by asking how much of our lives are governed by astronomy rather than divine declaration.  That should cause some reassessment.  We have only scratched the surface here, but maybe that’s enough for the “day.”

Topical Index:  time, Genesis 1:14-15