Evening And Morning

The divine creation of light follows the creation of the general, unfinished cosmos, the "heavens and the earth," in Genesis 1.  Shortly afterward, the Bible begins acknowledging the passage of the first days by saying there was evening, and then there was morning.  This sort of phrasing is utilized for each of the first six days before the seventh, on which God rests and establishes the pattern of the weekly Sabbath (Genesis 2:2-3).  In fact, one might come across people who claim that the wording of evening and morning throughout Genesis 1 means that all days start at evening, and the correct adherence to the Sabbath involves resting once a week from evening to evening.  

A special annual Sabbath holiday specifically said to last from evening to evening in Leviticus 23 would not necessarily have the same timing as the weekly day of rest, so this necessitates nothing more than the one distinguished Sabbath is from one evening to the next.  Even so, any Sabbath beginning at a particular time of day does not mean that that time is therefore the first moment of each day.  This alone refutes the idea that there is any inherent connection between the precise beginning of the Sabbath and the real time at which each singular day begins.

Now, does Genesis 1 actually define evening as the starting point of the day?  Read what it says.

Genesis 1:1-5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31—"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.  God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light 'day,' and the darkness he called 'night.'  And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day . . .

God called the vault 'sky.'  And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day . . .

And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day . . .

And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day . . .

And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day . . .

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.  And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day."

Genesis never quite gives an exact starting point, which certainly invalidates the alleged basis for the Sabbath and other days beginning in the evening already, but it is logically true that evening and morning do not even account for the whole of either the 24 hour day or the full respective periods of daylight and nighttime darkness.  The afternoon leading up to the following evening is not included in the exact scope of "evening and morning".  Unless morning somehow refers to every part of the day outside of the literal evening, or evening entails the entirety of sunset up until dawn and morning entails everything from the first light through sunset, there is absolutely no way that evening and morning encompass the entire day one way or another.

Morning comes before evening.  So, too, does evening come before the next morning.  One could never tell from the natural cycle whether one or the other came first, and pure logic does not require in itself that one or the other must be the inevitable starting point for the back and forth transition from day to night and night to day.  Darkness existing before the first light, as the Genesis 1 account proposes, would not mean that evening, which ushers in the darkness of nighttime, is where the reset of the day and night cycle occurs.  The darkness  No, it does not follow on any level from the exact details of Genesis 1 about light and darkness, evening and morning, that each day begins at sunset.

The weekly Sabbath does not start at sunset as Jewish tradition holds because the actual day (daylight) does not start at sunset.  Or at the very least, if the true day does start before daylight, Genesis does not make this clear (nor does Genesis or anything in the books of the Law specify that the weekly Sabbath is rigidly equivalent to what modern Americans would call Saturday as many Jews and some Christians also assume is the case).  The position that "evening and morning", either in isolation or because of the repetition of the phrase, establishes that each day starts with evening because of the literal wording deviates from the text, and thus logical truths about the text, on at least two counts regardless.  One, nowhere does Genesis say that the day does not begin with daylight, and two, evening and morning do not literally include the entire day-night cycle.

Certainly, it is untrue that the standard modern conception of a day as a 24 hour period that starts with daybreak and ends with the subsequent daybreak—or as a 24 hour period that ends and restarts at midnight, an especially arbitrary time for someone to think is the real end of a day—has to be correct because it is modern, because it is societally entrenched, or because it subjectively appeals to an individual.  But the issue of precisely when a day starts and ends is not as simple as it might seem to someone who just assumes that midnight is "obviously" when the next day arrives out of cultural custom or that evening is when the new day begins because of what amounts to the same foundational reason, as Rabbinic tradition is a type of cultural custom.

Genesis does not say anything as straightforward as exactly when a day starts and ends.  The recurring use of "there was evening, and there was morning" does not convey the particulars which would justify practices like initiating the rest of the Sabbath in the evening rather than when daylight actually begins.  Yet the cycle of day and night continues.  The morning precedes the evening, and that evening precedes the next morning.  And if the Bible is in some way inspired by God, and God wanted to make it clear that the weekly Sabbath starts specifically, exclusively as sunlight retreats away from our view of the sky, it would have been very easy for this to be clarified.