PhiloAlexandria, c. 40
greek jewish · floruit 30–45 · Alexandria
To each of the days he assigned some of the parts of the whole, excepting the first, which he himself does not even call first, lest it be counted in with the others; but naming it 'one' he addresses it by a name that hits the mark, having seen in it, and pronounced upon it, the nature and the appellation of the monad. We must say as much as can be said of what it contains, since to say all is impossible; for it contains the intelligible world as its own peculiar possession, as the account of it shows.
The grammatical half of this crux, stated first and stated as a deliberate act of the author. Moses assigns parts of the whole to each of the days, and holds the first one back: he does not even call it first, so that it should not be counted in along with the others, and calls it one instead, a name that hits the mark, because he had seen the nature of the monad in it. Two things are worth marking. The first is that Philo makes the choice of word an authorial decision with a reason, which is what Bruno reaches independently a thousand years later when he says that first and second are relatives and a first requires a second. The second is that the reason is arithmetical and not theological: to be one is to be uncountable with the rest, outside the series rather than at the head of it. Everything the Latin bench does with dies unus, from Ambrose's excellently he said one day and not first day to Augustine's not first but one, is downstream of a Greek reading Philo already has, and the Latin channel for it is Ambrose.
Not counted in with the other daysThe versions keep the cardinal
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
greek jewish · floruit 30–45 · Alexandria
After the kindling of the intelligible light, which came to be before the sun, the adversary darkness withdrew, God walling them off from one another and setting them apart, he who knew well their contrarieties and the battle that is in their nature. So that they should not always be borne together in strife, and war prevail instead of peace, setting disorder within the ordered world, he not only separated light and darkness, but also set borders in the intervals between, by which he fenced off each of the extremes. For being neighbours they would have wrought confusion, stripping for the contest over dominion in much and unceasing rivalry, had not borders been set fast between them to sunder and dissolve the assault. And these are evening and morning: of which the one heralds beforehand the sun that is to rise, gently fencing off the darkness; and evening comes on when the sun has set, mildly receiving the massed onset of the darkness. And these too, morning I mean and evening, must be placed in the order of the incorporeal and intelligible things; for there is nothing perceptible at all among them, but all are ideas and measures and types and seals, incorporeal things for the genesis of other bodies.
Why separate light from darkness, answered with a war. Light and darkness are natural enemies, and God, who knew the battle in their nature, did not merely part them but walled them off and put borders in the intervals between, because neighbours fight for mastery and the fighting would have put disorder inside the ordered world. Then the borders are named, and the naming is what makes the passage matter twice over: they are evening and morning. On the Latin bench the same reading of vayavdel as a real spatial separating is Bede's, not only by a difference of quality but of places, which Rabanus copies word for word; on the rabbinic bench the same instinct is R. Yannai's, that the division is between the deeds of the righteous and the deeds of the wicked, and it is moral rather than physical. Philo's is physical and political at once: a treaty with a demilitarised zone. The last sentence anticipates K10 and settles what evening and morning are for him: they belong among the incorporeal and intelligible things, all ideas and measures and types and seals, so the evening of the fifth verse is not a time of day.
Separated so they should not be at warDivided by place and quality
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
greek jewish · floruit 30–45 · Alexandria
But when light had come to be, and darkness had given way and withdrawn, and borders had been set fast in the intervals between them, evening and morning, then straightway, by the necessary measure of time, there was brought to completion that which the Maker also called day: and day not first, but one, which is so said because of the solitariness of the intelligible world, which has a monadic nature.
The sentence this crux is named for, in the oldest witness that has it, and it gives the word the whole finding turns on. Day not first but one, and the reason is the monosis of the intelligible world, its solitariness, which has a monadic nature. Monosis is not unity and not primacy: it is the condition of having nothing beside you. That is precisely what Rashi means by yachid be-olamo, that God was alone in his world that day because the angels were not yet created and so there was no second anything to count with; and it is what Augustine means when he says the day is called one rather than first. Three witnesses on three benches read unus as a claim about solitude rather than about position in a series, and Philo is the head of all of them: he is a Jew writing in Greek four centuries before the midrash, and the Latin bench received the reading through Ambrose, who reproduces it and does not name him. The clause before it belongs to K9 and to Philo's account of evening and morning as borders in the intervals; the day is completed by the necessary measure of time only once those borders are in place.
The monad's solitarinessGod was alone that day
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
Patres378–720
latin · 370–380 · Caesarea in Cappadocia
Now indeed, after the creation of the sun, day is the name for air lit by the sun, when it stays in the hemisphere that is above the earth; and night is called the shadowing of the earth, which is produced when the sun is set at its going down. But then day was made, and night followed, not by the motion of the body but by the diffusion of the principal light, now withdrawing itself and now bringing itself back again, according to the divine command. And there was made evening, and there was made morning, one day. The naming of evening, therefore, is to be understood in the common way. For both when the day begins and when it inclines to its setting, night is next to it by its nearness; yet, so as to keep the privileges of the day's birth, he said evening first, saying that night accompanies the day. For before light was created there was no night in the world, but darkness. The shadowing of the earth, then, of which we spoke above, cutting off the day, was called night, and therefore was named with a new name after its coming to be: And so there was made evening, and there was made morning. He did not say day and night, but evening and morning, so as to give the dignity of the word to the better part. For a day touches evening and morning alike, and you will find that Scripture keeps this custom everywhere in numbering times. For we say that so many days have gone by, making no mention of the nights.
Added at Phase 6, and it should have been on the daf from the start: this is the passage every later Latin answer to 'why evening first' descends from, and K10's greps did not reach it. Basil, in the Latin of Eustathius, gives the crux its two halves at once. Evening is named first so as to keep the privileges of the day's birth — nativitatis diurnae privilegia — because night accompanies the day and does not precede it; and before light was made there was no night in the world at all, only darkness, so night is a new name for a new thing. Then the second argument, which is about the choice of words: he did not say day and night but evening and morning, to give the dignity of the word to the better part, and Scripture keeps that custom everywhere in counting times. ⚠ The TEI of this column carries at least two plain OCR faults in the space of six lines — suipra for supra, et deo for ideo — which is worth knowing before the variant in the next note is read as a textual fact.
Day before nightThe versions keep the cardinal
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · c. 387 · Milan
Some ask why Scripture recorded evening first and morning afterward, lest it should seem to put night before day. They fail to notice, first, that it put the day first by saying, 'And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night'; and then that evening is the end of the day, and morning the end of the night. So, to give the day the prerogative and the birthright, it named the end of the day first, since night was to follow, and afterward added the end of the night. […] Excellently, too, he said one day and not first day. For with a second day and a third and the rest to follow he could have said 'first,' and that seemed to be the order; but he laid down a law, that twenty-four hours of day and night together be defined by the name of day only — as if he were saying: the measure of twenty-four hours is the time of one day. For as the generation of men is counted and the women are understood along with them, since the lesser are bound to the greater, so too the days are numbered and the nights reckoned as joined to them. Therefore as there is one circuit, so there is one day.
Ambrose's chapter heading states the crux exactly: 'That day is here set before night, against what seems so to some; why it is called one day rather than first; and that it is closed by a morning end.' His answers are three: evening comes first because evening is the end of the day and morning the end of the night, so naming evening first gives the day its birthright; 'one' rather than 'first' because a day is a single circuit of twenty-four hours; and the day names the night along with it as men name women. He also notes that many call a week 'one day' because it returns into itself. At PL 14:145C he adds a fourth: the day is set apart from the others as 'one,' not compared with them as 'first,' because on it the foundations of all things were laid. Elided in the English at […]: the proof from Scripture's custom of naming the greater term for the pair (Jacob's 'days of my life', Ps 89:10's 'days of our years', never 'and nights'), and the sentence 'Principium ergo diei, vox Dei est: fiat lux.'
Day before nightOne circuit, twenty-four hours
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 388–389 · Thagaste
Here too the Manichees carp, supposing it was said as though the day began from evening. They do not understand that the whole of that working — by which the light was made, and division was made between light and darkness, and the light was called Day and the darkness Night — that this whole working belongs to the day; and that after this working, the day being as it were finished, evening was made. But because the night also belongs to its own day, the one day is not said to have passed until, the night too being over, morning came: and so thereafter the remaining days are counted from morning to morning.
Augustine's earliest answer, and the one the Latin bench keeps: the day does not begin at evening. The whole work belongs to the day; evening is what follows a finished day; and the days are counted a mane usque in mane, morning to morning. The Manichees are the named opponents, but the reckoning he rejects is the one Ben Zoma rules for in b. Chullin 83a — the day that follows the night. Neither side knows it is contradicting the other.
Day before nightEvening completes a work
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 401–415 · Hippo Regius
Or is this day the name of the whole of time, and does it include all the volumes of the ages under this one word — and is that why it was called not 'first' but 'one day'? For 'and there was evening,' he says, 'and there was morning, one day': so that by the evening's being made the sin of the rational creature may be signified, and by the morning's being made, its renewal.
The one sentence in the Latin bench that puts the rabbis' question and answers it their way: not first but one, because the word holds all time. Augustine raises it and then sets it aside in the next paragraph — 'this is a matter of prophetic allegory, which is not what we undertook in this discourse' — and returns to the literal question. The reading he declines here is the one Abelard will take up as his own, and it is the shape of Bereshit Rabbah 3:8's 'one day' too, though what fills the word there is Yom Kippur and not the ages.
One day = all timeEvening as sin or temptation
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 401–415 · Hippo Regius
And because the other creatures, which are made below it, are not made without its knowledge, therefore of course the same day is repeated throughout, so that by its repetition there come to be as many days as there are kinds of created things to be distinguished, to be brought to an end by the perfection of the number six: so that the evening of the first day is its knowledge of itself, that it is not what God is; and the morning after this evening, by which the one day is closed and the second begun, is its turning, by which it refers what it has been created to the praise of the Creator, and receives from the Word of God the knowledge of the creature that is made after it, that is, of the firmament.
Augustine's mature answer, and the one the Glossa puts in the margin of 1:5 by book, chapter and column. There is only one day: the angelic light itself. Its evening is its knowledge of itself as not-God; its morning is that knowledge referred back in praise; and the six days are that one day presented six times over, once for each kind of thing made. On this reading 'one day' is not a counting word at all, which is why the sixfold repetition does not make it 'first'. Two chapters on (I.25, PL 34:313) he draws the corollary the City of God will state more compactly: this is why no night is ever named.
The same day repeatedEvening and morning knowledge
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 401–415 · Hippo Regius
Now then let us consider those things which God made all at once, from which, when they were completed on the sixth day, he rested on the seventh — intending afterward to consider his works in which he works even now. […] Of this whole creation of God there is much we do not know: whether things in the heavens too high for our sense to reach them, or things in regions of the earth perhaps uninhabitable, or things hidden below, whether in the depth of the abyss or in the secret folds of the earth. Now these things, before they were made, certainly were not. How then were things known to God which were not? And again, how could he make things that were not known to him? For he made nothing in ignorance. He made them known, then; he did not come to know them once made. Accordingly, before they were made they both were and were not: they were in God's knowledge, they were not in their own nature. And therefore that day was made on which they should become known in both ways, both in God and in themselves: by that as it were morning or daylight knowledge, and by this as it were evening knowledge.
The place where the two halves of Augustine's reading are joined and named. 'Creavit omnia simul' (Sir 18:1) makes the six days non-successive; the morning and evening knowledge explains what the day words are then doing. Migne's chapter heading supplies the technical term the schools will quote — cognitio matutina et vespertina. This is the passage Bonaventure will call 'very reasonable and very subtle' and then decline.
All things made at onceEvening and morning knowledge
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 413–427 · Hippo Regius
If, that is, we can understand the evening of this day and its morning with any fitness. For the knowledge of the creature, compared with the knowledge of the Creator, in a manner grows dusk; and again it grows light and becomes morning, when that knowledge too is referred to the praise and love of the Creator; nor does it fall away into night, where the Creator is not forsaken through love of the creature. In short, when Scripture numbered those days in order, it nowhere inserted the word 'night.' It nowhere says 'night was made,' but 'evening was made, and morning was made, one day' (Gen 1:5); and so a second day, and the rest. For the knowledge of a creature in itself is, so to speak, more faded than when it is known in the Wisdom of God, as in the art by which it was made. Therefore it can more fittingly be called evening than night; which nevertheless, as I said, when it is referred to the praise and love of the Creator, runs back into morning. And when it does this in the knowledge of itself, it is one day.
The City of God's compact restatement, and the one that travels. The observation that carries the argument is a plain fact about the text: through all six days Scripture never once writes 'and night was made.' Evening, yes; night, never. Augustine reads that as evidence that the vespera in question is a dimming of knowledge, not a darkness. Gregory the Great will make the same observation serve a moral reading, and the Glossa prints Gregory's version on 1:5.
The same day repeatedEvening and morning knowledge
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 720 · Jarrow
'And there was evening and morning, one day.' There was evening, the light setting little by little after the space of a day's length was spent, and passing beneath the lower parts of the world — which is now done by the accustomed circuit of the sun in the nights; and there was morning, the same light returning little by little over the lands and beginning another day; and up to this point one day was completed, of twenty-four hours, that is. By the commendation of which word Scripture watchfully warns us to learn that the light which was made lit the lower parts of the world by its setting. For if it did not do this, but rather, evening having come, it wholly perished and again little by little revived at morning, it would have said the day was completed not at the morning of the following day but rather at the evening of the first.
Bede reads the phrase as an argument about physics. If the created light had been snuffed out at evening and rekindled at morning, then the day would have been complete at its own evening and Scripture would have said so. That it waits for the morning proves the light went on shining round the underside of the world — the same body of light that later runs the sun's circuit. This is the one place in the crux where the wording of Genesis is treated as evidence for cosmology. Rabanus copies the paragraph verbatim.
One circuit, twenty-four hoursDay before night
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
VersionesLXX · Vulgate
greek jewish · c. 250 BCE · Alexandria
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
The Seventy render the cardinal exactly: ἡμέρα μία, 'day one', not ἡμέρα πρώτη. Every later day in the chapter is an ordinal (δευτέρα, τρίτη), so the Greek preserves the very unevenness the commentators argue about. Brenton's 1851 English prints 'the first day' and dissolves it; this is a fresh draft rather than Brenton for that reason.
The versions keep the cardinal
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 392 · Bethlehem
And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And there was made evening and morning, one day.
Jerome keeps the cardinal against the Latin ear: dies unus, then dies secundus, tertius. Every Latin argument in this crux — Ambrose's, Bruno's, Rupert's — exists because he did not write dies primus. PL 28 prints the text with 'Factumque est vespere et mane, dies unus'.
The versions keep the cardinal
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
Glossa ordinariaLaon, c. 1120
latin · compilation 1110–1130 · Laon
Verse 5. […] 'And there was evening,' etc. (GREGORY, Moralia VIII.6.) By no means in this life is sin so forsaken through the exercise of justice that one may remain in it unshaken: for if rectitude drives out the fault, the fault sits at the doors of our thought and knocks to be let in. Whence Moses says: 'Light was made'; and a little after: 'Evening was made.' For the Creator, foreknowing human guilt, then set forth in time what is now enacted in the mind. For the shadow of temptation follows the light of rectitude. But because the light of the elect is not put out by temptation, it is recorded that not night but evening was made: for temptation hides the light of justice, it does not destroy it. (AUGUSTINE, on Genesis to the letter, book IV, ch. 22, 23, vol. III, col. 311, 312.) Note that the other creatures, etc., down to: that the one may belong to the day, and this to the evening.
Two glosses only, and between them they carry both Latin answers onto the verse. Gregory the Great supplies the moral one, and he does it by seizing exactly the fact Augustine had seized in City of God XI.7 — that Scripture writes evening and never night — and reading it as consolation: temptation dims the light of justice, it does not extinguish it. Then Augustine's angelic reading is not quoted but cited, by book, chapter and Migne column, and abbreviated in the Glossa's usual way ('etc., usque ad'). A twelfth-century reader of the margin was told where to go and expected to have the book. The English here is a fresh draft; Wilson's edition of the Glossa (migne.app/glossa) supersedes it when it reaches 1:5.
Evening as sin or temptationEvening and morning knowledgeThe same day repeated
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
מפרשיםTargums · Midrash · Bavli · Rashi
rabbinic · 100–300 · Palestine
And the LORD called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
Added at Phase 6. Onkelos was cited twice on this daf — by the Pseudo-Jonathan note and by the answer gloss — and was not on it: the plain targum renders the cardinal exactly, yoma chad, and then yom tinyan for the second day, so the Aramaic preserves the unevenness as the Greek and the Vulgate do — and preserves a second unevenness of its own that no other version has, since yoma chad is determined and yom tinyan is not. It interprets nothing here at all, which is the point: of the three targums only Neofiti ever adds a doctrine, and it does not add one to this verse either. Etheridge's 1862 English, fetched from archive.org for this phase, prints 'Day the First' and then 'the Second Day' — see the Pseudo-Jonathan note; the cardinal is restored here in a fresh draft for the same reason.
The versions keep the cardinal
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
rabbinic · compilation 400–500 · Galilee (Tiberias / Sepphoris)
“It was evening” (Genesis 1:5) – these are the actions of the wicked. “And it was morning” (Genesis 1:5) – these are the actions of the righteous. “[It was evening and it was morning,] one day” – the Holy One blessed be He gave to them [to Israel] one [unique] day. Which is that? It is Yom Kippur. Rabbi Tanḥum bar Yirmeya said: [It was the day] on which four items were created: Mountains, the heavens, the earth, and light. Rabbi Yudan said: [It was the day] on which the Holy One blessed be He was alone in His world, as there was no one else in His world other than Him. This is in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi Yoḥanan, but it is not in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi Ḥanina. Rabbi Yoḥanan said: The angels [malakhim] were created on the second day. That is what is written: “He covers His upper chambers with water; He makes clouds His chariot; He proceeds on the wings of wind” (Psalms 104:3), and it is written: “He makes the winds His messengers [malakhav]” (Psalms 104:4). Rabbi Ḥanina said: The angels were created on the fifth day, as it is stated: “Let birds fly [yeofef] over the earth…” (Genesis 1:20) and it is written: “And with two it would fly [yeofef]” (Isaiah 6:2). Rabbi Lulyana bar Tavrai said in the name of Rabbi Yitzḥak: Both according to the opinion of Rabbi Ḥanina and according to the opinion of Rabbi Yoḥanan, everyone agrees that none were created on the first day, so people should not say: Mikhael was pulling at the south side of the heavens and Gabriel at its north side, while the Holy One blessed be straightened it out it in the middle. Rather, “I am the Lord, who made everything; who stretched out the heavens alone, who spread the earth by Myself [me’iti]” (Isaiah 44:24) – it [the last word] is written [as two]: “who is with Me [mi iti]?” Who was partner with Me in creation of the world?
Three answers to 'one day' stacked in one section, and the last of them is the one Rashi will carry into Christendom's reading list. (1) Evening and morning are the deeds of the wicked and of the righteous — the moral reading. (2) 'One day' is the day God gave Israel: the Day of Atonement. (3) R. Yudan: it was the day on which the Holy One was alone (yachid) in his world. That third answer forces the angel question, and the section closes by ruling that on the first day nothing whatever was created besides God — lest anyone say Michael held the sky at the south and Gabriel at the north while God measured in the middle.
Evening as sin or temptationThe one day given to IsraelGod was alone that day
English: The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022
rabbinic · compilation 400–500 · Galilee (Tiberias / Sepphoris)
Rabbi Shmuel bar Ami said: From the beginning of the creation of the world, the Holy One blessed be He desired to enter into a partnership with the creations below. Either way, it [the wording of the verse] is difficult. If it [the counting of the days] was for the purpose of a tally, it should have said: ‘One, two, three,’ or else ‘first, second, third’; is it proper to say: ‘One, second, third?’ This is bewildering. When did the Holy One blessed be He repay them? It was later, at the establishment of the Tabernacle, as it is stated: “The one who presented his offering on the first day” (Numbers 7:12) – [alluding to] the first [day] of the creation of the world. The Holy One blessed be He said: ‘It is as though I created the world on that day.’ It was taught: That day was conferred with ten crowns. It was the first day of the act of Creation; the first day for [years of] kings; the first day for the princes; the first day for the priesthood; the first day for the Divine Presence [on earth], as it is stated: “They shall craft a sanctuary for Me [and I will dwell in their midst]” (Exodus 25:8); the first day for blessing; the first day for sacrificial service; the first day for the prohibition of improvised altars; the first day for slaughtering [sacrifices] in the north; and the first day for descent of fire [from heaven], as it is stated: “Fire emerged from before the Lord…” (Leviticus 9:24).
The grammatical objection in its sharpest rabbinic form: if the days were being tallied it should read 'one, two, three' or 'first, second, third' — is it proper to say 'one, second, third'? The midrash states the difficulty and then answers something else (the ten crowns of the Tabernacle's first day), leaving the grammar standing as a difficulty. Ambrose, Bruno and Rupert answer the identical objection on the Latin side, and nobody on either side cites anybody.
'First' needs a second
English: The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022
rabbinic · redaction 500–600 · Babylonia (Sura / Pumbedita)
And R. Yehudah said in the name of Rav, Ten things were created on the first day, and they are these: Heaven and earth, chaos and desolation, light and darkness, wind and waters, the measure of the day and the measure of the night. "Heaven and earth", as it is written, (Genesis 1:1) "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Chaos and desolation, as it is written, (Genesis 1:2) "And the earth was chaos and desolation." Light and darkness, darkness as it is written, (Genesis 1:2) "and darkness was upon the face of the deep," light as it is written, (Genesis 1:2) "And God said, Let there be light." Wind and water, as it is written, (Genesis 1:3) "and the wind of God floated upon the face of the waters." The measure of the day and the measure of the night, as it is written, (Genesis 1:5) "And there was evening and there was morning, one day."
Rav Yehuda in Rav's name lists ten things made on the first day, and the tenth pair is proof-texted from our verse: the measure of the day and the measure of the night, 'and there was evening and there was morning, one day.' The day's own measure is itself a creature of day one — which is the rabbinic way of answering the question the Latin bench asks as 'what kind of day was it, with no sun?' Hugh of St Victor's dies naturalis is the same instinct in computistical dress.
The day's measure is a creature
English: Sefaria Community Translation
rabbinic · redaction 500–600 · Babylonia (Sura / Pumbedita)
MISHNAH. The 'one day' stated with regard to an animal and its young (Lev 22:28) means that the day follows the night. This is what Ben Zoma expounded: it is said in the work of creation 'one day' (Gen 1:5), and it is said with regard to an animal and its young 'one day'; just as the 'one day' stated in the work of creation means that the day follows the night, so too the 'one day' stated with regard to an animal and its young means that the day follows the night. GEMARA. Our rabbis taught: this is what Ben Zoma expounded. Since the whole passage speaks of nothing but consecrated things, and with consecrated things the night follows the day, one might have thought it is so here too; therefore it is said here 'one day' and it is said in the work of creation 'one day' — just as the 'one day' stated in the work of creation means that the day follows the night, so too the 'one day' stated with regard to an animal and its young means that the day follows the night.
The halakhic weight of the verse, and the flat contradictory of the Latin bench. Ben Zoma — the same tradent who reads merahefet as a measured gap in K7 — ties 'one day' in Lev 22:28 to 'one day' in Genesis by verbal analogy and rules that the day follows the night: reckoning begins at evening. Augustine says in so many words that the days are counted a mane usque in mane; Ambrose says the day has the birthright over the night; Hugh says every dawn belongs to the preceding day. Same five words of Genesis, two calendars. Steinsaltz/Davidson English is CC BY-NC and is not embedded; this is a fresh draft against the Wikisource Aramaic.
Night before day
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
rabbinic · 600–800 · Palestine
And the LORD called the light Day, and made it that the inhabitants of the world might labour in it; and the darkness he called Night, and made it that in it the creatures might have rest. And it was evening, and it was morning, one day.
Two things at once. The targum keeps the cardinal, yoma chad, as Onkelos does. And it supplies a reason for the pair that no Hebrew word demands: day is for labour, night for rest. Etheridge's 1862 English prints 'the First Day' — a translator taking the side of the ordinal, exactly as the WEB does — so the cardinal is restored here in a fresh draft. Corrected at Phase 6: this was written as though the ordinal were Etheridge's response to the expansive targum. It is not. His Onkelos, fetched from archive.org because Sefaria's Etheridge has no Genesis 1, prints 'Day the First' for the same Aramaic yoma chad, and 'the Second Day' after it — so the ordinal is a habit of the translator applied evenly, not a judgement about this text.
The versions keep the cardinalNight made for rest
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
rabbinic · 1080–1105 · Troyes
יום אחד THE FIRST DAY (literally, one day) — According to the regular mode of expression used in this chapter it should be written here “first day”, just as it is written with regard to the other days “the second”, “the third”, “the fourth”. Why, then, does it write אחד “one”? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, was then the Only One (Sole Being) in His Universe, since the angels were not created until the second day. Thus it is explained in Genesis Rabbah (Genesis Rabbah 3:8).
Rashi puts the question in the form the Latin bench uses — by the order of the chapter's own language it should have written 'first day,' as it writes second, third, fourth — and answers it from Bereshit Rabbah 3:8: because the Holy One was then alone (yachid) in his world, the angels not having been created until the second day. Ambrose asks the same question in Latin seven centuries earlier and answers it from the length of a circuit; Bruno of Segni answers it from the logic of relatives. Note that Silbermann's English renders the lemma 'THE FIRST DAY (literally, one day)' — the translator conceding the point the commentary exists to dispute.
'First' needs a secondGod was alone that day
English: Rosenbaum–Silbermann 1929–34
ScholaeCarolingian and twelfth-century Latin, 790–1170
latin · c. 790 · Aachen
Disciple: 'And there was evening and morning, one day.' How is this to be understood? — Master: What is evening but the perfecting of each several work, and morning the beginning of those that follow? — AUGUSTINE. Disciple: You maintain that the first day is a spiritual creature; how then did it have evening and morning? — Master: Every creature, before it was made in its own time, was in the Word of God itself, to be known first by the angels and so to be made in its own time. Wherefore the creature's own knowledge of itself was evening; in God, however, morning — because the creature is seen more fully in the Lord than the creature is seen in itself; seen more fully, that is, in the art by which it was made than in itself which was made. For this reason the evangelist John says: 'What was made, in him was life' (John 1:3–4).
The Carolingian catena doing on 1:5 what it does on 1:2 in K7: setting the two Latin lines side by side and labelling the second one. The schoolroom formula comes first unattributed; then the disciple presses the hard case — if the first day is a spiritual creature, what are its evening and morning? — and the answer is Augustine's angelic double knowledge, printed under his name. This is where a reader of the ninth century could see that the compressed gloss and the difficult doctrine were the same doctrine.
Evening completes a workEvening and morning knowledge
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 796 · Tours
Question 33. Why is the light read as created on the first day? — Answer: It suits the works of God that on the first day a temporal light should first be made from the eternal light, so that there might be something by which the rest he would create could appear. Question 34. What is 'there was evening and morning, one day'? — Answer: That is, the end of a work completed, and the beginning of a work begun.
Augustine's angelic evening and morning stripped of the angels and reduced to a schoolroom formula: evening is a finished work, morning is a work beginning. Everything that made the doctrine difficult is gone, and what is left will be copied by Wigbod and Angelomus and, through them, become the standard Carolingian gloss on the verse.
Evening completes a work
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 822 · Fulda
'And there was evening and morning, one day.' There was evening, that is, the light setting little by little after the space of a day's length was spent, and passing beneath the lower parts of the world — which is now done by the accustomed circuit of the sun in the nights; and there was morning, the same light returning little by little above the lands and beginning another day; and up to this point one day was completed, of twenty-four hours, that is. By the commendation of which word Scripture watchfully warns us to say that the light which was made lit the lower parts of the world by its setting. For if it did not do this, but rather, evening having come, it wholly perished and again at morning rose up in the thing created, it would have said the day was completed not at the morning of the following day but rather at the evening of the first.
Rabanus copies Bede on 1:5 as he copies Bede on 1:2 — the same silent transmission the K7 threads trace. The Corpus Corporum text differs from Bede's at two words ('dicamus' for 'discamus', 'in re creata resurgeret' for 'recreata resurgeret'); the second looks like a printer's separation of 'recreata' rather than a real variant, and the PL plate should be checked before either is treated as Rabanus' own.
One circuit, twenty-four hoursDay before night
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 850 · Luxeuil
Verse 5. 'And there was evening and morning, one day.' It must be asked why 'evening and morning' is said, when the sun was not yet in the firmament, by whose setting evening and by whose rising morning would be made. Or did the first and second and third day perhaps have as much space as there is from the rising of the sun to its setting, and again, wheeling by the north, it returns to the east so as to drive off the world's darkness by its brightness — the space which those who are in caves and workhouses, though they lack the light, can feel by habit? Which might perhaps be understood so, were it not that 'evening and morning' is added. So it remains that by evening is understood the perfecting of the preceding work, and by morning the beginning of the one that follows. For Scripture speaks after our manner, so that the distinction of God's works may be understood. Further, what it says, 'evening and morning, one day,' can be referred to the angelic creature. For when it turned its gaze away from God and turned to beholding the creature, in a manner it was evening; but when it turned back to the Creator, so as to understand the creature more clearly in him, it was morning. And yet, if it had remained in the consideration of the creature, it would have been not evening only but night. 'One day' is well added, on account of the unity of angelic dignity, which so clings to contemplating the one God that it never moves its gaze from contemplation.
Angelomus splices as he splices in K7: the schoolroom formula first, then Augustine's angelic reading, then a third answer that is his own. 'One day' is well said because of the unity of angelic dignity — the word 'one' is made a predicate of the angels' undivided attention rather than a number in a series. Note also that he keeps Augustine's guard rail: had the angelic mind stayed with the creature it would have been not evening but night, which is why Scripture never writes night.
Evening completes a workEvening and morning knowledgeThe unity of angelic dignity
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 900 · Auxerre
Verse 5. 'There was evening and morning, one day.' By morning is understood the beginning of faith; by evening, the perfection of good work. The morning of this day is drawn out into evening when the beginning of faith is perfected by the completion of good work.
The shortest witness on the crux and the only one that quietly reverses the verse. Remigius reads morning as the beginning and evening as the perfection, so that his day runs from mane to vesperam — the opposite of the order Genesis prints and of the order every other Latin here defends. He is not arguing for a reckoning; the moral figure simply requires that a thing begin before it is completed, and the text is bent to it. Compare Bereshit Rabbah 3:8, where the same moral pairing (wicked and righteous) is fitted to the verse's own order instead.
Evening as sin or temptation
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1100 · Segni
There follows: 'And there was evening and morning, one day.' Some understand evening and morning as night and day. For since it enumerates all the days in order with the nights passed over, they want both day and night to be understood under the one name of day. But the order of speech is astonishing, in which evening is put before morning, as though he had begun to work not from morning but from evening. For if he had said, 'there was morning and evening, one day,' there would perhaps be no question; but because he put evening between two mornings, it can be doubted which of them it is referred to. For if evening is referred to the preceding morning, the whole night is undoubtedly left out; and if to the following, then the whole day is passed over and only the night's boundaries are set. Hence it was more fitting that there should be 'evening and morning, one day' — but it could have been called one night. But since divine providence created the night not for labour but for rest, there is nothing unfitting if in God's working, which was done not in the night but in the day, only the day's boundaries are set. For if in this place we understand the whole space of day and night, as they wish, to be one day, then God divided the two from each other in vain, and gave the divided things different names; for he called the light Day and the darkness Night. No day, therefore, consists of night and day. Since then it is not the dreams that are seen in the night, but the works that are done in it, that are described here, it was necessary to enumerate days and not nights. […] But as for its being said 'one day was made,' and not 'a first day was made,' this holds good because 'first' and 'second' are relatives, and neither can exist without the other. Since therefore there was not yet a second, it was indeed one day; yet that one could not be called first.
The best-argued Latin answer on the crux, and the one that most nearly meets Bereshit Rabbah on its own ground. Bruno's is a logician's answer: primus and secundus are relative terms, and a relative cannot stand without its correlate; with no second day yet in existence there was nothing for a 'first' to be first of, so the day could only be called one. He also reaches, independently, the reason Pseudo-Jonathan gives for the night — that providence made it for rest and not for labour — and draws the hard conclusion the others avoid: nulla dies ex nocte constat ac die, no day is made of night and day, because God divided them and named them separately.
'First' needs a secondDay before nightNight made for rest
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1114 · Liège
It is to be noted here first of all that he did not say, 'And there were made darkness and light, one day.' This was well and prudently observed by the sacred writer. For how can the things God divided be joined together, or make some one thing? Now he divided light and darkness, and called the light Day — day, I say, whole and full, without partnership of darkness. […] For, as has been said already, things separated by God's dividing cannot be associated or make some one thing.
Rupert's chapter heading is the crux in his own words: 'Why it was not said, there were made darkness and night, a first day, but there was made evening and morning, one day.' His first move is Bruno's conclusion arrived at differently — what God divided cannot be added back together into a single thing, so the 'one day' cannot be day-plus-night. Two columns later (PL 167:217D) he gives his own answer to the ordinal: the truly first day is not this one; and at PL 167:1807A, in the books on the Spirit's works, he states it flatly — the writer knowingly refused to write dies primus, because the day that is first by nature is eternal, and this one is first only by number and by the order of creation. Elided in the English at […]: the sentence the Corpus Corporum text prints as 'Bene ergo dictum est: Factae sunt tenebrae et lux dies unus', which contradicts the sentence it follows and should almost certainly read 'Bene ergo non dictum est'. [CHECK the PL plate before translating it either way.]
Day before nightThe true first day is eternal
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1130 · The Paraclete (Nogent-sur-Seine)
'And there was evening and morning, one day.' He here calls 'one day' the whole completion of those works of God — held first in his mind, and afterward completed in the work on the sixth day. And the evening of this whole span of time which he here calls one day, he calls that whole working of God according as it first lay hid in his mind, before it came forth into the light through its effect. And again he names that same working morning, according as, being afterward completed in the work, it showed itself visible. Thus he calls the conception of the divine mind, in the disposing of the work to come, evening; and morning he calls the working out of that conception and the effect of the divine disposition, completed in six days.
Abelard takes the reading Augustine raised and set aside: 'one day' names not the first of the days but the whole of them. His evening is the work as it lay hidden in God's mind, his morning the same work made visible — the pair describing the passage from conception to execution rather than any part of a night. He then allows, fairly, that a reader who prefers to refer the phrase to the first day's work alone may do so, 'nihil impedit'. As in K7 he is the Latin most willing to hold two readings and rank them rather than refute one.
One day = all timeEvening completes a work
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1134 · Paris
And therefore, because the first day had no dawn preceding it — since before the light was created there was full darkness, and as soon as the light appeared over the earth there was full day, and because God's work ought to have begun from what is perfect — therefore Scripture said: 'There was made evening and morning, one day.' For it did not say, 'There was made morning and evening,' but 'There was made,' it says, 'evening and morning, one day.' Because, as we have said, the first day had no morning preceding it, since it took its beginning from full and perfect light; and therefore every dawn belongs to the preceding day, and every day takes its beginning from sunrise. And the natural day is that space of time which, passing from sunrise to sunrise, encloses within itself both night and day; in which — since day naturally precedes night — we call the end of the day evening and the end of the night dawn; and it stands beyond doubt that dawn is always to be referred to the preceding day.
The computist's answer, stated with the technical vocabulary the schools had by then settled: the dies naturalis runs sunrise to sunrise and holds a night and a day inside it; evening is the end of the day and dawn the end of the night; therefore a dawn always belongs to the day before it. The reason evening is named first is not doctrinal at all but a fact about the first day: it had no dawn to be named, because it began in full light. Hugh's Adnotationes on Genesis (PL 175:35A) argue the same in brief and add a proof from the equinox.
Day before nightOne circuit, twenty-four hours
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1140 · Regensburg
'And there was evening and morning, one day.' Evening is the end of the day; morning, however, is the end of the night: which two joined together make twenty-four hours and complete one day. And it is called not first but one day, because the same day is always repeated, as it is written: 'By your ordinance the day continues' (Ps 119:91). During that first three days the night remained wholly dark, because neither moon nor stars lit it. It is to be noted, moreover, that the day begins from light and ends in light: because all the works of God are begun from Christ, who is the true light, and in him all are completed.
By 1140 Augustine's angelic repetition has become a one-clause gloss with a proof text — 'not first but one, because the same day is always repeated' — sitting inside a paragraph of plain computistical arithmetic. The two answers that stand furthest apart in the tradition are here made to agree in a sentence apiece, which is what the twelfth-century handbook does with a contested question. Honorius returns to the verse later in the same work (PL 172:261D) with a wholly different answer: not first but one, because the angelic nature which is called day begins from the eternal day and has no end. [CHECK the work division at PL 172:261 before treating that as a second witness.]
One circuit, twenty-four hoursThe same day repeated
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1170 · Paris
'And there was evening, and after that there was morning.' And so one natural day was completed. For first, with heaven and earth, light was created; and as it set little by little, there was made the evening of the first usual day; and as the same light passed under the earth and came to the rising, there was made morning — that is, the night was ended and the second day began. And so, with the light of the day preceding and the night following being ended, one day came to be.
The textbook settles it: dies unus naturalis, light first and night following, on Bede's travelling light. Nothing of Augustine's day survives in the sentence, and the question 'why not first?' is not raised at all — it has been answered so often that the schools' handbook no longer needs to ask. Comestor does keep one older reading a few lines earlier: the division of light from darkness is also the division of the angels, the standing ones light and the fallen ones darkness.
One circuit, twenty-four hoursDay before night
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 1322–1332 · Paris
And there was evening and morning, one day. He is speaking of the natural day, which is of twenty-four hours and takes in both day and night; and therefore he says, And there was evening and morning, one day. For at evening the artificial day is completed, which is the first part of the natural day; and at the morning of the following day the night is completed, which is the second part of the natural day. And therefore he sets evening over against morning, so as to show the completing of the natural day by naming the boundaries of the artificial day and of the night, which are the parts that make up the natural day.
Bede's twenty-four hours, restated four hundred years later with the mechanism supplied and the theology gone. Bede says one day was completed, of twenty-four hours, and Rabanus copies him; neither explains why the verse should name evening and morning rather than a beginning and an end. Lyra does, and does it with a distinction the schools had made their own: the artificial day is the sunlit part, the natural day is the whole twenty-four hours, and evening and morning are named because each is the terminus of one of the two parts that make the natural day up. Evening ends the artificial day; the following morning ends the night. So the verse is not reporting two events but marking out a measure by its joints. That answer needs no angels, no morning and evening knowledge, and no first day different in kind from the rest, and it is the point at which the Latin bench's oldest question here stops being a theological one.
One circuit, twenty-four hoursEvening completes a workThe day's measure is a creature
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
see every crux on this verse →
The ancient versions all kept the cardinal — ἡμέρα μία, dies unus, yoma chad — and the modern English translations on both benches quietly convert it to the ordinal: the WEB prints 'the first day', Etheridge's targum prints 'the First Day', and Silbermann's Rashi glosses the lemma 'THE FIRST DAY (literally, one day)' in the very note that exists to ask why it is not 'first'. The question the whole crux is made of survives only in the languages nobody now reads it in. Where the two benches do meet, they meet on the grammar: Bereshit Rabbah 3:9 objects that 'one, second, third' is not a proper series, and Bruno of Segni answers exactly that objection with the logic of relatives — first and second are correlatives, and with no second yet in being nothing could be called first. Both halves of that meeting have a head, and it is the same man. Philo of Alexandria, writing in Greek before either bench existed, gives the grammatical argument first: Moses does not even call it first, so that it should not be counted in along with the others. That is Bruno's logic of relatives a thousand years early and Bereshit Rabbah 3:9's objection to the series eleven hundred years early. And he gives a reason neither bench states — day not first but one, because of the monosis of the intelligible world, its solitariness, which has a monadic nature. Monosis is not unity and it is not primacy; it is the condition of having nothing beside you, which is exactly what Rashi means by yachid be-olamo, that God was alone in his world that day because there was not yet a second anything to count with. Three benches read the cardinal as a claim about being alone rather than about position in a series, and the oldest of the three is the one neither of the others knew it had. And they part on the calendar: Ben Zoma derives from yom echad that the day follows the night, while Augustine states in so many words that the days are counted a mane usque in mane.