Judeo-Christian Light And Darkness

Writing 5 Rachna Shah

The Light of Our Life:

An Analysis of Light in Genesis 1 and John 1

Traditionally, light and darkness represent good and evil, but where did these symbolic norms arise from? One source is Judeo-Christian origin stories, scriptures which use these images as metaphors to establish religious creeds for their respective communities. Two particularly significant representations are found in Genesis of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospel of John of the New Testament. The Old Testament and the New Testament both belong to Judeo-Christian thought, but as Christianity separated from Judaism, the latter’s symbols were interpreted in different ways. Thus, while Genesis and John both present light as a divine substance, they

In the fourth day of creation, God re-introduces and reforms light to Earth. The first day’s light is absolute light (from the Hebrew or) and the fourth day’s lights are luminous bodies or light bearers (from the Hebrew maor). These lights are placed in the “vault in the sky”, meaning heaven, a phrase repeated thrice within Gen. 1:14-19, emphasizing the divine source and the divine setting of light. It also conveys a distance between light and the Earth, and thus God and the Earth. When lights are created, man has not yet been created - thus light is not explicitly made or given to man, as in John. Nonetheless, light has already been intentioned to serve many of the purposes that underlie the structure of man’s life. The purpose of light in 1:4 is repeated in 1:14 as “to separate the day from the night”. This iteration is furthered by expansion, where the unit of God’s focus is no longer only each day but also each year. Lights are described as “for seasons and for days and years”, thus aiding man by providing cycles for agriculture and signs for navigation, the basis of early livelihoods and economies. After God forms a greater and lesser light to govern the day and night, he also creates stars. Unlike the greater and lesser light, stars are dispersed, conveying a spreading of the light. As stars were also used for agriculture and navigation, the formation of lights

Nonetheless, light is presented in fundamentally different ways within each text. In Genesis, light operates as a physical guide to creation; in John, it is a moralized embodiment of Jesus, the figure who spiritually guides man toward new life. Light as the basis for life is compared with light as the basis for the reproduction of faith. This contrast is furthered by each text’s depiction of light in comparison to darkness; in Genesis, they are complementary whereas in John 1, the moralization of light and darkness conveys light as morally good and darkness as adversarial to virtue. In Genesis, light is physically separated from darkness and it is created to serve man and to govern the Earth. In John, light shines in the darkness and is given to man. While the meanings and implications of light within each scripture may not completely reconcile, their shared divine origins suggest that man’s path is guided by light, and thus, by