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:
All Commentaries on Genesis 1:14 Go To Genesis 1
Basil the Great
AD 379
“Let them serve,” he says, “for the fixing of days,” not for making days but for ordering the days. For day and night are earlier than the generation of the luminaries. This the psalm declares to us when it says: “He placed the sun to rule the day, the moon and stars to rule the night.” How, then, does the sun rule the day? Because, whenever the sun, carrying the light around with it, rises above our horizon, it puts an end to the darkness and brings us the day. Therefore one would not err if he would define the day as air, lighted by the sun, or as the measure of time in which the sun tarries in the hemisphere above the earth. But the sun and the moon were also appointed to be for the years. The moon, when it has completed its course twelve times, measures a year, except that it frequently needs an intercalary month for the accurate determination of the seasons, as the Hebrews and the most ancient Greeks formerly measured the year. The solar year is the return of the sun from a certain sign to that same sign in its regular revolution.
