Finding

Both benches decide this crux by reading a silence, and they find the same silence at consecutive clauses of the same verse. Augustine notices that on the first day 'and God saw that it was good' stands before the division and not after it, whereas on the fourth day, where the darkness is blameless, it stands after — and concludes that the placing is deliberate: God does not repeat his approval once the darkness is in view, 'lest both should be called good, when one of them was evil'. Bereshit Rabbah reads the next clause the same way and gets the same answer: it is not written 'and to the darkness God called night' but 'and to the darkness he called night', because the Holy One never joins his name to the bad but only to the good. And R. Abahu, at Bereshit Rabbah 2:5, argues from the identical omission at the identical clause that God desires the deeds of the righteous and not those of the wicked. Three arguments from what the verse declines to say, on two benches, with no contact — and it is the only place on this site where the two traditions use the same technique on the same words to reach the same conclusion.

What they do not share is the question underneath. The Latin bench cannot get past whether darkness is anything, because Augustine settled that it is not — it is the absence of light, as silence is the ceasing of voice and nakedness the absence of a garment — and then had to explain how a nothing can be divided, which he did with the finest thing said on this crux in either language: God did not make the darkness, he ordered it, as a singer orders the rests in his song and a painter the shadows that set off what is prominent. Every Latin witness after him is placed by that doctrine, including the ones who reject it. And they do reject it, in the schoolroom rather than in the controversy: Wigbod's dialogue puts under the rubric AUGUSTINUS the inference that everything divided can also be, so that as there is an essence of light there is an essence of darkness; Remigius says God made both and proves it from the Benedicite, where light and darkness are called together to bless the Lord, which a privation cannot be; and the Glossa prints Remigius' sentence as the standard gloss on Gen 1:4 three columns after printing Augustine's privation as the standard gloss on Gen 1:2. The twelfth century then argues from Augustine's doctrine on a page that no longer teaches it.

The rabbinic bench never asks the question at all, and its answers are correspondingly unembarrassed. Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer lists darkness fourth among the eight things created on the first day, with no proof text and no defence. R. Tanḥuma quotes Isaiah's 'who forms light and creates darkness, who makes peace' and says that after they were created he made peace between them. Ramban says the darkness is the element of fire, which is dark, and that were it red it would redden the night for us. Comestor, who knows perfectly well that shadow is what bodies cast, has to introduce the same thought with a quasi. What the rabbinic bench has instead of the metaphysical question is a liturgical one: R. Ze'eira derives from 'he saw … and he divided' the rule that one does not bless the lamp at havdala until he has used its light, so that the verse ends as the source of a benediction still said every week — and nothing on the Latin bench has that shape, because nothing on the Latin bench is looking for a practice.

There is one place where the silence stops being a coincidence, and it is four hundred years after the last witness above. Nicholas of Lyra, asking why the second day has no approval, calls the answer of Rabanus and of the Master a piece of trifling, refutes a second Latin answer from the Scriptures, and then takes the reading he wants from Rashi — more according to the intention of the letter, as it seems. Paul of Burgos, who had been a rabbi in that city until he was forty and was afterwards its bishop, replies that the postillator departs from rectitude in three ways, and the third is that he attributes to Ra. Sa. the Hebrew the authority of a literal exposition which our own doctors found first. Matthias Doering, defending Lyra, restates the charge and changes one word: he attributes the true answer to an unbeliever, though it is contained in our own gloss, to which he ought rather to have shown the honour. Nobody in that exchange denies that the answer is right. What they are arguing about is whose it is, what is owed for it, and whether the literal sense is the place where a Christian may be taught by a Jew. Every other page of this edition shows two traditions reading the same verses without knowing the other is in the room; this one shows what it sounds like when they do.