a fresh look

We live with familiar things that have been handed down to us and when we look into them we can be surprised.  I woke up thinking about the name of this day of the week: "Wednesday".  What a funny word.  It's hard to pronounce.  We actually say "Wensday".   It turns out that the days of the week came down to us through our Anglo-Saxon heritage from the names of the sun, moon and five known planets of the ancient world.  Some false gods got pulled into the picture because they were used to name the planets too and that's how we got some strange names like Wednesday (from Woden's Day...which is actually based on the planet Mercury...in French Wednesday is called Mercredi).  So I was curious if the Hebrew people had colorful names for the days of the week, that might be more closely linked with the one true God!  It turns out that the Hebrew names for days of the week are "1st Day", "2nd Day", "3rd Day", "4th Day", "5th Day", "6th Day", and "Sabbath (or Day of Rest)".  I suppose it isn't surprising that the natural, or pagan, world tried to give colorful names to honor their false gods.  They had a full time job trying to please so many myths.  But the simplicity of the Hebrew system is that it points every week to Creation in the most direct of ways.  Each day remembers a stage in the origin of the universe and the week's end reminds us of the rest that God took, upon completing the project.

Here's what really happened on the Third Day that we know as Wednesday:

^{Genesis 1:9} Then God said, "Let the waters beneath the sky flow together into one place, so dry ground may appear." And that is what happened. ¹⁰ God called the dry ground "land" and the waters "seas." And God saw that it was good. ¹¹ Then God said, "Let the land sprout with vegetation—every sort of seed-bearing plant, and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came." And that is what happened. ¹² The land produced vegetation—all sorts of seed-bearing plants, and trees with seed-bearing fruit. Their seeds produced plants and trees of the same kind. And God saw that it was good.

 ¹³ And evening passed and morning came, marking the third day.

 

I hope to carry a clearer picture of this third day of the week from now on.  This is the day when dry land appeared out of the sea and when life, in the form of all kinds of trees and plants and fruit trees began.  Trees make wood, so maybe I can think of this as "Woods Day"!