And what signs is he talking about, when he says of the heavenly bodies, Let
208 The Literal Meaning of Genesis liability to change in the very thing made and formed, that is, its ability, if l may so put it, to fall apart, called night, because inherent in things that have been made is the capacity to change even if they do not do so?
While as for evening and morning, were they perhaps named, not as signi fying the passing and the coming of a particular time, but as indicating a kind of boundary, by which can be understood how far the realm of one nature extends, and where the starting point of the next one begins? Or is some other explanation of these words to be looked for with greater diligence?
29. Who is there who could easily break open such a well-guarded secret? And what signs is he talking about, when he says of the heavenly bodies, Let them befor signs? He does not mean, after all, the kind that it is the sheerest folly to observe,32 but the ones, naturally, that are useful and necessary for the purposes of this life, ones which sailors observe in navigation, or which we all look for in order to forecast the weather in summer and winter and in the change able times of autumn and spring. And doubtless these are what he means by the "times" that are caused by the heavenly bodies: not just periods of time, but the changes in the moods of this sky above us.
l mean, if there was any movement, either bodily or spiritual, that preceded the fashioning of these lamps, of such a kind as to transfer something from what was being waited for in the future back to the past through the present,33 this would not have been possible without time; and who would maintain that time only began with the fashioning of the heavenly bodies? But definite hours and days and years, which we are so familiar with, could only be produced by the movements of the heavenly bodies.
And so if this is how we are to understand "times, days and years," as various divisions which we measure with sun-dials and clocks, or which we are most familiar with in the sky, when the sun rises up from the east to its noonday height in the south and again sinks down from there to set in the west, so that the moon or some star can thereupon be observed rising in the east immediately after sunset, and when it in turn reaches its zenith in the south, that indicates midnight, and then it also sets with the sun coming back to usher in the morning. lt is days
32. That is, the signs that astrologers claim to observe. 33. A kind of time machine which, 1 think he is suggesting, would be a necessary condition for the predictions of astrologers to have any validity. But the sequence of his thoughts in this whole passage is not in the least straightforward. 1n the next sentence he may be supposed to allow the possibility of such a time machine, by rejecting any suggestion that there was no time before the heavenly bodies were made—this on the authority of the text giving us three whole days before they were made. And then he goes on to talk about times in the sense of periods of time, days and years, being controlled by the heavenly bodies, though earlier he had seemed to confine the meaning of "times" to the seasons of the year. But all this only serves to remind us ofhow tentative his whole approach is to the interpretation of the text—little more than a tissue of questions. With such a procedure a straightforward sequence of thought is not to be expected.