Genesis: The Bible's First Light Wasn't the Sun

Picture the first morning of the world, and then take the sun out of it. The sky is not blue yet. There is no disc to rise, no shadow with a direction, no heat on a stone. Genesis has already said that darkness was on the face of the deep. Then a sentence happens. God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.

If you grew up with this chapter, you may have slid past that sentence on the way to the sun. The sun is what we mean by light. The chapter does not. The lights of the sky come later, on the fourth day: lights in the expanse, and the greater light to dominate the day. Between those two moments the Bible leaves a gap wide enough to walk into. What was the first light, if the sun was not there to make it?

This episode lives in that gap. It does not close the gap with a single answer. The Talmud, the ancient book of Jewish wisdom, argues on the page. A midrash tells a different clock. The Zohar, the foundational book of Kabbalah, says the light was hidden the way a seed is hidden, which is not the same as gone. Later teachers say you can still meet a thread of it. None of them asks us to picture a face in the brightness. The words are the words.

A light before the sun

Read the verse before anyone explains it.

There is a speaking, and then there is light, and then a seeing that it is good, and then a separation. The verse does not name a source in the sky. It does not describe a body, a hand, or a figure. Ramban, the great medieval commentator, pauses on the verb itself and says that “said,” in this place, denotes will. That is a side note, and only a side note. It is not a teaching about a hidden light. It is a reminder that the chapter tells creation as a willing, not as a collision of things. We leave it there and go back to the puzzle.

On the fourth day the sky receives its lamps.

So the question is older than any sermon. It is the question the Talmud asks out loud. Was light created on the first day? Is it not written that God set them in the firmament of heaven? The page does not give one voice. It gives a dispute, and this article will not sand it down.

Rabbi Elazar’s view is the one the short film follows, and it has to be introduced as his.

A different kind of light. Through it, a person could observe from one end of the world to the other. Not a lamp for a room. A light in which distance does not hide the world from itself. The short says it in ordinary words. The Talmud’s words are the ones above, and they belong to Rabbi Elazar, not to “the Talmud” as if the book had one mouth.

On the same page, the Sages say something else.

These are the same lights. They were created on the first day, and they were not hung until the fourth. On this reading there is no second sun and no secret radiance waiting offstage. There is a making, and then a placing. Day one and day four are one work, finished later.

If you want a single clean answer, this page will disappoint you on purpose. The honest report is that two ways of holding the verses sit side by side. Rabbi Elazar’s way is the one the episode walks, because it still has a light to look for after the sun exists. The Sages’ way keeps the first light and the fourth day’s lights as one act of heaven. You can love the story and still leave both sentences standing. A library that hides the disagreement has already stopped being a library.

Why it was hidden

Stay with Rabbi Elazar for a moment, and do not pretend his next sentences are the Sages’ sentences. He goes on. The Holy One looked at the generation of the Flood and the generation of the Dispersion, saw that their ways were corrupt, and that they might misuse this light for evil, and concealed it. For whom? For the righteous in the future.

The spoken line in the film, that future generations would be corrupt, is a compression of those two generations. The article keeps the names. The Flood. The Dispersion. The hiding has a reason, and the reason is use. A light through which you can see from end to end is a terrible thing in cruel hands. The concealment is protection, and it is also a reservation. The light is not described as destroyed. It is concealed, and the concealment has an address.

The same passage gives the light a moment of joy, in the Talmud’s own image, not as a body we are asked to draw. When the light saw that it had been concealed for the righteous, it rejoiced. Hold that as the book’s picture. We do not add a face to it.

Rashi, the great Bible commentator, hangs a related reading on the verb “separated” in Genesis 1:4.

The wicked were not worthy to use it, so it was set apart for the righteous in the world to come. That is the same destination Rabbi Elazar named, now tied to one word of the verse. Rashi does not stop at that reading. He also gives the plain sense. The research quotes the opening of that sentence, “and according to its plain meaning,” and describes it: light and darkness each received their own domain, day and night. The rest of that Hebrew sentence was not copied, so it is not invented here. Mentioning it matters. A great commentator can say what a word is doing in the story, the separation of day and night, and also say what the story is keeping back. “Separated” can mean the borders of day and night. In the line we quoted in full, “separated” means reserved.

Rashi on the fourth day says when that reservation takes effect, in his reading.

After the primeval light was conserved for the righteous. But during the first seven days of creation, the primeval light and the darkness functioned together. So even inside Rashi’s own comments, the hiding is not a switch thrown at the first sentence. There is a week in which that light still serves, and then a storing. Read him beside the Sages, not instead of them. He is explaining the verses. He is not erasing the other view on the Talmud’s page.

Bereshit Rabbah 3:6 gives another image of why a light like that cannot simply stay in the daytime sky.

It would dim the orb of the sun. Where is it, then? Stored away, designated for the righteous for the future. Here the hiding is almost a courtesy to the sun, and a promise. The first light is too bright to share the day’s work with the lamp that was made for the day. So it is put aside for a people who can bear it. That is a third way of saying “hidden,” beside Rabbi Elazar’s worry about misuse and Rashi’s plain borders of day and night. They rhyme. They are not the same sentence. Let them rhyme.

Thirty-six hours, and the first flame you make yourself

Now a different clock, and it must be worn as one view, not as a correction that swallows the others.

Rabbi Levi, in the name of Rabbi Nezeira, teaches in Bereshit Rabbah 12:6 that the primordial light functioned for thirty-six hours. Twelve on the day before Shabbat. Twelve on the night of Shabbat. Twelve on Shabbat day. The Sefaria English calls the sage Gezeira. The Hebrew reads Nezeira. Either way, the teaching is Rabbi Levi’s report, not a verse, and not the Talmud’s account of the Flood.

When Adam sinned, the teaching says, the Holy One sought to hide the light at once, and accorded deference to Shabbat. The honor of the day held the hiding back. This is not Chagigah’s story of generations not yet born. It is a story about the first Shabbat, and about a light that was allowed to finish the day. If you braid the thirty-six hours into Rabbi Elazar’s concealment as though they were one timeline, you will have made a third text that neither book wrote. Say “one view” when you say thirty-six. Then you can love the view without counterfeiting the page.

What the midrash says happened after that Shabbat is one of the gentlest scenes in this whole library. Two flint stones were prepared. They were struck together. Light came out, and a blessing was said over it. Why, the midrash asks, do we bless the lights of fire at the departure of Shabbat, “who creates the lights of fire”? Because that hour was the beginning of this fire’s creation.

Havdalah, at the end of Shabbat, is this memory in the midrash. A greater light has been stored, and a small flame is blessed. The practice below returns to it.

Centuries later, Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov, in Bnei Yissaschar, reads the Shabbat candles themselves as a glow from the hidden light. He says that some of the earlier rabbis were careful to light thirty-six candles, corresponding to the thirty-six hours that light served Adam before it was hidden. He says this as a report of earlier masters. A work called the Rokeach is named in another place in his book for the thirty-six-candle custom. That work was not opened for this article, so the custom is not laid at the Rokeach’s door. It is Bnei Yissaschar, citing those who came before him.

The same author says the thirty-six lights of Chanukah were instituted corresponding to that first light, and that the radiance of the Chanukah lamp comes from the radiance of the hidden light. One line from Kedushat Levi belongs beside that and then stops. On Chanukah we light thirty-six candles, and the service of below arouses above. The passage around it is heavy with letter-numbers. One line is enough. What below does can awaken what is above. A small flame is not nothing.

A note, so the clocks stay honest. The thirty-six hours, the Shabbat that was honored, the flints, the thirty-six candles: that cluster stands on Bereshit Rabbah 12:6 and on the later books that cite the idea. It is not “the Pesikta” in this article. A later author points to a Pesikta. What was opened and matched is Bereshit Rabbah. Cite the book you can check.

Hidden like a seed, and hidden in the Torah

Where is that light today? The film asks, and then refuses a sentimental answer. The Zohar, the foundational book of Kabbalah, answers in Terumah. A printed page number sometimes attached to this passage was not verified. The citation is the Sefaria reference, 37:414–415.

First, the hiding that matches Rabbi Elazar. That light was hidden and kept for the righteous in the world to come. The Zohar sets a verse beside the hiding: a light is sown for the righteous.

Sown. The verb in the psalm is an agricultural verb. Light is not only stored in a locked room. It is planted. Psalm 97:11 goes on, in the verse itself: radiance for the upright. The Zohar is reading the first half, and the second half is allowed to stand next to it. Uprightness and joy are in the same line as the sown light.

Then Rabbi Yehuda, and this is the sentence the minute-long film is trying to carry.

Had the hiding been total, the world would not stand for a moment. The world is not being asked to live on a memory. It is being asked to live on a seed. A seed is hidden, and a seed is not absent. It makes other seeds and fruit. From that light, the Zohar says, the world is sustained. There is not a day on which something does not come out of it into the world.

And then the most practical clause. Whenever Torah is studied at night, a little thread of this hidden light comes down on the people who are absorbed in the study. Not a floodlight. A thread. The episode’s picture of someone learning by a lamp is trying to show that clause without a beam from the sky, because a beam from the sky starts to look like a body. The clause is about study, at night, and a thin line of the original light. If you do nothing else with this article, do that once. A few verses, after dark, read slowly.

The Baal Shem Tov, as his grandson reports him in Degel Machaneh Ephraim, answers the question “where was it hidden?” with a place you can open. God hid it in the Torah. That is why the righteous of every generation make use of that light: through the Torah. The stories that follow, of seeing from one end of the world to the other, are not told here. The teaching is enough, and it is warm. The book you study is not a substitute for the light. In this report, it is where the light was placed.

The Degel also cites a reading, from the Baal HaTurim, that the words “the light” correspond in their letters to “in the Torah.” That book of the Baal HaTurim was not opened for this article. If you repeat the correspondence, say that the Degel cites it. Do not say we verified it on the Baal HaTurim’s own page.

The Sefat Emet, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Ger, takes the same hiding and refuses to let it become a light that only great people can find.

Where was it hidden? In the Torah. Through Torah and mitzvot a person merits this light. And then the sentence that should be read twice: in truth this light is found everywhere, because it is the life-force of all the worlds. Only it is concealed. Even those called wicked, he says, necessarily have a point of that light. This is not a shrug about harm. It is a refusal to declare any human place empty of the original brightness. Concealed is not the same word as absent. If you are looking at someone and you cannot see the point, the Sefat Emet would rather you suspect your eyes than suspect the absence.

He is reading, as well, a verse in Proverbs. The commandment is a lamp. The teaching is a light. A mitzvah is the smaller flame, the lamp. Torah is called light, the same word as the first day. You do not have to turn that into a system. You can let the verse sit next to his sentence: the way to the hidden light he describes is through the lamp of a commandment and the light of Torah.

Light that comes out of darkness

Genesis 1:5, still on the first day, says there was evening and there was morning, one day. Evening is named first. That order is the verse. It is not yet an interpretation. Any further step has to come from a book.

Ecclesiastes 2:13 says there is a superiority of wisdom over folly, like the superiority of light over darkness. The plain sense is “superior to.” Light is better than darkness, as wisdom is better than folly. A popular reading hears the Hebrew as “the advantage of the light that comes from the darkness,” as if the verse itself taught that light is born out of dark. That hearing is a derash. It is not what this article will attribute to Ecclesiastes. The verse, in the translation checked for this page, is about superiority.

The derash has a real address, and the address is the Zohar. In Tetzaveh, the Zohar says there is no light except the light that issues from darkness, and no true good except what proceeds from evil. When a person enters an evil way and then leaves it, the Holy One is exalted in glory. The context there is why the Torah was given in the desert, a place of lack. The sentence we are allowed to carry is still enormous, and it is hopeful. The light the Zohar is willing to call light is the light that has come through a darkness, and the good it is willing to call good is a good that has come through a turning. Leaving the evil way is not a footnote. It is the glory in the sentence.

The Tanya, in the words of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, says the same hope in the language of return. The one who turns from his wrong makes that wrong into day and light above, when the other side is subdued. “Day” and “light” are the words of Genesis, borrowed for a human turning. This is not permission to romanticize harm. It is a claim about return. What was bent can be made into day. The other side, in his phrase, is subdued, not decorated.

Keep the three in order. Ecclesiastes, in its plain sense, says light is superior to darkness. The Zohar says there is no light except what issues from darkness, and it says this of a person who forsakes an evil way. The Tanya says return makes that wrong into day and light. Together they say: do not worship the dark, and do not despair of it.

How a person tastes it now

Rebbe Nachman, in Likutei Moharan, is wonderfully direct about desire. Anyone who wants to taste the taste of the hidden light must lift the quality of fear up to its root. With what is fear lifted? With judgment. A person should judge and evaluate all his own dealings. By that, all the frights are removed from him.

This is not a mood. It is a practice with an order. The thing you want, a taste of the original light, is tied to what you do with fear. Fear that stays low becomes fright, the kind that runs your day. Fear that is lifted becomes a clear eye on your own deeds. You sit, you look at what you actually did, you judge it yourself, and the teaching says the fright comes off. The hidden light, in this passage, is not grabbed. It is tasted by someone who has stopped lying to himself about his day.

Set that next to the Zohar’s thread and the Sefat Emet’s point of light. The light is sown, so the world is not abandoned. It is in the Torah, so study is a meeting. It is concealed everywhere, so you look for it where the hour is not bright. And the taste of it, Rebbe Nachman says, begins when you look at your own deeds without the fright that usually comes with that looking. Rabbi Elazar’s view is not the only view on the page. The sun of the fourth day is real. The work is to read the dispute, and then to do one small thing the books name.

Tools for life

These are uses of the sources. Where a sentence is ours, it stays in the telling and out of the quotation marks.

The next episode leaves the first week and enters the garden. The light does not actually leave the library. A later episode will say, from another book, that a garment of light was this same hidden light, covered, and not lost.