The Hidden Light - What God Did Before 'Let There Be Light'

(Genesis 1:3) records the first words God ever spoke: "Let there be light." The sun was not created until the fourth day (Genesis 1:14-19). The rabbis of the Talmud noticed this contradiction immediately. If the sun did not exist yet, what was the light of the first day? The answer they constructed over centuries became one of the most beautiful and haunting ideas in all of Jewish mythology, the Or HaGanuz (אור הגנוז), the Hidden Light, a primordial radiance so powerful that God had to conceal it from the world to prevent the wicked from exploiting it.

Before even that first utterance, another tradition asks an even stranger question. What was God doing before He said "Let there be light"? According to Bereishit Rabbah and (Psalm 104:2), God was wrapping Himself in light like a garment. The light came first. Then the words. Then the universe. And the light we see today, sunlight, starlight, firelight, is a dim replacement for something far more extraordinary that existed at the very beginning and now exists nowhere in the visible world.

God Wrapped in Light Like a Garment

Bereishit Rabbah 3:4, compiled c. 400-500 CE by the rabbinic academies of the Land of Israel, preserves a teaching about the moments before creation began. The midrash draws on (Psalm 104:2): "He wraps Himself in light as with a garment; He stretches out the heavens like a curtain." Rabbi Shimon ben Yehozadak (3rd century CE) asked Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman (3rd century CE, Land of Israel): "Since I have heard that you are a master of aggadah, tell me, from where was the light created?" Rabbi Shmuel answered: "The Holy One, blessed be He, wrapped Himself in a white garment, and the radiance of His splendor shone from one end of the world to the other."

This teaching, whispered as a secret ("he said it in a whisper"), reveals that the very first act of creation was not speech but self-adornment. God clothed Himself in light before doing anything else. The light that became the raw material of the universe was not something God created out of nothing, it was something that radiated from God's own being, projected outward like a garment unfurling. The text in our database, God's Garment of Light from our collection, preserves this tradition alongside related mystical elaborations.

The implications are staggering. If light is God's garment, then the physical universe is, in some sense, woven from what God was wearing. Creation is not a construction project. It is an act of divine self-disclosure, a disrobing and re-robing on a cosmic scale.

The Primordial Light That Adam Could See By

The Babylonian Talmud, in Chagigah 12a (redacted c. 500 CE), records a teaching from Rabbi Eleazar (3rd century CE): "By the light that the Holy One, blessed be He, created on the first day, Adam could see from one end of the world to the other." This was not ordinary vision. The primordial light granted a kind of total perception, spatial, temporal, perhaps even spiritual, that allowed the first human to see everything that existed simultaneously.

The same passage explains what happened next. "When the Holy One, blessed be He, looked upon the generation of the Flood and the generation of the Dispersion [the Tower of Babel], and saw that their deeds were corrupt, He arose and hid it from them." God withdrew the primordial light from the world because wicked people would misuse its power. He stored it away, ganaz it, hence Or HaGanuz, the Hidden Light, for the righteous in the World to Come.

Bereishit Rabbah 3:6 reinforces this: Rabbi Yehudah bar Simon (4th century CE) taught that God hid the light because it was too good for this world. The visible light that replaced it, the sun, moon, and stars created on the fourth day, is a pale substitute. What we call daylight is a shadow of what once existed. The How Light and Darkness Were Created text in our database traces these traditions across multiple rabbinic sources.

Where Did God Hide the Light?

The rabbis disagreed about where the Hidden Light was stored. Chagigah 12a says God hid it "for the righteous in the future" without specifying a location. Other traditions are more specific. Rabbi Yehudah taught that God hid the light in the Garden of Eden. Others said it was stored in the Torah itself, embedded in the black fire of the letters, accessible to anyone who studies with pure enough intention.

The Zohar (composed c. 1280-1290 CE in Castile, Spain, by Rabbi Moshe de Leon) offers perhaps the most poetic answer: the light shone for exactly 36 hours before being concealed. This number connects to the 36 candles of Hanukkah (the total number lit over 8 nights, excluding the shamash) and to the tradition of the Lamed-Vav Tzaddikim, the 36 hidden righteous people who sustain the world in every generation. Each of these 36 hidden saints, the Zohar suggests, carries a fragment of the primordial light within them. The world is sustained not by the sun but by these invisible sparks of the original radiance, scattered across the globe in 36 human vessels.

The Light Is Sown for the Righteous text draws on (Psalm 97:11): "Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart." The rabbis read "sown" literally, God planted seeds of the primordial light throughout creation, and they will sprout and bloom in the messianic age. Light from the Temple connects this idea to the Temple in Jerusalem, which some traditions identify as the place where the Hidden Light was concentrated most intensely before the Temple's destruction in 70 CE.

How Does the Kabbalah Interpret the Hidden Light?

The kabbalistic tradition (3,260 texts in our database) transforms the Hidden Light from a narrative detail into a foundational metaphysical concept. Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (1522-1570 CE, Safed, Galilee) explained in his Pardes Rimonim (Garden of Pomegranates, published 1548) that the Hidden Light corresponds to the sefirah of Chokhmah (Wisdom), the first flash of divine illumination that emerges from Keter (Crown) before being shaped into structured creation through Binah (Understanding).

In this framework, the Hidden Light is not merely old light that was put in storage. It is the most fundamental form of divine energy, the raw, unfiltered radiance of God's mind before it takes any particular shape. The visible world, including physical light, is what happens when this radiance passes through the filters of the lower sefirot. The Or HaGanuz is what exists before those filters are applied.

Rabbi Isaac Luria (the Ari, 1534-1572 CE, Safed) integrated the Hidden Light into his cosmic drama of creation. In the Lurianic system, recorded by his student Rabbi Chaim Vital (1542-1620 CE) in the Etz Chaim (Tree of Life), the Or HaGanuz is connected to the Or Ein Sof, the Infinite Light that existed before tzimtzum (divine contraction). The ray of light that God projected into the vacated space after withdrawing His infinite presence was itself a filtered version of this primordial radiance. Explore these ideas in The Contraction of God and Creation By Broken Vessels from our collection.

The Light Hidden in the Torah

One of the most influential traditions about the Or HaGanuz holds that God concealed the primordial light inside the Torah. The Zohar teaches that the Torah was written in black fire upon white fire before the world was created. The white fire, the parchment beneath the letters, is the Hidden Light itself. Those who study Torah with sufficient depth and purity do not merely learn information, they catch glimpses of the original radiance that existed before the sun, before the stars, before time itself.

This idea transformed the act of Torah study from an intellectual exercise into a mystical practice. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810 CE, great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov) taught that the 36 tractates of the Babylonian Talmud correspond to the 36 hours during which the primordial light shone, and that studying any tractate with genuine intention gives a person momentary access to that light. The Hasidic movement, founded by the Baal Shem Tov (Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, c. 1698-1760 CE, Podolia) made this connection central to their theology: every act of study, prayer, and kindness can uncover fragments of the Hidden Light embedded in creation.

The Creation By Light text in our database explores how light serves as the fundamental building block of reality in rabbinic thought. Before the World Was Created describes the state of existence prior to the first utterance, a state suffused with the light that would later be hidden away. The Darkness That Existed Before Creation provides the necessary counterpoint, describing what existed in the absence of this light.

Explore Hidden Light Texts

The tradition of the Hidden Light runs through virtually every major source in Jewish literature, from the Talmud through the Midrash and deep into the Kabbalah. Our database contains over 18,000 ancient Jewish texts, with dozens exploring the nature and fate of the primordial radiance. Start with God's Garment of Light and Creation By Light from our collection. Browse Light Is Sown for the Righteous for the messianic dimension. Explore the Kabbalah collection (3,260 texts) for mystical interpretations, or the Midrash Rabbah collection (2,921 texts) for the foundational rabbinic teachings. Search for hidden light or Or HaGanuz to find every reference in the database.