Let there be light
jay_emm
Kerygmania Host
in Kerygmania
There was a request for a discussion on light motifs.
Between Genesis, John's I am saying, and Revelations seven sun irradiance, there's clearly a lot to talk about.
Between Genesis, John's I am saying, and Revelations seven sun irradiance, there's clearly a lot to talk about.
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And (without going too much into any documentary hypothesis), are there other candidates for the earliest light reference in the bible?
How does it compare with other creation myths, is it an unusual feature or a standard?
And then we can see if other uses call back to this.
1) It is a symbol of intelligibility--the world becomes knowable through it.
2) It is a sign of divine activity--the gods reveal themselves though illumination.
3) It is a country marker--separating chaos from cosmos.
4) It is a metaphor for life
Genesis 1 stands out from the other creation stories in that light is not a god. Note, we have light, and plants before the sun, moon and stars
What is the seven sun irradiance? I can't think of what this could be, off hand.
Probably some pop culture having been merged in with my memory of rev 21:23 "the city had no need of the sun...for the Glory of God did lighten it" and similar 22:5.
Paul seems to manage to get it four times in 2 Cor 4:6, which I think is impressive.
It's interesting that 'light' there us linked to 'knowledge' - or clarity I suppose. The knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in a relational sense.
I'm often struck by John 1:5 where we are told that light has shone in the darkness and the darkness 'did not comprehend it.'
Some versions have 'understand' of course, which amounts to the same thing.
It's as if darkness has a kind of negative agency, as if it ought to be able to understand it but can't because of its own darkness as it were.
Plenty of light and dark imagery in the scriptures of course about 'light' and understanding.
'The entry of your word brings light, it brings understanding to the simple.'
It goes beyond that, of course.
We've got the light of the Transfiguration, and much more besides.
Thanks for starting this thread and for your contributions so far Kerymaniacs. I look forward to further reflections on light imagery in the scriptures.
It sounds like Isaiah 30:26: "Moreover, the light of the moon will be like the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be sevenfold, like the light of seven days, on the day when the Lord binds up the injuries of his people, and heals the wounds inflicted by his blow."
(Glad it was actually biblical at least)
I was wondering about psalm 119:105 "your word is a lamp to my feet and light for my path", it works perfectly fine as an improvised metaphor,
But if there is a pattern, say a resonance with creation, or with wisdom 'seeing the light'...
There's definitely lots of passages that can be brought in.
I think if someone clever could give structure, it would could easily last Lent.
Perhaps we could narrow things down to consider the subject in relation to Christ?
'I am the light of the world ...' etc.
But even then it's a massive topic.
How can it not be?
Or consider the scriptural references to 'light' in the context of understanding and illumination?
Again, pretty big ...
Any suggestions on how we can break this down into bite-size chunks?
Perhaps we could pick one particular verse or passage and consider that in detail. @Jengie Jon's citation of 2 Cor 4:6 might be a good place to start as there are several light references in that one verse.
1. Cosmic & Creative Light
These passages deal with light as the foundational "stuff" of the universe and the boundary between order and chaos.
Genesis 1:1–5: The first separation (Day 1).
Genesis 1:14–19: The delegated lights (Day 4).
Job 38:12–15 & 19–21: The "dwelling place" of light.
Psalm 104:1–2: Light as a garment for the Divine.
2. Ethical & Wisdom Light
Here, light is a tool for navigation, clarity, and distinguishing right from wrong.
Psalm 119:105: The lamp and the path.
Psalm 27:1: Light as salvation and confidence.
Proverbs 4:18–19: The "shining light" of the righteous vs. deep darkness.
Ecclesiastes 2:13: The practical advantage of light over folly.
3. Prophetic & Restorative Light
These verses look forward to a time when light will be intensified to heal the world or signal God’s intervention.
Isaiah 9:2: The people walking in darkness seeing a great light.
Isaiah 30:26: The "Seven Sun" irradiance (moon like sun, sun sevenfold).
Isaiah 60:1–3 & 19–20: The glory that replaces the sun.
Micah 7:8: The Lord as light in the midst of a fall.
4. The Incarnate & Living Light
The New Testament shift where the metaphor becomes a person.
John 1:1–14: The Word as the light of men.
John 8:12: The "I Am" claim to be the Light of the World.
Matthew 17:1–8: The Transfiguration (light as a physical manifestation of glory).
2 Corinthians 4:4–6: The light of the knowledge of the glory of Christ.
1 John 1:5–7: The claim that "God is light" and the requirement to walk in it.
5. The Eschatological (Final) Light
The conclusion of the biblical narrative where the "physics" of the world changes.
Revelation 21:23–25: The city with no need of sun or moon.
Revelation 22:5: The end of night.
To which I asked it to add contradictory verses:
1. The Darkness as God’s Hiding Place
In these verses, darkness isn't the absence of God, but the very place where God dwells to protect His holiness or to shroud His mystery.
Psalm 18:11: "He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him—the dark rain clouds of the sky."
1 Kings 8:12: "The Lord has said that he would dwell in a thick cloud [thick darkness]."
Exodus 20:21: "The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was."
2. The "Inaccessible" Light (The Danger of Exposure)
Usually, we want to get closer to light, but these verses suggest that divine light is a barrier that creates a different kind of "blindness."
1 Timothy 6:16: God "who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see."
Acts 9:3–9: The light of Christ on the road to Damascus doesn't clarify the world for Paul; it physically blinds him for three days.
3. The Deceptive Light
The Bible warns that "light" isn't always a guarantee of truth—it can be a costume.
2 Corinthians 11:14: "And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light."
Matthew 6:23: "If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (The idea of "false light" or internal delusion).
4. The "Darkness" of the Womb and Secret Creation
Darkness is often seen as a place of chaos, but in the Wisdom literature, it is the necessary, quiet "darkroom" where life is developed.
Psalm 139:12–15: "Even the darkness is not dark to you... I was woven together in the depths of the earth [the secret/dark place]."
There should be something to pick out from that, for instance, playing the first one against the last.
Well done!
Darkness us the absence of light.
Which makes the last references all the more intriguing and counterintuitive.
But seeing the use of Gemini I will make some general remarks.
We don't want AI to be used as an authority.
We don't want AI used to produce content faster than everyone can read/respond.
We don't want AI used to avoid reading others posts.
We really don't want any copyright leakage or other legal issues.
We don't want to be confused between you and any AI (thanks for attributing it)
And I'm sure there's more.
Jay-Emm Kerygmania host
Then perhaps on Ash Wednesday someone can do Darkness/Inaccessible light.
Then wk 3 ethical light
Then wk4 prophetical light
Jesus wk 5/6 in teaching
Jesus wk 6/5 as person
Eschalotical light
That gives kind of a Lenten shape to it (or an altar call), while being distinctive. And each part can hopefully stand on it's own.
The koine Greek word translated as "comprehend" here is κατέλαβεν. It is translated in the NRSV as "overcome" - "the darkness did not overcome it." How can the same word have such different meanings?
English has a similar overlap of meaning in the word "grasp." Grasp can mean understanding something. It can also mean take, seize, overcome.
The translation to "comprehend" reminds me of the related word "comprehensive", as something all-inclusive or enveloping. The darkness could neither understand the light, nor could it envelope it.
Actually, it is what I love about knowing a bit of koine Greek; words do not map one-to-one, but to a linguistic territory and as you come to understand those overlapping territories, you begin to get some insight into how the original author's mental maps of the world differed from ours.
Don't worry, that is as far as I will use it. It took long enough to do that; it might have been quicker to type in the texts from a concordance, which is what I previously would have done.
Light had long been the most important commodity in human history. When Jesus tells his followers they will be the light of the world, that was an astounding statement back then, not so much now.
The first thing that sprang to mind when I read this is the siebenfachen sonnenkreis that is the central "article of dispute" in Mozart's The Magic Flute. It's a talisman of great power that is guarded by Sarastro, withheld from the Queen of the Night, and gifted to Tamino and Pamina at the end of the opera, as the catalyst for their apotheosis.
AFF
@jay_emm your suggested Lenten timetable makes sense to me, despite variations in our calendars.
I'm not sure I'm clued up enough to get the ball rolling on it though. Any takers?
Something I would like us to consider is the idea of believers as the 'light of the world.'
Ephesians 5:8 tells us that the Ephesian believers were now 'light in the Lord.'
They have become light themselves, as it were.
Lots to unpack there.
I take @Gramps49's general point. The Oscar-nominated Hamnet is well worth seeing but there are highly implausible scenes, such as Shakespeare scribbling away late at night like a tortured genius by the light of a guttering candle.
Yes, people would have lit candles before their 'second sleep' but by and large people stopped doing very much once it got dark to conserve tallow.
Samuel Pepys is believed to have lost his sight by squinting away by candle light as he wrote his diary.
That would have been unusual.
Anyhow, be all that as it may - and yes as @Lamb Chopped observes, the sun was free of charge so people tended to restrict important activity to daylight hours - the point is a valid one. Artificial light was hideously expensive in our forebears' times.
Is anyone going to get the ball rolling on Jay-Emm's suggested calendar?
In Northern climates without glass windows need to be small, so during winter the sun's affect is minimalised. I definitely would value good lighting.
It's going to be an different in a land where rooftop bathing is viable.
But night is still going to be unsafe.
Given that, would people have treated "let there be light" as meaning daytime is God's and nighttime is when chaos and bandits do their thing, or see the separation as showing God in control of both.
We famously have the Sun/Moon coming later than day/night.
Does this show that this is a different kind of light (should it read lit and unlit).
How viable is it for an iron age writer (who will see sunrise more than us) to not realise the sun makes the day.
A for what belongs to God, the day and night both get names and called good. Darkness, even chaos are not presented as bad or as something God must do battle with; the imagery is rather of the Holy Spirit brooding over the chaos as a bird over a nest of eggs. So what we have originally is not light vs darkness in the sense of food vs evil, but rather something more like raw material vs finished creation--goods contrasting with other goods.
Jesus uses the present tense: You are the light of the world.
IMHO the present tense makes it that much more astonishing. They already are the light of the world.
'Become what you are,' as I've heard it said.
Does this refer to Genesis 1:1? I mean, I like this imagery of the Spirit as much as the next person, but I don't read that in Genesis 1:1 without a lot of Christian imagery and theology overlaid on top of this verse, as it were.
That's another way of reading Scripture.
No order, no structure, but God is not fighting it. It is bird imagery, maybe of a giant sea eagle hovering like a kestrel. God is portrayed as disengaged from the darkness and formlessness, but deeply attentive to it.
And agreed to your point about the notable lack of conflict in the story.
But that's a matter for a different thread.
I like the point about lack of duality and conflict too.
FWIW it doesn't bother me in the least whether there are two separate Creation stories or it's one 'story' addressed from different perspectives.
Or an overview followed by a close-up.
I don't think it makes any odds one way or another or how many authors may or may not have been involved or over what time period.
I like the idea of a dendrological version. Perhaps someone should write one.
Coming back to the 'light' theme, I was pondering the story of the Apostle Paul's conversion earlier (BBC Radio 3 was playing a Baroque piece which addressed the subject).
Saul was apparently blinded by the light - one assumes. Yet although Acts 9:7 tells us that those with him heard the voice but saw no-one, it also appears that they weren't affected by the brightness in any way.
What are we to make of this?
That the light didn't cause his temporary loss of sight, but it happened by some other means?
It's not literal but a metaphor for his spiritual darkness?
The light was somehow directed at him and not the others?
Then there are instances of people's eyes being opened to see spiritual realities beyond - or behind - the visible.
Elisha's servant in 2 Kings, for instance, or Balaam seeing the Angel of the Lord with sword drawn.
Paul identified as a zealous defender of the law. It was at the core of his self understanded.
Paul is confronted with the stubborn facts of the early Jesus movement. The followers of Jesus, at the time, were Jews who still worshiped God.
These followers showed transformed lives, courage, even joy under persecution. Their message is rooted in Scripture Paul knows intimately. And the movement keeps growing despite opposition.'
This is the seed of cognitive dissonance.
The Damascus event is when the dissonance becomes unmanageable, Paul's internal conflict is forced into the open. The God he believes he is serving confronts him. The people he is harming turns out to belong to the same God. He realized his identity as a zealous defender of God is reveals as the persecutor of God.
This results in the collapse of the dissonant structure. It is the moment when incompatible beliefs can no longer exist. Theologically it is the moment of revelation and grace.
In the Book of Acts, divine encounters are often directed one select person even when others are physically present. Paul sees the light and hears the articulate voice of Jesus, but his companions only hear a sound, but not the message.
It is a pattern seen in other parts of scripture. Daniels sees a vision, the men around him feel terror, but see nothing. At Sinai, the people hear noise, but Moses hears words. At the road to Damascus, the men perceived something real, the noise, but only Paul comprehends the message, the voice of Jesus.
Sorry, meant to post this last night, but I had hit the save draft, not post comment.
AFF
Maybe Paul was the only one stupid (shocked/called) enough to gaze into it!
It doesn't explicitly say they don't see the light, they clearly don't see it as a person or as surprising as the sound. Which sounds like they didn't see it as Paul did. But it is unclear if they are speechless in surprise at Paul, or at the experience.
You'd think it would be the other way round, though. The voice is the more personal part.
I'm not sure which part is the most 'natural' (either to expect God to do, happen by itself, or Luke to invent).
I used to use The Text This Week (anyone remember it?) for some study resources. I haven't studied Hebrew and can't speak to the authoritative nature, or lack thereof, for the linked resources, so that's my caveat.
Having said that: this is an interlinear Hebrew-English page of Genesis 1. The verb we were discussing, translated variously as "sweeping, hovering, moving over" is rendered here as "vibrating." Vibrating! Cool. I had genuinely never thought of the Spirit vibrating over the waters. This agrees with Alter's note about rapid back-and-forth movement.
PDF link: https://scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/OTpdf/gen1.pdf
A word that resonates with me is "quivering". Kind of feels like the energy is about to be released, even explode (as in Big Bang)
The Greek for "hearing the voice" is ἀκούοντες μὲν τῆς φωνῆς . I've only got college Greek, so this isn't set in stone, but I believe "phones" can be translated as either "voice" or "sound," and "akouontes" means "hearing," but doesn't necessarily imply "hearing with understanding."
So what they could have going on is perceiving the sound (and the light too, probably) but not in the same way as Paul, the intended audience--maybe they heard the noise, but couldn't make out the words. (and heck, we don't even know what language it was--I'm willing to bet Paul had languages his road companions didn't, and I'm not even going to guess what Jesus would have chosen)
And with the Western Lent kicking off with Ash Wednesday this week, we are getting pretty close.
Given that the rest of us don't claim any past incarnational encounters with the Apostle Paul or anyone else who was around in the 1st century Middle-East we don't have AFF's putative and 'unpopular' first-hand experience to counter the received narrative as handed down through scripture and tradition/Tradition and dismiss it as 'bullpucky.'
All any of us have to go on are the received texts - this is Kerymania - and the interpretative frameworks we bring to bear from our respective flavours of Christianity.
Which is enough to be going on with for now.
'We see through a glass darkly.'
But we still see.
There are plenty of folk who suggest that the Apostle Paul adapted and shaped the 'original' deposit of faith and teaching handed down from Christ and the first disciples and effectively 'invented' Christianity as we know it today.
As AFF acknowledges, what we have now is what we have to go on.
No amount of special 'revelations' or privileged individual insights are going to alter that.
We all bring assumptions and presuppositions to the texts. For instance, I assumed, on the basis of other scriptural references to dazzling or blinding light that Paul's blindness was a direct result of the light Luke tells us he saw on the Damascus road.
But as @Lamb Chopped has pointed out, the text doesn't explicitly say that it did. But then neither does it explicitly say that it didn't. So we have to form a judgement based on comparisons with other scriptural references and reasoned debate.
Which is fine.
I s'pose what I'm picking up from this thread is how multilayered these themes and references are. I knew that already of course, but it's yet another example of this working out in practice.
Whereas in the account of Paul’s Damascus road experience nothing is said about ‘dazzling’ or ‘blinding’, merely that it was ‘a light from heaven’.
Acts 22:11 has Paul saying that his blindness was caused by the light: "And since I could not see because of the brightness of that light, I was led by the hand by those who were with me, and came into Damascus."