The days in the Old Testament seem to be backwards. Of course, I’m sure we can all grasp that they count time differently, so it’s not wrong but different. Except, I would like to contend that the Old Testament’s way of counting days is instructive to us. Honestly, it’s also better. The day starts in the evening as the Sun sets and then continues into the daytime after the night, ending at sunset the subsequent evening. Think, perhaps, of the Jewish observation of the Sabbath to see this in practice: beginning on Friday evening and following through to Saturday evening.

Have you ever noticed that in Genesis chapter one, the days are the wrong way around?

When I say the wrong way around, I mean backwards to what we expect, and before you rush off to compare the order of creation and question whether it means anything meaningful that the sun and moon come so late (it does, but that’s not our topic today), look at each day.

They’re backwards.

“And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” and each day thereafter. Evening, then morning. That’s backwards. We all know that days start in the morning, unless we’re pedantic enough to insist that they start in the middle of night. If we are that pedant, we are a prime example of what happens when you give a scientist a poet’s job, or when we let people learn the natural sciences before they’re thoroughly grounded in real subjects, like poetry.

But the destructive results of carving the day into twenty-four sections and thinking we’ve done something clever aside, the days in the Old Testament seem to be backwards.

Of course, I’m sure we can all grasp that they count time differently, so it’s not wrong but different. Except, I would like to contend that the Old Testament’s way of counting days is instructive to us. Honestly, it’s also better.

The day starts in the evening as the Sun sets and then continues into the daytime after the night, ending at sunset the subsequent evening. Think, perhaps, of the Jewish observation of the Sabbath to see this in practice: beginning on Friday evening and following through to Saturday evening.

Ok, they count days differently, so what?

Little things like this shape the way we see the world. They subconsciously tell us stories. Day, followed by night tells us a story: we have limited time to work, then our death will come. Make the most of your days in the sun while you can, for they are brief. The best comes at the beginning, the worst at the end: or in other words, youth is better than old age. This is as good as it will get, or nearly, once you hit a peak it’s downhill from there. There is nothing to hope for, for the Sun is dying, slowly, inexorably, and we will perish with it. We are brief. Life is short.

This is the liturgy of the hours, day, then night. It is a story of swelling sadness, of endings, and of the death of God. Everything that is good withers and perishes.

You might think that you are not affected by this, but you are, we all are. The smallest of things done day after day will shape the way we see the world.

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