The Length of a Day
The Length of a Day

Evening and morning – one day. The language of the Creation story is poetry and it does not analyse its terminology. Neither evening nor morning is defined. Nor is “day”.

The question of evening and morning is for another occasion; our present subject is the meaning of “day”.

In “Alice in Wonderland” the Mad Hatter more or less says that words mean whatever we want them to. More precisely, Einstein says that the speed at which time passes is not the same in all circumstances. Nachmanides and others argue that when the Bible says “day” it means the same as the days of hours and minutes with which human beings are familiar.

Not all the commentators agree, and many point to Psalm 90:4 which declares, ”A thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday”,
indicating that G-d’s days are not necessarily 24 hours but are vast expanses of time. In fact there is no such thing as G-d’s days. G-d is outside the time system and, unlike human beings, is not governed by the passing of time.

When the Torah speaks of the days of creation it is using human language, implying that if G-d did actually have days they would be eras. When we refer to evening and morning being one day, we are not measuring time according to any particular cultural usage.

TEN SAYINGS

Pir’kei Avot 5:1 tells us that the world was created with ten sayings, ten instances of the phrase, “And G-d said”, in the first chapter of B’reshit (e.g. “And G-d said, Let there be light” – Gen. 1:3).

Ten is a good round number, but actually there are only nine sayings. However, “in the beginning G-d created” (Gen. 1:1) is taken as a “saying”, since the Psalmist declares, “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made” (Psalm 33:6). The phrase, “the word of the Lord”, informs us that G-d brought the universe into being by an effort of will.

There is a famous notion in Greek thinking that matter was always there and that G-d did not create the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. Maimonides says (Guide 2:25) that this assertion of the eternity of matter is not automatically provable according to science, but even if it were it would still not affect our faith so long as we could argue, “Matter is eternal because it is the will of G-d that it should be so”.

Another idea implicit in the phrase, “the word of the Lord”, is propounded by the Midrash, which says that G-d’s Torah, which existed for generations before the world, was the Divine blueprint. G-d looked at His word, His Torah, and its pattern provided the outline of the universe and civilisation.

This interpretation conveys a lesson to mankind, who, according to rabbinic exegesis, are G-d’s partners in Creation. Like G-d, man must look into the Torah to know what kind of world the Almighty desires, and he must work accordingly in developing his earthly civilisation on the basis of truth, justice and peace.