And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
The light has appeared. It has been seen, assessed, and divided from the darkness.
Now something different happens.
It is called.
This may seem like the simplest operation in the story so far. The light receives a name: Day. The darkness receives a name: Night.
But grammatically, something rather more interesting is happening.
The clauses are identifying relational clauses. They establish a relation between something and what it is called:
the light — Daythe darkness — Night
The world has not merely been differentiated. Its differences have become linguistically identifiable.
This is an important transition.
Division establishes a distinction. Naming makes that distinction available within a semantic system.
And the distinction is not arbitrary. Day and Night are not simply sounds attached to two objects. The names construe the differentiated phenomena as elements of a relationship that can subsequently be referred to, contrasted, and organised.
The importance of this becomes clearer in the next verse:
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
The new proposal presupposes distinctions already made.
There are waters.
They can be divided.
The firmament is proposed as a structure through which that division will be established.
The story is therefore not beginning again from nothing. Each new operation takes up what earlier operations have made available.
This is becoming a recurring feature of the grammar:
one construal creates the conditions for another.
The firmament is then made:
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
The waters are not simply replaced by different things. They are relationally organised: some are above the firmament, some below it.
And then:
And God called the firmament Heaven.
Again, a differentiated configuration is identified.
The firmament has been made and positioned as part of a relation among the waters. Now it is called Heaven.
The sequence is becoming:
make → differentiate → identify
But there is another grammatical resource at work here.
In verse 10, the text says:
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.
The second thing called is not a simple object.
It is:
the gathering together of the waters
A process or configuration has been packaged as a nominal participant and then identified as Seas.
That is a small grammatical detail with large consequences.
Language can take something that happens — the gathering together of the waters — and construe it as something that can itself be talked about.
A process becomes a participant.
Once it has been packaged in this way, it can enter into further relations of identification and evaluation.
This is one of the remarkable powers of grammar: it does not merely describe an already segmented reality. It provides resources for turning processes, relations and configurations into things that can themselves be construed.
And Genesis immediately does precisely this:
and God saw that it was good.
The it gathers up the preceding configuration and makes it the Phenomenon of the mental process saw.
What has been differentiated and identified can now be apprehended as a whole and evaluated.
We can therefore extend the sequence from the previous post:
actualise → perceive → assess → differentiate → identify → evaluate
But perhaps identify deserves special emphasis.
Naming does not create the light in verse 5. It does not create the firmament in verse 8. It does not create the dry land in verse 10.
Something is already there.
What naming does is establish a semantic identity for what has already been differentiated.
That distinction will become important throughout the story.
Creation and naming are not the same operation.
To create is to bring something into actuality.
To differentiate is to establish a distinction.
To call is to establish an identifying relation.
The three operations are related, but the grammar does not collapse them into one.
And this gives us a tentative picture of what is happening to the world of the story.
At first there is existence without determinate form.
Then there is differentiation.
Then there is identification.
The world is becoming not merely something that is, but something that can be construed as something.
This is where we need to resist an easy temptation.
We should not say that naming simply puts words onto a pre-existing world. Nor should we leap to the opposite conclusion and say that language creates the physical world.
The grammar supports neither extreme.
What it shows us is more subtle:
language provides a resource through which differentiated experience can become semantically organised.
The light can be Day.
The darkness can be Night.
The firmament can be Heaven.
The dry land can be Earth.
The gathering of waters can be Seas.
And once these distinctions have been named, they can participate in further grammatical and semantic relations.
The world is acquiring a vocabulary.
But more than that, it is acquiring a structure of identities.
And perhaps this is why the narrative's repeated acts of naming matter so much.
The story is not simply telling us what God calls things.
It is showing us a world becoming sayable.
And once a world is sayable, it can become the object of further construal.
The next stage will not merely name the world.
It will make the world productive.
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