(Gn 1:18). This is what he had already said, the beginning ofday and the begin
Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 1 39 should take the starting point for our count from the sixteenth or fifteenth day, and not from the first.55 Nor should the point influence you that the luminary that was made had to be made in its complete state. I mean to say, it is complete every day, but its completeness is not seen by us human beings except when it is oppo site the sun. Since even when it is in conjunction with the sun, though it seems to be reduced to almost nothing, because it is under it, still even then it is full, because it is being illuminated on the other side, and this cannot be seen by those who are underneath, that is, by the inhabitants of the earth. It is not possible to demonstrate this in a few words, but it calls for subtle explanations, and needs to be illustrated by visible diagrams and models.
Making and placing the lamps are the same thingfor God
41 . And God placed them in the solid structure of heaven, in order to shine upon the earth (Gn 1:17). How is it that he said, Let them be made in the solid structure, and that he now says God made lamps and placed them in the solid structure, as though they had been made outside and then placed there later, when it had already been said that they should be made there? Or is this simply indicating yet again and again that God does not make in the way human beings do, but that the story is told in the only way it could be by human beings; that is to say, that with us "he made" is one thing and "he placed" another, but with God they are identical, because he places by making and makes by placing?
The explanation of "the beginning " ofday, etc.
42. And let them preside overday and night and divide between day and night (Gn 1:18). This is what he had already said, the beginning ofday and the begin ning ofnight, which he here explains by saying let them preside over day and night. So we should understand that "beginning" as meaning "pre-eminence," because in the day there is nothing of all visible things more excellent than the sun, and nothing in the night more so than the moon and the stars. So now that other uncertainty need not worry us, and we can believe that the stars too were placed there to belong to the beginning, that is to the pre-eminence of the night.
55. Perhaps not so absurd as he thinks; Ps 8 1 :3 reads in the RSV, taken from the Hebrew text like all modern translations: "Blow the trumpet at the new moon, at the full moon on our feast day." The Hebrew word for new moon is from the ordinary word meaning new. renew; but the word for full moon is of obscure origin according to Brown, Driver & Briggs, possibly a loan word from Assyrian. The point is, it is not obviously on the face of it just the opposite of "new"; and perhaps this verse of the psalm may indicate that at one time the 1sraelites had thought of the moon as new when it was full, shining brightly, and had reckoned their months from the day of the full moon, and not from what we now, and to be sure they in rabbinic times, called the new moon. Augustine's text of the psalms, following the Greek Septuagint, did not have the verse in that form, but "Blow the trumpet at the new moon, on the auspicious day of your feast."