Bereshit Rabbah

English

Rabbi Shimon ben Yehotzadak asked Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥman, saying to him: ‘Since I have about you that you are a master of aggada, [I ask you:] from what was the light created?’ He said to him: ‘It [the verse] teaches that the Holy One blessed be He wrapped himself in it like a garment, and the aura of its radiance shone from the end of the world to its end.’ He said it to him in a whisper. He said to him: ‘It is an explicit verse: “Wrapped in light as if with a garment” (Psalms 104:2), and you say it to me in a whisper? This is bewildering.’ He said to him: ‘Just as I heard it in a whisper, so I said it to you in a whisper.’ Rabbi Berekhya said: Had Rabbi Yitzḥak not expounded this in public, it would not have been possible to say it. Beforehand, what would they say? Rabbi Berekhya said in the name of Rabbi Yitzḥak: It is from the site of the Temple that the light was created. That is what is written: “And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the direction of the east…[and the earth shone with His glory]” (Ezekiel 43:2). And his glory is nothing other than the Temple, just as it says: “Throne of glory, exalted from the first, the place of our Temple…” (Jeremiah 17:12).

The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022 · sefaria-midrash-rabbah

Hebrew / Aramaic

Bereshit Rabbah 3:4 (Vilna numbering) · cc-by-sa

Notes

The question of this crux asked in the rabbinic idiom — not what the light was but what it was made from — and answered in a whisper. R. Shmuel bar Naḥman says the Holy One wrapped himself in it like a garment and the radiance shone from one end of the world to the other, and he says it under his breath even though Ps 104:2 says it outright; when challenged he answers only that he heard it whispered and so passes it on whispered. Then a second answer that no Latin witness could have imagined: R. Berekhya in the name of R. Yitzḥak, that the light was created from the site of the Temple. The Latin bench asks where the light shone (Bede: in the upper parts of the earth, where the sun's daylight falls now); this bench asks where it came from, and answers with a place in Jerusalem.

Threads

• ← echoes · Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer
  The garment of Ps 104:2, no longer whispered: Bereshit Rabbah has the Holy One wrap himself in the light like a garment; Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer takes the next clause of the same verse — 'who stretches out the heavens like a curtain' — and makes the heavens out of that light.
• → parallel · Bereshit Rabbah
  Two sections of one compilation asking the crux from opposite ends: 3:4 asks what the light was made from and answers with God's garment and the site of the Temple; 3:6 asks where it is now and answers that it was stored away for the righteous.
• ← parallel · Bede
  The same question — where — and two answers that could not be further apart. Bede: in the upper parts of the earth, the parts the sun's daylight now falls on, and he defends it with the divers who let oil from their mouths. R. Berekhya in the name of R. Yitzḥak: the light was created from the site of the Temple, proved from Ezek 43:2 and Jer 17:12.
• ← parallel · Philo of Alexandria
  The same question, asked in the same terms, with two answers that are structurally identical and materially unrelated. Bereshit Rabbah 3:4: from what was the light created? R. Shimon says the Holy One wrapped himself in it like a garment and the splendour of his majesty shone from one end of the world to the other. Philo: the intelligible light is an image of the divine Reason, a supercelestial star and the spring of the perceptible stars. Both make the first light an overflow from God rather than a creature standing on its own, and both make the visible lights derivative from it. Neither can have read the other.