Bereshit Rabbah

English

Rabbi Elazar said: The Holy One blessed be He never associates His name with the bad, but only with the good. “God called the light, Day and to the darkness God called night” is not written here, but rather, “to the darkness He called night.”

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

Hebrew / Aramaic

Bereshit Rabbah 3:6, R. Elazar on the withheld name (Vilna numbering) · cc-by-sa

Notes

Split out of `br-3-6b` at Phase 6, and it should always have stood alone: this is the single rabbinic argument that the Latin bench matches technique for technique, and it was buried at the end of a seven-tradent card. R. Elazar reads a silence in the syntax. It is not written 'and to the darkness GOD called night' but 'and to the darkness he called night' — the divine name is present at the naming of the day and absent at the naming of the night, and the Holy One never joins his name to the bad but only to the good. Augustine notices the mirror-image silence in the Latin at Civ. XI.20 — 'and God saw that it was good' stands before the division on day one and after it on day four — and draws the same conclusion, that the placing is deliberate lest both should be called good when one of them was evil. Neither could have read the other. That is the star thread of this crux (t-k9-01) and it now points at the argument itself rather than at the block that contained it.

Threads

• ← parallel · Augustine
  The star thread of this crux, and both benches reach it by reading a silence in the syntax. Augustine: on day one 'and God saw that it was good' is placed before the division and not after it, 'lest he should seem to have borne the testimony of his approval to such darkness along with the light' — and on day four, where the darkness is blameless, it is placed after. R. Elazar: 'the Holy One never joins his name to the bad but only to the good, for it is not written and to the darkness GOD called night, but and to the darkness he called night.' One argues from where a clause of approval stands, the other from where the divine name is dropped, at consecutive verses, with no contact of any kind.
• ← parallel · Hugh of St Victor
  'He divided by judgement, and by merit he named' and R. Elazar's 'the Holy One never joins his name to the bad but only to the good' are the same doctrine of naming: what a thing is called follows what it deserves, and the naming is therefore a second act after the judging, not a label. Hugh gets it from the order divisit … vocavit, R. Elazar from a missing subject in the second half of the verse.