BBC Radio 4 20170823

The US seems to have gone eclipse crazy on what was Monday evening our time. We watched as Americans followed a path of total darkness which went from coast to coast as the moon and sun passed together over the continent. Day-time turned to night time in an instant and the temperature dropped precipitously. ‘Oh my God’ was the most common exclamation, according to a report in the Guardian, and one enthusiast for eclipses was quoted as saying, ‘I’m not religious but I think it’s something very like when God says, “let there be light”’.

I’m sorry to be pedantic, but in actual fact it is not at all like when God says ‘let there be light’. God makes that great declaration in the very opening verses of the Book of Genesis, on day one, three days before the sun is created. The sun doesn’t appear till day four, when, amongst other things, God makes two ‘great lights’, one for the day and the other for the night. But even then, neither the sun nor the moon is actually named directly - which is, of course, only to add insult to injury, since they have already suffered the indignity of having to wait their turn to be created until after God made vegetation on the third day.

The Book of Genesis is not meant to be history, nor science. Its concern is not to tell us how or when what there is came to be, but to reflect on the meaning of what there is – and the point of a story which has cabbages and cucumbers getting a look in before the sun and the moon, is to deny the notion, popular with many of ancient Israel’s neighbours, that the heavenly bodies were divinities shaping our destinies. If those of us who know that an eclipse is, in a manner of speaking, a mere matter of mathematics, witness it with feelings of awe, how much more likely that others will not only be awed, but over-awed, by the seeming battle between sun and moon, so much so that they may come to think that they deserve worship, reverence and fear – an idea which the Book of Genesis intends to deny with its mockery of the sun and moon’s pretensions.

Sun worship - except in the sense of lying on a beach for too long – isn’t for most of us a live option. But the main point of the story of Genesis is still pertinent I believe, since the significance of putting down the stars, the moon and the sun, is just to bring us humans face to face with the fact that our destiny is not under their control, but lies with us. Humans possess a grand freedom, quite different from anything the stars possess. Indeed, the irony of this eclipse tracking across the US is just that the US, perhaps of all countries, needs to reckon with the fact that the powers we humans wield are in their own way quite as awesome as the power of the sun - and that rather than our being subject to it, or any other celestial body, its affect on us and on the planet’s immediate destiny lies firmly in our hands.