The End of Everything
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. Genesis 1:3 NASB
Let there be– Unfortunately, translating this text usually ignores the Egyptian background of the intended audience. What I mean is this: the Genesis stories aren’t written in some kind of pre-modern proto-scientific vernacular, as if God were describing how He kicked the universe into being. That should have been obvious from the choice of the first word (which is inaccurately translated “in the beginning”) and the words in the next verse (which are all about primal chaos and human fears). If we correctly imagine the original audience as the children of Israel coming out of the paradigm of Egyptian thinking, then we immediately recognize that these verses speak to that Egyptian consciousness still resident in the audience. That’s why “light” comes into being before the sun, moon and stars. This isn’t cosmology. It’s tribal history renewal.
But, just for the moment, let’s imagine that this declaration about light is in fact a statement about the origins of the universe. If it were, there is an amazing implication here that we probably overlooked. So let’s spell it out.
“Then God said” isn’t quite right since the verb is a Qal imperfect waw-consecutive. So the action described isn’t finished and it isn’t temporally located in the past (sort of). Remember this: “the peculiar Hebrew tense form known as the conversive vav: this standard mode of biblical narrative prefixes the vav—‘and’—to the future tense, thus converting it into the past tense. (va-yomer—‘And he said’—for instance, is written, ‘He will say,’ with a vav—‘and’—as a prefix.) ”From the Today’s Word of October 16, 2018. [see also HERE]
Here we have a “past” tense that is really a vav attached to a future tense, and should be read “And God saying [said],” followed by yehi, the imperfect jussive, really something like God’s ongoing-yet-to-be-finished desire for light. After all this grammar, it amounts to a declaration that whatever God is doing here, it isn’t done. It continues.
So now the implication. What this text implies is precisely the opposite of the second law of thermodynamics, that is, the universal, inevitable law of heat death. In other words, this “creation” account speaks of continuing life, not inevitable death. But we, as modern scientific thinkers, have converted the ancient belief in the inevitably of death into a scientific principle: As below:
“ . . . John Berger writes of the ‘finality of modern despair,’ which translates the figure of death into scientific principle: In most earlier cosmogonies . . . time was cyclic and this meant that the ‘ideal’ original state would one day return or was retrievable. . . With entropy and the nineteenth century view of time, we face only the irretrievable and only dissipation . . .”[1]
As Berger underscores, in our world nothing finally lives. Death is the direction and goal of everything. And we embrace this in our science. There is no room for redemptive renewal in modern cosmology.
But the ancients didn’t think in this “sophisticated” way. They thought in terms of renewal. Mircea Eliade has shown this “myth of eternal return” is expressed over and over in ancient cultures, and finds its way into our modern world in annual events like “New Year.” Man cannot abide a world of entropic death. So modern man is caught between the undeniable conclusions of death science and the relentless pursuit of meaning and hope. The ancient Hebrews knew something we apparently have forgotten. When God spoke light into existence, He wasn’t finished with it. And He still isn’t. Perhaps the antidote to modern heat death is Heschel’s provocative declaration, ““No word is God’s final word.”[2]
Topical Index: light, entropy, death, hope, Genesis 1:3
[1]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus(Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 43 citing John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous(Vintage International, 1992), pp. 29-31.
