Due Sep 8
Sun, Crops, Life: Daily, Monthly, and Yearly Cycles
Introduction to the Scientific Method (observation and theory) and to Naked Eye Astronomy. The apparent motions of the Sun and Moon. The phases of the Moon. Megalithic temple design: Newgrange and Stonehenge.
Astronomy Lesson
- Carl Sagan, “Science as a Way of Thinking”: link.
- Openstax Astronomy (pdf | online), Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.1.
- Fabian Patterns In the Sky, selections: link.
Arts Assignment: Two Creation Stories
Click here for the story of creation from the Hebrew Bible and the Eskimo story of Sun Sister Moon Brother. (Trigger warning: the latter involves both a rape and an act of self-mutilation.) Then write a short (1-2 ¶) response to ONE of the following prompts:
- In the Genesis story of creation, God creates “day” and “night” long before creating the sun. How might we make sense of this?
- The text of Genesis repeatedly uses the verb “divide” to describe certain stages in the seven-day creation. What does this tell us about the ancient Hebrews’ conception of the heavens and of creation more generally?
- Use the apparent motion of the sun and moon in the arctic sky (described on p29 of Patterns in the Sky) to better explain the myth of Sun Sister Moon Brother.
- The bloody action of Sun Sister Moon Brother invites comparison to the Greek myth of Cronus, the Titan who ate his children in a vain attempt to stave off the prophecy of a son (Zeus) who would depose him—and offers a marked contrast to the seven-day creation in the Hebrew Bible. What’s at stake in these differing conceptions of the world’s origins?
Post your response below by clicking “Reply” under the appropriate heading. (Note: for best results, include two ¶ breaks between your ¶s.)
Existence of Night and Day before the Sun’s Creation
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In the story of creation God creates light and darkness, which he then names day and night respectively, this is all before the sun and the moon were created. There simply isn’t a rational explanation for this, however I wish to offer an alternative one to define this confusion. Humans of the old days were dominated by superstition and often applied abstract concepts to things they couldn’t understand. Life was dangerous back then too, night and darkness, are primordial fears etched across humanity so readily that children teach themselves to fear it. Ultimately night and darkness represent a great unknown amongst mankind, whereas light or day is known and safe. To the man who wrote the book of genesis light and darkness were their entire lives; known and unknown, good and evil. It was so much more than just the presence or absence of the sun.
The light and darkness that were being created on the first day had nothing to do with day or night, but were the concepts of good and evil themselves. Two juxtaposing ideas that are yin and yang, balancing each other together. But why was it written in such a convoluted way? I often see the bible as metaphors, and not God’s honest truth. Blasphemy!? It is written by man after all, therefore it isn’t perfect, and ultimately is contaminated with the; prides, prejudices, and analogies that we humans use to try to understand the divine will of God. So to summarize I believe that “day” and “night” were simply concepts used in this passage to represent the larger creation of the universe and good and evil; rather than actually being indicative of the passage of time.
– Cosmic-visions-Class-1-Writing-2.pdf
Prompt 4: Differing views on the conception of the world’s origins
Although the two stories regarding the world’s conceptions are vastly different, I believe that the “stakes” are not as visible as it may seem. With centuries passing, many believers have simply accepted the fact of their story on world creation, whether that be the Hebrew’s version or the Eskimo’s version. In the modern world, religion and belief no longer play as large a part in people’s lives. With the rise of science, it is easy for people to differentiate that religions are simply beliefs, and that science contains more concrete evidence and proof. However, although religion may not be as important, stories such as the creation of the world could still play a part in a small way. An american indian may look up at the sky and be reminded of the bloody fight between siblings, and a christian may see an animal and think of god’s creations for them.
This difference in story also reminds me of a study done a long time ago about the association between languages spoken and item perception. In romance languages, such as Spanish, items are labeled with either a “masculine” or “feminine” article. This causes Spanish speakers to associate items such as keys, which use a feminine article, to be more feminine overall, compared to English speakers, who would see the item as “neutral”. Although it may not seem like much, subtle changes in languages and in this case, stories on the creation of the world, can shape a person’s perception of life without them noticing.
Prompt 1: As human beings, we’re constantly seeking ways to deepen our knowledge and find explanations for what is beyond our comprehension. At the time of writing, the author of the Genesis story of creation had limited knowledge, and so I don’t think we can make sense of why it was written as it was.
To me, it appears to be about balance; for everything there is the opposite, yin and yang. We see this balance as we read about the creation of land and sea, darkness and light, heaven and earth, sun and moon, male and female. Something had to differentiate “day” from “night” and so the “sun” and the “moon” were introduced. The story tells us these “lights”, were signs for seasons, days, and years, with the sun ruling the day, and the moon the night. They do just that; they determine when we sleep and rise, when we reap and sow, when the tide comes in and goes out. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west and depending on where you are in the world, that path determines daily activity. Some native Americans consider sunwise motion sacred, and so it determines their movement in sacred spaces. For the Inuit at Igloolik, Canada, the extended period of darkness is associated with poor hunting and dangerous travel, while the return of the sun in mid-January is a cause for celebration and a time for making long-term weather forecasts. Over time, and for many deep-rooted reasons, many human beings have attributed positive connotations to that which is “light”, and negative connotations to that which is “dark”. I don’t believe this was the intent here, nor do I believe it is accurate. Rather, we simply can’t have one without the other and they both serve a critical purpose in our lives and the life of the planet.
– W1_Sun-Moon-Cosmic-Visions.pdf
Genesis gives us day and night on the first day and holds back the sun until the fourth, and that only looks like a mistake if we assume the sun is what makes a day. The chapter is saying something stranger: time comes before the thing that measures it. What God makes on the first day is not really light to see by but a rhythm, evening and morning, back and forth in the dark. Three days pass that way, counted with nothing to count them by. Only later does anything appear in the sky that could be read.
That is why the sun and moon get so little credit when they finally show up. They are never named. They are just the greater light and the lesser light, set in the sky to divide, to rule, and to mark seasons and days and years. That is a job for a tool. A clock face does not create the hour; it shows an hour that was already passing. Put the sun on day one and it becomes the source of morning, the thing without which there is no time at all. Put it on day four and it becomes a dial fitted to a clock that was already running, a lamp hung in a house that was lit before anyone thought to light it.
The shape of the chapter backs this up. The first three days divide: light from darkness, waters from waters, sea from dry land, opening empty rooms. The last three days fill them: lights in the sky, fish in the water, birds in the air, animals on the ground, and man at the end. Day one makes the room that day four furnishes. So the sun does not arrive late. It arrives as a tenant, in a world whose hours it did not invent and cannot stop. And the stars, which people once read before going to war, get four words at the end of a sentence: he made the stars also.
“Day” and “night” are created before the sun in Genesis. Personally, I make sense of this by putting day and night into the perspectives of light and darkness. Light and darkness, as concepts, rather than physical, visible light, are often associated with good and evil. We can interpret day and night as light and darkness, good and evil. Science is not necessarily at the forefront. Part of religion is faith, and the author intends that the reader has trust in the story of creation instead of thinking analytically or logically. The sun does not seem to be super central to Christianity as it is to some other religions. In this case, the sun controls day and night, but there is not emphasis as the sun as a source or creator — that is a role for God alone. I think this point of view helps us to understand why day and night are
God’s creation of light and darkness may mirror the path that humans’ own minds took when understanding the world we live in. Animals have no understanding of what the sun and moon are, they just understand when to go out (day) and when to sleep (night). As humans evolved, we attributed more wealth to each phase of the day because of the variety of actions we took at those times. As we began to farm, we began to look into the stars as a way to pass the time. Then, we understood the movements and timings of the sun and moon as corresponding to days/nights. Perhaps he created these solar bodies to satisfy our curiosity.
The other possibility is that day/night are concepts as a whole. It’s possible that the idea of a day/night was something rationalized by god himself, rather than anything else. So, as a convenience, he created the two bodies for the plants to understand when the two times of day were.
Prompt 1:
I believe it’s hard to rationally explain why there is day and night without the sun because science has made us correlate these two things. I think the creation of day and night more speaks to the power of God and his ability to create from a metaphorical sense. I’ve often heard the phrase “God is light” I think this idea of “day” initially stems from the presence of God.
Now shifting the focus to how we might make sense of the sun being created on day 4 rather than day 1, I think this distinction is important. The sun does not necessarily have to be the source of “day” in the creation story. Instead, the sun, moon, and stars are later given the role of governing and marking the day and night. Genesis describes the lights as being created to “divide the day from the night” and to mark “seasons, and for days, and years.” This suggests that day and night already exist as part of God’s creation before the sun is introduced as a physical way of regulating them. From this perspective, the story may be less focused on giving a scientific explanation of how daylight works and more focused on establishing an order to creation. The fact that God creates light first and the celestial bodies later could emphasize that God’s power exists independently of the physical objects we associate with light. Therefore, I think the sun being created on the fourth day can be understood as another example of the story presenting creation through a theological or metaphorical framework rather than a scientific one.
Prompt 1:
One way to make sense of this sequence is to understand “day and night” and the sun as two related but distinct concepts. In Genesis, God first creates light and separates it from darkness, naming the light “day” and the darkness “night.” Day and night therefore represent two contrasting states within the order of creation. The creation of Day and Night establishes a fundamental rhythm: light and darkness, activity and rest, and the passage of time. At least that’s what I think the author or the early people had observed from their daily pattern, so the author records it in Genesis.
The sun, created later, performs a more specific function within this already established order. It does not create the distinction between light and darkness; instead, it governs the day and serves as a visible sign by which living beings can recognize and measure the passage of time. Together with the moon and stars, it also marks days, years, and seasons. Seasons, in turn, influence the natural world and the organization of human societies. Therefore, the order of creation may suggest that the sun is not the ultimate source of day and light. God creates the two states independently and then assigns the sun the role of governing and signaling them. That’s maybe how early people thought about nature as well as their daily patterns.
Prompt 4: What’s at stake in these differing conceptions of the world’s origins? These different stories represent and shine a light into the people’s minds and beliefs when creating them. It taught people those beliefs so, the stake is knowledge and in turn, livelihoods. There are many depictions throughout the many thousands of recorded years on this earth that have connected the cosmos to human nature.
For the Cronus example, it shows self preservation. Cronus tries to prevent his undoing by horrifically eating his children. Zeus, which is the ruler of the heavens, ends up defeating him. This division and opposition between this extremely human thing of wanting to stay alive and in power and the heavens, is shown clearly (heavens wins). From very early on the earth and the heavens had a distinction.
Another bloody and gruesome action of the Sister Sun and Brother Moon is told. The Sister and Brother break this inherent divide between Heaven and Earth by becoming the Sun and Moon after displaying a cruel depiction on the reality of the horrors of humans. This could blur the lines between the Heaven and Earth while shining light that in the end, with wrongdoings and being wronged, you reach the heavens and succumb to the cosmos/return the the “star stuff” we are made up of, making the human experience seem small. It could also potentially strengthen the division of the realms by showing that you need to cross them. There is never really a clear answer.
This reminds me of the story of Huitzilopochtli (god of war and sun), who defends his mother, Coatlicue, by decapitating his sister, Coyolxauhqui. This story is in a way a direct opposite of the Sister Sun Brother Moon story. There is a stone which depicts the sister, Coyolxauhqui, at the base of the Temple Mayor, representing where she was thrown off and tossed down the mountain of the serpent to her death. This temple is at the center of Tenochtitlan both physically and spiritually. At the top of this temple, the sun rises behind the “light god” during the dry season, and the “rain god” during the wet season. This plus the fact that it’s closer to the heavens at the top, shows how you can be thrown out of the heavens when committing a heinous act. So, instead of joining the heavens like Sister Sun and Brother Moon, it is the exact opposite.
The many perspectives of the Earth and Heavens shows many different things about the human mind. It cannot fully be discussed in this little comment but the stake of understanding the human mind through these stories is definitely one of them.
I think “day” and “night” in Genesis do not have to mean exactly the same thing as we understand them today. In the story, God first creates light and darkness and separates them into day and night. The sun is created later, so maybe the idea of day and night is more about creating order in the world, instead of only describing how sunlight works. I also think this story was written to explain the world in a symbolic way, not as a scientific explanation. For ancient people, light and darkness were very important parts of daily life, so separating them could represent the beginning of structure and order. The sun was then created later as something that helps control and mark the cycle of day and night.
Prompt 1: Personally, when I read the Genesis story, I felt that it was a metaphor of how life is in general. Between the time God established day and night, Firmament, Earth, Dry land, the Seas etc. were made before the sun and moon were present. These parts of nature were built and it did not change, but the source of light that was then created – sunlight and moonlight – changes the way we perceive them, just like how we perceive things everyday.
Taking sailing for example. Imagine you are on a boat, in the sea traveling. During the daylight, you view the sea as this calm, perhaps fun, part of the travel experience. You see dolphins, and all sorts of fish. The sea, is predictable. However, when night falls, you might start getting scared. The light forecasted hides you from seeing what is in the water, and while part of you still admires the environment, a part of you starts being scared. At night, seas are associated with storms, and boats getting overboarded. Though it is the same sea, the cast and angle of light provides a different perspective and feeling. The sun and moon, and the time it takes to get from daylight to moonlight, to me, feels like a metaphor in how we view situations. At a certain point of time, maybe we can view a situation in a certain angle, but overtime, maybe these certain aspects of a situation are covered up, or revealed; all directly proportional to the cycle of the sun, moon, and how we view the world is perceived during the presence of these light sources.
In Genesis, day and night exist before the sun is created. On the first day, God separates light from darkness and calls them day and night, but the sun and moon are not created until the fourth day. This can seem confusing at first because we usually think of the sun as what causes day. However, the story seems to show that light, darkness, and the cycle of day and night come from God first, rather than from the sun itself.
When the sun and moon are created later, their purpose is to mark days, seasons, and years. This makes them seem more like tools for measuring time instead of being the source of time. In my opinion, this also makes an important point about God’s power in the story. The sun may control how people experience day and night, but Genesis shows that it is still only part of creation and not the reason that day and night exist in the first place.
Creation by Means of “Dividing”
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The repetition of the verb “divide” in Genesis tells us that ancient Hebrews’ may have conceived of the whole universe as existing prior to God, just in an undefined form. God divided light from darkness, day from night, and heaven from Earth. God “divided” All the largest pieces of the universe before going on to “create” creatures, plants, and humans. As this creation story is a way of explaining Earth’s existence, ancient Hebrews’ may have found more logical sense in understanding God’s largest creations as acts of sorting through preexisting cosmic material, rather than a true summoning out of nothing. I believe this makes sense because even with our contemporary scientific knowledge, it is still difficult to imagine creating something out of pure nothing. Pure nothing itself is difficult to understand; anechoic chambers and sensory deprivation tanks try to re-create the sensation of nothing, but it is not a sensation humans can really experience. Granting God the creativity to invent birds and trees is a lot more digestible than trying to imagine a being intelligent enough to shape an entire planet, or plane of existence. I think it is also noteworthy that studying this specific excerpt from the King James translation of Genesis assumes that the text was both passed down and translated accurately. “Divide” might not even be the truest interpretation of the ancient Hebrew text, and other translations might suggest different things about ancient peoples’ conceptions of creation.
Based on the excerpt from Genesis, the repeated use of the verb “divide” highlights the ancient Hebrews’ distinction between what is considered “good” and, by implication, what is bad. This contrast is reinforced by the recurring phrase, “and God saw that it was good.” Through this imagery of division, the Hebrews indicated that God created the universe with an inherent distinction between right and wrong, light and darkness.
I do find it interesting, though, that the words “bad” or “evil” are never explicitly stated in the passage, which could be an indication that my assumption is not entirely accurate. If light, day, and sea are “good” by God’s assertion, but darkness and night are not inherently bad, then this leaves open the possibility that the distinction between light and dark, and this division created in the text, is not moral, but rather something deeper.
I’m a firm believer that humans find comfort in division. The simplification of defined “lights” and “darks” adds order and understanding to a universe so often defined by the opposite. I find this perfectly described in the text of Genesis, as the verb “divide” is consistently used throughout the seven-day creation. Religion, in nearly all forms, is an attempt to understand a world defined by randomness, and the use of division is a clear example of this.
I would be remiss not to clarify that I don’t particularly attach a negative connotation to the concept of darkness. It’s simply the inverse of light, a differing perspective that’s necessary for the definition of each. I’d like to call back to where God divided the day and the night. Day and night, followed by other definitions of time like years and days, offered a way to organize tasks and importance. Farming was for the day, sleeping for the night. Humans crave instruction, a path to follow that we know is right in order to live a “fruitful” life. In Genesis, these consistent divisions create designated roles for each side of life: day vs. night, sea vs. land, whales vs. fowl. Division is how we survive, despite our many attempts to reject it.
Prompt 2:
The repeated use of “divide” tells us the ancient Hebrews thought of creation as separation instead of something that manufactures something completely new. We see that God doesn’t make the world from absolutely nothing. A dark, formless deep space is already there, and what God does is split it into parts. These parts are light from darkness, waters above from waters below, and dry land from sea. Each division gets a specific name attached so day, night, heaven, and earth become distinct categories from an originally uniform mass. So in these explanations, creation means bringing order to what already exists, rather than creating the Earth from nothing or beginning creation by bringing forth light.
This in turn shapes how the heavens get imagined in our minds. The firmament is a solid barrier holding back an ocean above it, which explains why the flood later works by opening it up. The sky has a structural reason, with it keeping chaos on the other side. The same logic runs through the rest of the chapter with plants and animals made “after his kind,” each fixed in its own category. Order isn’t the natural state of things here but rather it’s imposed and held in place, which makes the everyday steadiness of the sky look less like a given and more like something being actively maintained by someone else.
From the passages of Genesis 1:1-2:4, the verb “divide” is used five times: twice to divide the light from the darkness, twice to divide “the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament,” and once to divide the day and the night. The two passages relating to lightness and darkness seem to indicate that the ancient Hebrew believed in an inherent distinction between right and wrong and that distinction was put in place by an all-powerful supreme being (God), in line with the Old Testament’s more rules-based approach to faith. The division of day and night also indicates this rigidity (in days as well as seasons and years). Additionally, the timeline of creation marked by divisions indicates that the ancient Hebrew had a concept of progression, that certain conceptual processes needed to occur before other ones could take place. For example, the planet Earth must be created before water and vegetation could be added, and animals must be created before humans could be.
The discussion of the “firmament” in the two passages about the waters and about the day and night cycle is made a little clearer with the Bible’s NRSVue translation, which uses the word “dome” for this purpose. It can thus be noted that the ancient Hebrew would likely have followed a geocentric model similar to one with a celestial sphere, as stated in Genesis 1:14-15. The lights governing the day and night are described as “in the firmament of the heavens,” similar to how some Greeks viewed the celestial sphere as a physical material with stars fixed like jewels. The use of the verb “divide” along with clear dividing lines in these passages in Genesis implies that the ancient Hebrew observed an apparent order in the universe through the movement of the stars and planets, and that this perception of order was integral to the practice of their faith and its rigidity.
God divided the concept of day and sun, and it can be perceived that the sun is the ruler of the light and day rather than having day be reliant only on the sun. God said, “Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.” This sentence shows us that only God saw light in that moment. It could be that what he was creating had light that only he saw, or that the idea of what he saw he called light, but it was not light that our human eyes could see. So, he created everything as perceived by his eyes and what he saw, thought, and felt, and then added the sun so that humans and “beasts” could see light. He also says that the light he saw was good, which could suggest a pure form of light that humans cannot fully perceive. As there was no concept of evil or negativity in the world yet, light, darkness, day, and night may not (probably) have carried the same meanings that humans later gave them. The sun, then, does not necessarily create light itself, but instead becomes the visible ruler of the light and day that God had already created.
Genesis repeats “divide” at every key step like light/dark, waters above/below the firmament, day/night. This tells us that creation isn’t just making something out of nothing, instead it starts from a formless watery chaos that’s already there and God’s role is to separate it into order.
Additionally, each division is followed by “and God saw that it was good,” so goodness seems tied to things being properly separated rather than mixed together. That idea shows up again in the Israelite law like clean/unclean, holy/unholy, Sabbath/workday. So this division based idea sets the template for how this culture thinks about order overall.
The text of Genesis tells us the world was created in seven days. During this creation God divided Heaven from the Earth. He created a physical place for humans and animals and a spiritual heaven for the souls. The Hebrews believed this division was created to separate the passed on souls from physical human beings. Souls are pure, divine, and free from sin, while physical humans possess the ability to sin and do evil. The separation of Heaven and Earth was created to keep a division between all that is good and all that is evil. This division though is not necessarily a negative. The division of Heaven and Earth keeps a balance of the most pure souls together and humans who are more likely to sin together.
Insight from Fabian into Sun Sister Moon Brother
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The apparent motion of the Sun and Moon in the arctic sky can be seen metaphorically in the story of Sun Sister and Moon Brother. The sister embodies the sun as she flees her brother who embodies the moon, their constant chase reflecting how the two move through the sky without ever meeting. In the Arctic, the sun’s light is particularly significant as it’s seen to circle the sky without setting during the summer and disappears below the horizon for weeks during the winter.
Metaphorically, the sister’s disappearance during winter could represent her escaping her brother, an unmistakingly positive circumstance (for her). However, her absence has consequences on the world around her. Without her singing and warmth in the village, they are left sorrowful. Likewise, the arctic is left in “Great Darkness”, a time associated with danger and poor hunting. So, she returns for the good of those in her life. Only, after some time she becomes exhausted from the chase from her brother, seeking refuge beneath the horizon where she recharges before bringing light back into her village, and the arctic.
The Sun Sister Moon Brother fable plainly establishes the sun as a symbol of goodness and purity and the moon as a symbol of evil and corruption. The sister, who lives in the church, or “singing house,” of her town, is initially associated with purity and innocence. That purity is violated when her brother assaults her. When the siblings are eventually lifted into the sky, the sister becomes the sun while her brother becomes the moon, extending their moral opposition into the natural world. The story also presents the moon as less powerful than the sun: its light is dimmer, and the full moon does not appear in full as consistently as the sun. The contrast between the siblings therefore becomes a larger contrast between light and darkness, safety and danger, and good and evil. The excerpt from Patterns of the Sky, however, complicates this simple opposition by explaining the sun and moon in Arctic environment. Within the Arctic Circle, periods of continuous darkness and continuous daylight make the presence or absence of the sun especially significant. The “Great Darkness” is portrayed as a period of fear and uncertainty, particularly because darkness can intensify the difficulties of survival. When the sun finally reemerges, its return is met with celebration and represents renewal, security, and the beginning of a new period. In this context, light and darkness are not merely visual differences; they carry emotional and cultural meanings shaped by the Arctic environment.
This Arctic phenomenon ultimately provides a deeper explanation for the symbolism of Sun Sister Moon Brother. The sister’s transformation into the sun does more than identify her as morally “good,” just as the brother’s transformation into the moon does more than label him “evil.” In a place where sunlight can disappear for an extended period and its return can signal relief, renewal, and survival, the sun naturally becomes associated with life and hope, while darkness can represent fear, danger, and uncertainty. The fable transforms these environmental realities into a moral story: the opposition between the sister and brother mirrors the Arctic opposition between prolonged light and darkness. Viewed this way, the story’s symbolism is not arbitrary; it reflects how the extreme Arctic cycle could shape cultural understandings of the sun, moon, goodness, and danger.
The astronomical phenomenon of the Arctic Circle can be seen as a narrative of pursuit between the Sun Sister and Moon Brother story. In the myth, the sister and brother are lifted into the sky where they continue their relentless chase, which mirrors the visual reality of an Arctic observer who sees the sun and moon “move in flat planes around the sky”. The cultural practices surrounding the Arctic’s “Great Darkness,” a period of darkness when the sun doesn’t rise, are also reflected in the myth as the sister goes into hiding to escape her brother. Additionally, a direct parallel to the “new fire ceremonies” could be interpreted as when the lamps of the house are extinguished and relighted, similar to how the Inuit do the same to celebrate the return of sunlight. Finally, the sister’s habit of singing about her brother whenever the “new moon first appears” aligns with the tradition of making weather forecasts by observing the sun’s position relative to the first new moon of the year.
In the Eskimo myth, the sister represents the sun and the brother represents the moon. The sister flees her brother by running about the room and the brother pursues her but never catches her. They are then “lifted up” to “continue their course in the sky” which represents perpetual circling, akin to how the sun traces the sky in horizontal motions near the Arctic. Both the brother and the sister are doomed to loop around the horizon forever. The story uses the incest relationship between the brother and the sister as the moral reasoning for why the sun and moon are rarely seen together.
When the the brother is chasing his sister, he falls and extinguishes his light while the sister has a bright piece of wood. The extinguished torch in the story is meant to explain why the moon’s glow is dim compared to the sun. The myth uses a moral justification for the physical effect seen in the sky, and uses creative fictional elements to explain these phenomenon
Contrasting the Genesis Story with Sun Sister Moon Brother
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The story of Sun Sister Moon Brother and the Greek myth of Cronus both depict the world as arising from or being explained by a significant sin: Cronus’ filicide and the moon brother’s violation of his sister. In contrast, the story of seven-day creation in the Hebrew Bible sees the world made from benevolence and peace. Differing conceptions, conflict versus intention as the root of our world’s origin, beg the question of whether strife is an essential part of humanity, embedded in our origins, or a twisted path we took on our own.
The Sun Sister Moon Brother myth creates a background story for the sun and moon as their own agents of will/people. In the Hebrew Bible, they are things that emit light and are created from God, not beings of their own. The Eskimo myth also insinuates that the origin of the sun and moon come from the Earth, whereas God is a mythical being separate and above the Earth as a whole. There’s also notably a lot of violence and treachery within the Eskimo myth, as if the act itself was so awful that it is not of the Earth and places a more negative perspective on the sun and moon. The Bible is more positive, simply stating that light was needed and therefore it was created.
These differing conceptions create entirely different foundations for understanding and viewing the sky. The Eskimo people regard the sun and moon as previous Earthly beings, tied to each other and the songs that tell the story. The Hebrew Bible regards them as producers of light that originated from God and were never directly tied to the Earth. The differences in connection and hierarchy create entirely different relationships for people in each culture. People that relate to the Bible may feel dependent on the sun and moon for light whereas th Eskimo people view them as previous beings with a traumatic reason for why they are in the sky.
The text of Genesis repeatedly uses the verb “divide” to describe certain stages in the seven-day creation. What does this tell us about the ancient Hebrews’ conception of the heavens and of creation more generally?
The verb divide tells us that the Hebrew’s conception of the heavens is that there is always divide and there will always be tension between two sides. It shows that Hebrews believed that there will and always be division in the world and in living life. There is sun for the day and the dark for night, showing the natural implication of division in perceiving and experiencing the world. There is division in every part of society, which therefore gives structure and governance. The natural order in the world is kept by the structure and governance, which is therefore created by the natural divisions that god created, as mentioned in Genesis.
Prompt 2#
In the opening chapter of Genesis, “divide” or “separate” is the main verb for the act of creation, and it should be noted how much work is done with this word in the chapter, and not by creating out of nothingness. First of all, God separates the light from the darkness, and after this, the waters above the firmament from the waters below. Also, He is said to have created lights “to divide the day from the night” and “to divide the light from the darkness.” It is important that at the time of these acts of separating, there is already an existing earth, “without form, and void,” covered with darkness and water. Thus, no matter how the biblical story of creation sounds, in reality, God’s initial actions deal with a chaotic mass which needs to be sorted into several categories called Day and Night, Heaven and Earth, Seas.
It may be supposed that for the ancient Hebrews, order on the cosmic scale was not about origins but about boundary making and classification. The heavens in their imagination are represented architecturally, there must be the firmament, that is, a construction built to prevent the flood caused by the cosmic
Honestly, it’s one of those details that trips people up if you read Genesis like it’s supposed to be a science textbook, but makes more sense once you realize that’s not what it’s doing. Light and darkness get separated on day one, and the sun or moon don’t show up until day four so either the text isn’t worried about physical causation the way we are, or “light” here isn’t really about the sun at all. The sun and moon get introduced later almost as accessories, things placed in the sky to mark time and seasons rather than as the actual source of light itself.
There’s also a reading that this is a subtle jab at the culture around it: a lot of ancient Near Eastern religions worshipped the sun and moon as gods. By having God create day and night before the sun even exists, Genesis is basically saying “these aren’t divine beings, they’re just objects God made later, like furniture.” So the weird sequencing might not be a mistake at all. but instead, it might be the point.
Prompt 2:
I think the repeated use of the word “divide” in Genesis shows that creation is less of making something out of nothing but more like bringing order to the chaotic world. God divides light from darkness then separates waters above from the waters below by creating firmanent. Later appoints the sun and moon to distinguish between day and night. The separation made the world intelligible and habitable.
This also reveals the view of Hebrews about the heavens. It says a solid firmament that holds back celestial waters above the sky while separating them from waters below on Earth. This conception of the universe being structured through a series of divisions rather than a conflict of gods and forces. Creation is therfore portayed as the establishemnt of harmony and order, where each part of the cosmos has a function.