And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.
Something new appears in Genesis 1:14.
Not a new object.
Not even a new process.
A new function.
The lights are to be:
“for signs”
This is the first explicit indication in the story that something in the material world can function as a sign.
Until now, the world has been differentiated, identified, organised and made productive. Now a material phenomenon is being assigned a semiotic function.
The grammar is worth following carefully.
First:
Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven
Then:
to divide the day from the night
And then:
let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years
The lights therefore have several functions.
They divide.
They mark.
They organise recurrence.
And among these functions is signification.
This is important because light has changed its grammatical status since the beginning of the story.
In verse 3:
Let there be light.
Light is a phenomenon whose existence is projected and actualised.
By verse 14:
Let there be lights.
The phenomenon has become individuated.
There are now lights rather than simply light.
The subsequent verses make the differentiation still more explicit:
And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
Light has become participants with differentiated properties, locations and functions.
The lights do not simply exist.
They do things.
They divide day from night.
They rule over them.
They give light upon the earth.
And they serve as signs.
The material and the semiotic are therefore not presented as separate worlds.
A material phenomenon can acquire a semiotic function within the relations of the world already constructed.
That is a significant development.
We should nevertheless resist the temptation to explain exactly what kind of sign the text has in mind. Nothing here requires us to import a complete theory of semiotics.
The grammar tells us something simpler, and perhaps more interesting:
something material can function as something other than itself.
A light is still a light.
But it can also function for signs.
Its significance is therefore relational. It does not cease to be material in order to become semiotic.
This is consistent with what has happened throughout the chapter.
The world has repeatedly acquired new dimensions without losing the earlier ones.
Light was created.
Light was seen.
Light was evaluated.
Light was divided from darkness.
Light and darkness were named Day and Night.
Now lights are positioned within the firmament and assigned functions in relation to Day, Night, seasons, days and years.
Each new construal takes up what earlier construals have made available.
The same is true of time.
The story has already established Day and Night as identified categories. The lights now participate in the organisation of those categories.
And they also organise larger temporal recurrences:
seasons, days, and years.
Time is becoming not merely a sequence through which events occur, but something that can itself be marked, differentiated and recognised.
The world is acquiring recurrence that can be construed.
This helps explain why the lights are placed where they are:
in the firmament of the heaven
Their location is not incidental. The lights are positioned within an already differentiated relational structure so that they can perform their functions.
Again, the pattern is familiar:
constituted relation → material participant → function within the relation
But now the function includes signification.
This is perhaps the point at which the story crosses a subtle threshold.
A world can contain things without those things meaning anything.
It can contain differences without those differences being signs.
But once something functions for a sign, the material configuration has entered into a semiotic relation.
The story has moved from:
what is there
to:
what it does
and now to:
what it signifies.
That does not mean that the earlier world was meaningless. It means only that explicit signification has now entered the grammar of the story.
And that distinction is worth preserving.
The lights are not signs because we, as readers, decide that they symbolise something.
They are signs because the narrative explicitly gives them that function.
This is our first secure foothold for talking about meaning.
And it arrives rather late.
That may itself be significant.
The story does not begin with symbols.
It begins with existence.
Then come distinction, identification, relation, becoming, life and function.
Only then do things become explicitly signifying.
Perhaps meaning does not float above the material world as something added to it.
Perhaps, in this story at least, meaning emerges when material things enter into particular kinds of relations.
A light can be light.
It can illuminate.
It can divide.
It can regulate.
And it can signify.
One phenomenon, multiple construals.
The world is becoming increasingly complex not because new kinds of substance are continually appearing, but because existing phenomena are entering into new kinds of relations and functions.
That is a pattern we will want to keep watching.
For the next stage is even more remarkable.
The world will no longer merely contain things that signify.
It will contain living things capable of continuing the processes by which the world comes to be.
The world is about to become not only meaningful, but alive.
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