Six of the seven days of Creation repeat this puzzling phrase. What I find odd is that evening and morning do not describe a day, but the beginning and end of night. It is possible that this could refer to an actual night, which would give credence to the 24-hour day. Indeed, I believe the Jews interpret it this way, which is why the day for a Jew begins at sundown.
However, interpreting evening and morning as the end of a day creates some problems. The first is that this phrase is not mentioned on the seventh day. If evening and morning signify the end of a day, then the seventh day does not end, and God is still resting. This is how the Deists understood it, as do many people today. They believe that once God created the universe, he was done. He does not intervene in history.
Evening is the time when light dims before the darkness of night. Morning breaks this darkness as light dimly reappears and then gets brighter. This is a problem because there is nothing in the text to indicate how the light on the first three days of Creation would have been dimmed. There would have had to have been a huge barrier of some kind to block the light, but none is mentioned. This phrase does not clarify the text but muddies the water.
The Hebrew words for evening and morning might give us a better understanding. From the Deeper Christian article, titled “Evening and Morning (Genesis 1)”:
The word in Hebrew for “evening” is erev (or ereb). It does mean darkness, dusk, evening, and sunset, but it came out of the understanding of obscurity, mixture, chaos, increasing entropy.
When the day approaches evening, things increasingly get obscured, it becomes hard to see, darkness (chaos) encroaches, and there is seeming movement toward disorder (entropy). The word came to mean “evening” because of this.
The morning is the opposite of evening. Sunlight pierces the darkness and things become discernible. Entropy decreases, visibility is restored, and a seeming order ensues. This is why the Hebrew word boker (or boqer) came to mean “morning.”
Reasons to Believe has come to the same conclusion. From Hugh Henry’s 2022 blog post, “Evening and Morning and Entropy in Creation”:
The medieval Jewish sage Naḥmanides observes that the root of ‘ereb is “mixing up” and the root of bôqer is “to distinguish.” His commentary on Genesis 1:5 states:
“The beginnings of the night is called ‘ereb (evening) because shapes become confused in it. And the beginning of the day is called bôqer (morning) because a person is then able to distinguish between them.“
The Mi Yodeya website of Jewish law and tradition follows this line of reasoning:
The Hebrew word “Erev” as used in Genesis 1:5, means “mixed up” in English or “confusion”. This is because when things get darker, the human eye cannot properly identify forms; and reality is blurred.
The Hebrew word “Boker” means “clarity” or “break-through” (of light). This is because the coming of light will allow the human eye to once again recognize distinct forms and end all confusion.
This understanding and translation can be seen in the commentaries of Ibn Ezra, Radak, and Rav Shamshon Rafael Hirsch on Genesis 1:5.
Therefore, I simply like to translate the verse as:
There was chaos, and then there was order, one day.
If you follow the pattern of the creation account, you will see that the six days each have a starting point of “chaos” that is set right and becomes “orderly.”
The seventh day is “all light” since it had no chaos and was the culmination of the works of Creation. That’s why the 7th day has no mention of “it was erev, and then it was boker”. The 7th day was perfect.
The Hebrew words for evening and morning no longer mean chaos and order. This must have been how the ancients understood it, i.e., the original meaning of the word.
I think the second verse of the creation story can be of help here.
“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.” (Genesis 1:2)
This verse describes the heavens and the earth that God created in the previous verse. They are the raw materials that God is going to form into the heavens and the earth. The earth is described as formless and void. The Hebrew word for formless is “tohu,” which can be translated as formless or chaotic (Strong’s Concordance). I believe a valid translation would be that the earth was formless, chaotic, and void.
The other ingredient (deep) is the Hebrew word “tehom.” Strong’s defines it as an abyss (a surging mass of water). The word can also be translated as confusion. According to Dan Hayden’s word study, “Deep – Genesis 1:2”:
“It [tehom] comes from the root word which means, ‘to make an uproar, to agitate greatly.’”
The text makes it clear that the heavens and earth that were created in the beginning were chaotic, so interpreting “evening and morning” as chaos and order makes more sense. Over the six days of Creation, God transformed the chaotic earth and deep into the orderly universe we now enjoy and study.
The phrase, “and there was evening and morning,” then becomes a summation of the events that occurred on each of the first six days of creation. Everything is “very good” (complete) at this point, so it is notably absent on the seventh. Creation is done.