Annotatio XII

”And it was made evening and morning, the second day.” — Genesis 1:8

Rabanus [Maurus], Bishop of Mainz, in his commentaries on Genesis, inquiring why after the second day’s work it is not said — as of the other five days’ works — “God saw that it was good,” answers, on the authority of the ancient Fathers, that this came about because the binary [double] number is infamous and unclean, on account of the cause of corruption, which first proceeds from it.¹ And this is Jerome’s opinion, at the beginning of his commentary on Haggai and in the first volume against Jovinian, where he writes thus: “It must be observed, according to the Hebrew truth, that whereas Scripture, on the first, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth day — the works of each being completed — said, ‘And God saw that it was good’: on the second day it withheld this entirely, leaving us to understand that the double number is not good, which divides from unity and prefigures the covenants of marriage. Whence also in Noah’s ark all the animals which enter two by two [in pairs] are unclean.” Nicholas of Lyra, in the Postil on Genesis, explodes this opinion as a deception, preferring to it the exposition of Rabbi Solomon [Rashi], who says that God did not call the second day’s work “good” because the work of the waters — which was afterward completed on the third day — was not yet perfect, hinting that what is not yet perfect is not worthy of the appellation of “good.” Yet Paul of Burgos, the bishop, refutes this confutation of Lyra.