“Let there be light”

The grammar

Genesis 1:3 in Hebrew: vayomer Elohim, yehi or, vayhi or — “And God said, yehi or, and there was light.”

The form yehi (יְהִי) is the jussive of the verb hayah (to be). The jussive is a Hebrew grammatical mood for indirect command, wish, or permission — third person, expressing what should happen rather than describing what does. English approximates it with “let there be” or “may there be.”

The jussive is the appropriate form for divine speech that makes things happen. God does not strain or struggle; God speaks in a form that combines authority and wish, and the action follows. The compactness of the Hebrew — yehi or … vayhi or — is its own argument: speech and result are continuous.

What “light” means here

The Hebrew word or (אוֹר) — HALOT s.v. or: light, daylight, sunshine. The basic word for light. Genesis 1:3 creates or.

Genesis 1:14-19, on day 4, creates the me’orot (luminaries) — sun, moon, and stars. The two words are related but distinct: or is light; me’orot are light-sources.

The sequence has generated an interpretive question that runs through the history of Genesis commentary:

Day 1: light is created (or) Day 4: the sun, moon, and stars are created (me’orot)

What is the light of day 1, if the sun is not created until day 4?

Major readings

We do not adjudicate among them. They have all been argued in serious commentary literature.

Pre-physical / divine light. Some readings (patristic and medieval) understood the day-1 light as a divine or spiritual light — God’s own glory, or a primordial light distinct from solar light. The sun on day 4 is a vehicle for the same light, made visible in a particular cosmic structure.

Cosmological structure. Some modern readings argue the chapter is structured as cosmic ordering rather than physical chronology. Days 1, 2, 3 establish realms (light, sea/sky, land); days 4, 5, 6 populate those realms (luminaries, sea creatures and birds, animals and humans). The day-1 light corresponds structurally to the day-4 luminaries; the chapter is not narrating physical sequence in our sense.

Functional rather than material. John Walton and others have argued that the chapter narrates the assignment of function to elements rather than their material origin. The light of day 1 is the function of light-time; the sun of day 4 is the agent assigned to that function. The chapter’s logic is closer to ancient Near Eastern temple-inauguration texts than to modern physical-origin narratives.

Two-stage creation. Some readings (particularly some young-earth creationist literature) argue for a two-stage process — light produced directly by God on day 1, then mediated through the newly created sun on day 4.

The Hebrew text does not specify which reading is intended. It states the sequence; what to make of the sequence is interpretive.

Longinus on the verse

The Roman literary critic Longinus (c. 1st century AD), in On the Sublime 9.9, cited Genesis 1:3 as an example of the highest literary sublimity:

Likewise, also, the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man, having formed an adequate concept of the power of God, manifested it adequately, when he wrote in the very beginning of his Laws: “God said” — what? “Let there be light, and there was light.”

Longinus is the first known non-biblical author to cite Genesis. His point is the compression — the matching of speech and result — as a literary achievement of the first order.