What Does Genesis 1:5 Mean?
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.THE KEY
The first day is not light alone: it is a named rhythm that holds both darkness and morning.
THE MEANING
Your time is ordered through named contrasts: light is Day, darkness is Night. Evening and morning belong to one day, so darkness has a place within the world’s rhythm; it is not outside that order.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that darkness is an intrusion with no place in the created order dissolves here: it receives a name and belongs to the first day’s rhythm.
THE ROOT
וַיִּקְרָא
vayiqra
GROWS FROM
ק־ר־א
q-r-ʾ
קָרָא (qaraʾ): to call, name, or proclaim; also to read aloud.
The verb behind “called” can name a distinction into view, as God names light Day and darkness Night. Its branches also carry the sense of calling people together or calling words aloud, so naming belongs to a wider act of making something heard and recognized.
ALSO GROWS
miqra: A convocation or called assembly.
מִקְרָא
A call can gather people into a recognized occasion, just as the naming here gathers evening and morning into one day.
qore: One who calls out or reads aloud.
קוֹרֵא
The same root carries a call into speech; what is named becomes something that can be heard and distinguished.
THE PATTERN
Created order gives contrasting conditions distinct names and holds them within one world.
All the days of the earth, sowing and reaping, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not stop.The day is yours, the night also is yours; you set firm the light and the sun.And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not take hold of it.THE THREAD
He counts the number of the stars; he calls each of them by name.The same root, קרא (qaraʾ, to call or name), appears in “calleth them all by their names.” Genesis shows the first division of time being given names; Psalm 147 extends that naming to each star, giving the ordered world particularity.
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