Some people claim a contradiction related to the creation of light. God created light on the first day, but did not create the sun and stars until day four.
Day 1 Gen 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
D ay 4 Gen 1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
[Which ‘light’ was Day 1’s light? The Sun and the moon and the stars were not created, apparently, until Day 4. Is this a contradiction? How do you resolve this?]
Humans are quite capable of creating light by various means (with fire, electrically, and chemically), and there is no reason to believe that an omnipotent God could not create light independently of the heavenly bodies. The fact that the Bible doesn’t record the source of the pre-solar light is irrelevant.
People have proposed a number of possible sources of [the Day 1] light:
1. Invention vs. Application – some interpret the activities on day one to be those of an inventor who developed the reactions to produce light. Then on day 4 that invention was applied to the creation of the solar bodies that provide light today.
2. Universe Was Filled With Light – Cosmologists working with ‘Big Bang’ calculations indicate that a massive presence of photons would have crossed the entirety of the universe during the initial seconds of universal expansion. This would in fact have ‘lit up’ the entire universe, all at once. “…and there was light.”
3 . Sonoluminescence – Sonoluminescence is the process by which acoustic energy is turned into light. This is done by introducing a frequency to water while an air bubble is present. The light produced actually comes from this bubble. Light could have been accomplished this way during the creation week when the earth was just a sphere of water before land appeared.
4. The Light Came From God – God is often referred to as light. And because light that comes from God would be eternal just like God, it would know no bounds of time and could travel to the ends of space instantly. [Basically, God peaked into the created universe, and there was light…it came directly from Him…it was so much light that there would be enough light energy for the remaining 6000+ years.]
The perceived contradiction: On Day 1 God says “Let there be light” and there was light. It seems quite clear that on Day 1 “the lights were turned on” as it were. At the conclusion of Day 1 God also “separated light from darkness,” naming the light “Day” and the darkness “Night.”
On Day 4 God says “Let there be light in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night.” Further, verse 16 says about Day 4, “And God made the two great lights- the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night- and the stars…”
F urther, how could the author of this account (Moses) describe “evening and morning” within the first three days of creation if God didn’t create the sun and moon, day and night, until the 4th day?
How could God create the light on Day 1 when the text itself says that He created the source of light on Day 4?
Here are two theories that I find convincing in regard to the Day 1/Day 4 conundrum.
Theory #1:
John Sailhamer, in Genesis Unbound, asks this simple question: “Does the text actually say that the sun, moon, and stars were created on the fourth day?”
The simple answer is “no.” Sailhamer holds that Genesis 1:1 reveals that God created the whole universe (including sun, moon, and stars) “in the beginning.” He then proposes that the rest of the chapter (1:2ff) is the account of God ordering that which He already made in the beginning as He prepares the land for humanity to dwell in.
Sailhamer explains:
“What the writer wants to show in this narrative is not that on each day God “made” something, but that on each day God said something. The predominant view of God in this chapter is that He is a God who speaks. His word is powerful. As the psalmist who had read this chapter said, (Ps 33:6) By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.
Thus, often when God speaks, He creates. But that is not always the case in this chapter…On this day God “makes a proclamation” about that which He has already created (the sun, moon, and stars)…God announced His purpose for the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day.
To summarize: God created the sun, moon and stars “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1), and then throughout the days detailed in Genesis 1:2ff God ordered all he had created with the express purpose of preparing the land for humanity to dwell in. This eliminates any perceived contradiction, because the sun, moon, and stars were not created on Day 4.
Theory #2:
Simply put: light isn’t dependent on sun, moon, and stars, because God is the source of light.
A number of scholars have proposed theories similar to this, including Douglas Kelly in Creation and Change and Bruce Waltke in his commentary Genesis.
To me, the best evidence for this claim is Revelation 21:23. As John reported on the New Jerusalem he said, And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.
Isaiah 60:19 carries a similar theme with it: The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.
Waltke says:
“Since the sun is only later introduced as the immediate cause of light, the chronology of the text emphasizes that God is the ultimate source of light.
Kelly says:
“We are simply not told what the source of light was before the sun was placed in the sky. All the text says is that God spoke and the light was there.”
Conclusion:
I see validity in either theory. I tend to favor Sailhamer because his entire viewpoint on the initial chapters of Genesis holds significant consistency. When reading the text in Hebrew and taking into account the historical and grammatical context of it all, the text doesn’t claim God “created” those pieces (sun, moon, stars) on day 4. It seems clear that he created them in Genesis 1:1 in the beginning, and then the literal week dictated in 1:2ff is when he “gave them their job descriptions” for the land which he was making inhabitable for humanity.
Verse 3 is the first record of God speaking in the Bible. “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.” The Word of God brings light!
[What was the source of this ‘light’ first mentioned here? It might have been just temporary light source until day four when the sun was created. But, what is created does not cease to exist…so where is this light now? ]
[“The day is described, according to the Hebrew mode of narrative, by its starting-point, “the evening.” The first half of its course is run out during the night. The next half in like manner commences with “the morning,” and goes through its round in the proper day. Then the whole period is described as “one day.” The point of termination for the day is thus the evening again, which agrees with the Hebrew division of time (Lev 23:32).” (Barne’s Notes)]
The Bible elsewhere uses these terms consistantly to refer to 24 hour time periods: evening, night, morning, day. There is no other time span to be given it other than 24 hours!
When light appeared, “God divided the light from the darkness.” Darkness was not removed completely, so far as the earth was concerned, but only separated from the light. Furthermore “God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” As though in anticipation of future misunderstanding, God carefully defined His terms! The very first time He used the word “day” (Hebrew yom), He defined it as the “light,” to distinguish it from the “darkness” called “night.” Having separated the day and night, God had completed His first day’s work. “The evening and the morning were the first day.” This same formula is used at the conclusion of each of the six days; so it is obvious that the duration of each of the days, including the first, was the same. Furthermore, the “day” was the “light” time, when God did His work; the darkness was the “night” time when God did no work. Such a cyclical light-dark arrangement clearly means that the earth was now rotating on its axis and that there was a source of light on one side of the earth corresponding to the sun, even though the sun was not yet made (v. 16). The writer of Genesis was trying to guard in every way possible against any of his readers deriving the notion of nonliteral days from his record. In fact, it was necessary for him to be completely explicit on this point, since all the pagan nations of antiquity believed in some form of evolutionary cosmogony which entailed vast aeons of time before man and other living creatures developed from the primeval chaos.
On the first day, He had said: “Let there be light!” (Hebrew or).On the fourth day, He said: “Let there be lights” (or light-givers, Hebrew ma-or).Intrinsic light first, then generators of light later, is both the logical and the Biblical order.
The chief purpose of both the light of the first three days and the light-givers of all later days was to “divide the light from the darkness” (verses 4, 18), and this can only mean that the two regimes were essentially identical. The duration of the days and nights was the same in each case, and the directions of light emanation on the earth from space must have been the same in each case. Light was coming during the day as though from the sun and during the night as though from the moon and stars, even though they had not yet been made. If such a concept sounds strange, let it be remembered that it is as easy for God to create waves of light energy as to create generators to produce such waves.
It therefore did not take a billion years for the light from a star which is a billion light-years distant from the earth to reach the earth after the star was created. The light-trail from the star was created in transit, as it were, all the way from the star to the earth, three days before the star itself was created! As noted earlier, the universe was created “full-grown” from the beginning; God did not require millions of years to develop it into its intended usable form. The purpose of the heavenly bodies was “to give light upon the earth”; so this is what they did, right from the beginning. (Henry Morris)
1. The apparent contradiction disappears when one understands that the two accounts are meant to be complementary. They give two different perspectives of the account of creation. Genesis 1 is the floodlight, whereas Genesis 2 is the spotlight. Genesis 1 gives the big picture and describes the general events that occurred in the six days of creation. Genesis 2 focuses on man’s creation and was not written to give a specific account of the days of creation. Genesis 1 tells us precisely when the animals were made, whereas Genesis 2 shows the association between the animals and man and tells us what happened after the animals and man were made. Genesis 1 tells us that God made man male and female, and Genesis 2 tells us exactly how this was done.
2 . What about the different style of writing found in Genesis 1 and 2? The theological modernist believes the different styles of writing that are found in various parts of the Pentateuch are evidence that they were written by different pens, but this is an unnecessary deduction. “In reading this chapter one is impressed, even in the translation, by a marked difference in style between it and the first chapter of Genesis. How, then, do we account for this great difference in style? A sufficient and simple answer is that in every chapter the style corresponds to the subject matter. … The first chapter of Genesis consists of terse, abrupt, sententious sentences, each as rugged as a granite mountain. The nature of the subject calls for that style. The second chapter, following the usual method of Genesis, takes up certain items tersely stated in the first chapter and enlarges or expounds the statement. This calls for a smoother and more flowing style” (B.H. Carroll). (David Cloud)
In chapter 1, man and woman are created after the creation of the animals. In chapter 2, the animals are created after people.
This apparent contradiction is best illustrated by looking at Genesis 2:19.
And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them:…
The second account gives many flashbacks and doesn’t present a historical sequence of events.
Genesis 2:19 does not say that God made the animals after He made the man. It simply states that He made the animals for the man. [Genesis 1:24-27] tells us precisely when the animals were made [(animals first, then man)]. The supplemental information in Genesis 2 does not contradict this, but complements it.
My explanation for this simple: the ‘semicolon’ is very important in this verse; it is a completed fact… God created animals, period. ‘And’, then God brought them to Adam. Thus, after Adam was created, these animals were brought to him to be named. There is no difficulty with the passage when one looks at it in this perspective. (David Cloud)
