The Lights מְאֹרֹת · מֶמְשֶׁלֶת

Read day four’s next sentence

Most of us learned day four as decoration: sun, moon, stars, a nice sky. One verse further, day four hands the lights a job, and it names that job twice.

The Hebrew behind “to rule” is not a verb here. It is a noun with a small word in front of it, le-memshelet, “for the rule of.” Young’s Literal keeps the shape: “the great luminary for the rule of the day.” So day four does not only hang lamps. It hands out governments.

THE SKY THAT STEERS THE SHIP

Nobody on that deck thinks the stars are just pretty. The whole voyage answers to them. Genesis 1:16 says the lights were hung to govern.

Day four gives the lights another job in the verse before this one, “for signs, and for seasons,” and that clause is a calendar. It has a page of its own: signs and seasons. Two pages, two questions: who rules, and what time it is.

A ruler’s word

Memshelet is not a common word. It shows up fewer than twenty times in the whole Hebrew Bible. Two of those are day four’s own lights, said over again in a psalm. Every other one is about somebody’s government: a king’s territory, a steward’s office, God’s own dominion. Start with the psalm.

Same word, same lights, said again on purpose. Next, the word does its ordinary work on a man.

One steward is being put out of office and another is being put in, with the robe, the sash, and the keys. The word for the thing changing hands is day four’s word. It keeps that company elsewhere: “Israel his dominion” (Psalm 114:2), and the promise that “the first dominion” comes back to Zion (Micah 4:8). A king’s territory, a steward’s office, a people governed: that is the neighborhood this word lives in.

Lights that stand for people

If the lights were given governments, it matters what happens the next time somebody in Scripture sees a sun, a moon, and stars together.

Joseph’s dream is Scripture’s first reuse of sun-moon-and-stars, and Jacob decodes it out loud, on the spot: “Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?” (Genesis 37:10). Father, mother, brothers: a covenant family, told in lights, with the question of who bows to whom sitting right in the middle of it. Nobody in the room thinks it is a dream about astronomy.

The same three lights come back near the end of the Bible, with a crown on.

Sun, moon, and twelve stars: Joseph’s family, grown into a nation.

And John does not leave his readers to guess at his stars. In his first chapter he stops and hands over the key himself.

Stars are the angels of the seven churches. Candlesticks are the churches themselves. Readers argue over who exactly those angels are, messengers carrying a letter to a congregation or something more, and this page doesn’t settle it. The decoding itself is John’s. He prints it before he asks anybody to follow him any further. In this book, a star can be somebody with a job.

Daniel had already put people in that sky: the wise “shall shine as the brightness of the firmament,” and those who turn many to righteousness shine “as the stars for ever and ever” (Daniel 12:3). The word for firmament there is day two’s own word (see raqia), and the set-apart people who shine in it are where hivdil ends. What Daniel’s verse settles, and when, is a real question, left open on both pages. The picture, though, is steady: the set-apart ones do what stars do.

The rulers, retired

Day four hung two governors over the day and the night. In the last picture the Bible gives us, both step down. They are not fired, and not darkened in judgment like Babylon’s or Egypt’s; they are just no longer needed. God himself is the light now, in the room they used to rule. The lights’ other job, the calendar they were also hung for, gets the same ending, walked out in full on signs and seasons.