I Form Light and Create Darkness

There are sentences in Scripture that the comfortable reader hurries past and the troubled reader cannot. Isaiah 45:7 is one of them. A God who makes light and well-being is a God anyone is glad to confess. But the same verse says he creates darkness, and it says he creates calamity — and it puts both of those into the mouth of YHWH himself, in the first person, as a thing he is proud to own. The verse does not soften the claim. It builds it into the grammar, word by word, so that the harder half of existence is assigned to the heaviest creation verb in the Hebrew Bible. This study follows that grammar, weighs the one word the oldest manuscripts disagree about, and lets the rest of the canon say what the verse means before we decide what it cannot mean.

The Verse and the Grammar of the Claim

Here is the verse as the Masoretic Text preserves it:

יוֹצֵ֥ר אוֹר֙ וּבוֹרֵ֣א חֹ֔שֶׁךְ עֹשֶׂ֥ה שָׁל֖וֹם וּב֣וֹרֵא רָ֑ע אֲנִ֥י יְהוָ֖ה עֹשֶׂ֥ה כָל־אֵֽלֶּה

yôṣēr ʾôr ûbôrēʾ ḥōšek ʿōśeh šālôm ûbôrēʾ rāʿ; ʾănî YHWH ʿōśeh kol-ʾēlleh

"Forming light and creating darkness, making well-being and creating calamity — I, Yahweh, do all these things." (Isaiah 45:7)

The verse is built of four parallel clauses, each a participle followed by its object, and the choice of verb is not random. Light gets יוֹצֵר (yôṣēr, H3335), "forming" — the potter's verb, the one used when YHWH shapes Adam from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7). Well-being gets עֹשֶׂה (ʿōśeh, H6213), "making" — the all-purpose verb of Hebrew, the one that simply means to do or to make, carried across some 2,285 verses with no theological weight of its own. But darkness and calamity each get בּוֹרֵא (bôrēʾ, H1254), "creating" — the verb of Genesis 1:1, the verb that in the Qal takes only God as its subject, never a man. (That subject-restriction is the lexical fact; the sense of a sovereign, unconditioned bringing-into-being that we usually hear in the word is a theological inference drawn from it, not the bare dictionary meaning.) It occurs 55 times across 47 verses, and thirty-eight percent of those are in Isaiah. The seam runs straight down the verse: the lighter verbs carry the welcome poles, and the heaviest creation verb in the language is reserved — twice — for the poles that trouble us. The echo of Genesis 1 only sharpens the claim. There, God creates light (Genesis 1:3) and divides it from a darkness already present over the deep (Genesis 1:2, 1:4); Genesis never says the darkness was made. Isaiah 45:7 closes that gap: God does not merely separate the darkness, he creates it.

The fifth clause caps the list: עֹשֶׂה כָל־אֵלֶּה (ʿōśeh kol-ʾēlleh), "doing all these things," with the same participle that carried well-being. And every one of these five verbs is a Qal active participle, not a finite past tense. This matters. Genesis 1:1 uses בָּרָא in the Qal perfect — bārāʾ, "created," a completed act at the beginning. Isaiah 45:7 uses the participle five times over. The participle does not narrate a deed God once did; it names what God is. The verse is not saying "God once made light and once made darkness." It is saying that YHWH is, by his very nature, the one who forms light and creates darkness — an ongoing, defining attribute. The asymmetry between the verbs is therefore not a slip of style but a deliberate intensification: the hardest cases get the strongest verb, and they get it as a settled description of who God is.

The verse is the capstone of a single oracle. It belongs to the Cyrus pericope (Isaiah 45:1–7, which the Masoretes close with a setumah paragraph break after this verse), and the next verse continues in the same creative register: "I, Yahweh, have created [בָּרָא] it" (Isaiah 45:8). The grammar of verse 7 does not float free; it answers a polemical purpose set up in verses 5 and 6, to which we will return.

The Crux: Does God Create Evil?

The whole weight of the verse falls on one word: רָע (rāʿ, H7451), rendered above as "calamity." It occurs 662 times across 621 verses, and its range in the lexicon is genuinely wide. BDB lists both the circumstantial sense — distress, misery, adversity, calamity — and the ethical sense — moral evil, wickedness. The word can mean either. An honest study has to say this plainly, because the older translations that read "I create evil" were not inventing a meaning the word cannot bear.

Three things, taken together, anchor this occurrence to the circumstantial sense. First, the tag. The lexicon marks this instance H7451B, the calamity sub-entry — though it should be said that even H7451B is not airtight, since the sub-entry itself carries a residual "ethical evil" sense; the tag points to the primary reading, not the only conceivable one. Second, the semantic field. The words clustered nearest to רָע — H7455 (rōaʿ, badness), H7489 (rāʿaʿ, to be evil), H7564 (rišʿâ, wickedness) — do skew moral, and the careful reader should know that. The author did not reach for the unambiguous H6869 (ṣārâ, "distress"), which would have settled the question by itself; he chose the word with the widest range and then let the sentence disambiguate it. Third, and decisively, the antithesis partner does the disambiguating. The pole רָע is set against is שָׁלוֹם (šālôm, H7965), and šālôm has no moral-quality subdivision in the lexicon at all. Across its 237 occurrences in 209 verses, every sense is a welfare or wholeness sense: completeness, soundness, health, peace from war. It is categorically a weal word. When רָע is opposed to a pure welfare term, the opposite of welfare is woe — adversity, calamity — not moral wickedness. The pairing fixes the meaning.

The canon does not leave us to guess. Its own interpreters use רָע in exactly this sense of God-sent adversity, and they form a tight lexical tier that shares the very word. Amos asks, "If calamity [רָעָה] comes upon a city, has not Yahweh [done] it [עָשָׂה]?" (Amos 3:6) — the rhetorical question expects the answer "of course," and it binds together the same רָע, the same verb עָשָׂה, and the divine name, the closest single-verse match in the canon. Qohelet says, "In the day of adversity [רָעָה] consider: God has made [עָשָׂה] the one as well as the other" (Ecclesiastes 7:14) — the same two words, and no hedging. The poet of the Lamentations asks, "Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both troubles [הָרָעוֹת] and good [הַטּוֹב] come?" (Lamentations 3:38). And Job, having lost everything, says to his wife, "Shall we receive good [הַטּוֹב] from God and shall we not receive adversity [הָרָע]?" — and the narrator adds the verdict that governs the whole question: "In all this Job did not sin with his lips" (Job 2:10). To confess that YHWH is sovereign over the adversity that befalls us is, by the text's own ruling, not sin.

A second tier of passages says the same theology with different words. Deuteronomy 32:39 — "I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal" — and Hannah's song, "Yahweh kills and makes alive, brings down to Sheol and raises up" (1 Samuel 2:6–7), and the Lord's word to Moses, "Who makes a man mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, Yahweh?" (Exodus 4:11). These are structural parallels, not lexical ones: they assert the same sovereignty over both poles, but they use the vocabulary of life and death, wound and heal, sight and blindness. None of them contains רָע. They confirm the shape of the claim across every major section of the canon — Law, Former Prophets, Writings — even where the word itself does not appear.

The payoff is precise. Isaiah 45:7 claims that YHWH is sovereign over adverse historical events — defeat, exile, the ruin of cities, the suffering of the righteous. It does not claim that God commits moral wickedness. The two readings are not equally supported: the welfare-term opposite, the lexical tag, and the canon's own usage all converge on calamity, while the moral reading survives only as a residue in the word's lexical range. (The New Testament's "Father of lights, with whom is no variation or shadow due to change" in James 1:17, and "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" in 1 John 1:5, complement this theologically — but neither quotes Isaiah 45:7, and they should be read as thematic companions, not as proof-texts.)

The Pre-Christ Variant, Unresolved

There is a textual fact about this verse that most translations bury and which the principle of weighing the oldest witnesses requires us to surface. At the welfare pole, the manuscripts do not agree on the word. The Masoretic Text — the standardized Hebrew text preserved in codices from around AD 900 — reads שָׁלוֹם (šālôm, H7965), "well-being." The Septuagint, the Greek translation made roughly 250–200 BC, reads εἰρήνην (eirēnēn, "peace"; LXX Isaiah 45:7), which renders šālôm. But the Great Isaiah Scroll — 1QIsaᵃ, the oldest surviving Hebrew manuscript of Isaiah, copied around 125 BC — reads טוֹב (ṭôv, H2896), "good," at column 38, line 13.

The dating cuts against the comfortable assumption that the medieval Hebrew text is simply the original. The oldest surviving Hebrew manuscript reads ṭôv; the oldest surviving Greek translation reads what answers to šālôm; and the Greek translator's Hebrew exemplar may well have been older than 1QIsaᵃ itself. From the textual evidence alone, neither reading can be crowned as original. The verdict is honest and it is unresolved.

Two other Isaiah scrolls must be set aside, because they are sometimes wrongly enlisted on one side or the other. 1Q8 (the other Qumran Isaiah scroll, 1QIsaᵇ) begins its preserved text mid-verse at this point; the šālôm/ṭôv word falls in a gap and is simply not there to read. 4Q57 (4QIsaᶜ) has the word only inside reconstructed brackets — restored by editors from the surrounding context, not legibly preserved on the leather. Neither witnesses to either reading, and an honest account does not count them.

The theological stakes shift slightly between the two readings, but the claim survives both. If the MT's šālôm stands, the pair is welfare against calamity — a clean weal-and-woe polarity, with no moral charge at all. If 1QIsaᵃ's ṭôv stands, the pair is good against evil, which does carry a possible moral charge, and it echoes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (טוֹב and רָע together, Genesis 2:9). Under either reading, YHWH claims both poles; the variant adjusts only how exposed the claim is. And there is a quiet irony here: if ṭôv is original, then Job 2:10 and Lamentations 3:38 — both of which pair ṭôv with rāʿ as the two things God sends — become the closest canonical parallels to this verse by vocabulary, not merely by theme.

The Greek translator's verb choices are worth naming, though they do not simply mirror the Hebrew. Where the Hebrew uses בָּרָא ("create") for both darkness and calamity, the Septuagint spreads four different verbs across the clauses: κατασκευάσας (kataskeuasas, "having prepared"; LXX Isaiah 45:7) for light, ποιήσας (poiēsas, "having made") for darkness, ὁ ποιῶν ("making") for peace, and κτίζων (ktizōn, "creating") for κακά. The Hebrew's twofold בָּרָא is not reproduced — darkness gets the ordinary "make," not the creation verb. But the translator did reserve his one creation-specific verb, κτίζω, for the calamity pole, heightening rather than blunting the claim at exactly the point a translator might have been tempted to soften it. And to the divine self-identification he added ὁ θεός ("the God"; LXX Isaiah 45:7), so that the Greek reads "I am the Lord God," sharpening the monotheist edge beyond the Hebrew.

The Negative of Isaiah 5:20

Isaiah does not use these four terms loosely. Forty chapters earlier the prophet had already gathered the same four words into a single sentence — and turned them the opposite way:

הוֹי הָאֹמְרִים לָרַע טוֹב וְלַטּוֹב רָע שָׂמִים חֹשֶׁךְ לְאוֹר וְאוֹר לְחֹשֶׁךְ

"Woe to those who call evil [רַע] good [טוֹב] and good [טוֹב] evil [רַע], who put darkness [חֹשֶׁךְ] for light [אוֹר] and light [אוֹר] for darkness [חֹשֶׁךְ]." (Isaiah 5:20)

Isaiah 5:20 gathers four terms — רָע (H7451), טוֹב (H2896), חֹשֶׁךְ (H2822), and אוֹר (H216). Three of them are the core terms of 45:7 as the Masoretic Text reads it (רָע, חֹשֶׁךְ, אוֹר); the fourth, טוֹב, is precisely the word the Great Isaiah Scroll reads at 45:7 in place of שָׁלוֹם — so the two verses share three terms on the MT, and all four if 1QIsaᵃ's reading stands. And in 5:20 they are crossed, deliberately reversed. This is a woe-oracle, the prophetic formula of judgment (הוֹי, hôy, "woe"), and what it condemns is the human act of inverting the poles: calling what is evil good and what is good evil, treating darkness as though it were light. Isaiah treats these four words as a recognized polarity system, a fixed moral and cosmic order that men sin by reversing.

Set side by side, the two verses are photographic negatives of each other. Isaiah 5:20 condemns the man who blurs the line between the poles, who renames darkness as light and evil as good. Isaiah 45:7 does the opposite of blurring: YHWH does not call darkness light, and he does not call calamity well-being. He keeps the poles exactly distinct — and claims sovereignty over both of them. The sin of 5:20 is to confuse the categories; the claim of 45:7 is to own them, both sides, without confusing anything. Three of the four terms (רָע, חֹשֶׁךְ, אוֹר) are common to both verses outright, and the fourth, טוֹב, stands in the contrast pair for the MT and is the actual word in 1QIsaᵃ. Isaiah is working a single, deliberate vocabulary across his book.

One small lexical detail bridges the two couplets of 45:7. The word for darkness, חֹשֶׁךְ, has as its nearest semantic neighbor the form H2825 (ḥashēkāh), glossed "darkness; figuratively, misery." The light-and-darkness couplet, which sounds purely cosmic, already leans toward the domain of adversity in its own field — so the move from "light and darkness" to "well-being and calamity" is not a leap across two unrelated subjects but a step within one continuous range. Cosmic darkness and human misery were never far apart in the Hebrew imagination.

The Polemic: Cyrus, Monotheism, Anti-Dualism

Why does the verse exist? It is not a free-standing meditation on theodicy; it is the climax of an argument. The oracle opens by naming the unlikeliest of instruments: "Thus says Yahweh to his anointed, to Cyrus" (Isaiah 45:1) — to his anointed, his māšîaḥ, which the Greek renders τῷ χριστῷ μου, "to my christ." A pagan Persian king is called YHWH's anointed. And the ground of that astonishing claim is laid in the two verses just before our verse: "I am Yahweh, and there is no other [אֵין עוֹד]; besides me there is no God... that they may know... there is none besides me. I am Yahweh, and there is no other" (Isaiah 45:5–6). The phrase אֵין עוֹד, "there is none other," rings out twice.

Then comes verse 7, and the logic locks together. There is no other god — because every domain a rival god might occupy is already filled by YHWH. Light is his. Darkness is his. Well-being is his. Calamity is his. There is no unclaimed territory in the universe, no dark quarter left over for a second power to rule. The monotheism of verses 5–6 is grounded in the comprehensive sovereignty of verse 7. The verse is the floor under the claim "there is no other." And that same monotheism reaches its climax later in the oracle, at Isaiah 45:23 — "to me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear" — which the New Testament takes up as the universal confession of the one God: Romans 14:11 quotes it directly, and Philippians 2:10–11 echoes it over the name of Jesus. The "no other" of verse 5 ends in every knee bowing; verse 7 is what makes the claim total.

The vocabulary is not new with this verse; it is a signature Isaiah has been building. The verb pair yāṣar + bārāʾ (H3335 + H1254) appears together in just five verses in the whole canon: Amos 4:13 — the sole instance outside Isaiah, "the one who forms the mountains and creates the wind, Yahweh, God of hosts, is his name"; Isaiah 43:1, where the two verbs name YHWH's relation to Israel ("your creator, Jacob... your former, Israel"); Isaiah 43:7, which stacks all three of our verbs in one breath, "whom I created [בְּרָאתִיו], formed [יְצַרְתִּיו], even made [עֲשִׂיתִיו]"; Isaiah 45:7 itself; and Isaiah 45:18, which resumes the pair ("the creator of the heavens... the former of the earth... I am Yahweh, and there is no other"). The verbs that form mountains and create a people are now turned on light, darkness, and calamity. And the single most provocative construction — בָּרָא directly governing רָע, the Genesis creation verb taking calamity as its object — occurs in exactly one verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. The two words co-occur in only one other verse (Ecclesiastes 12:1, "remember your creator... before the evil days come"), but there they stand in unrelated phrases; Isaiah 45:7 alone makes calamity the thing God creates. The nearest cousin is Isaiah 54:16, "I have created [בָּרָאתִי] the destroyer to ruin" — the same creation verb applied to a destructive agent, confirming that the logic of 45:7 is a settled pattern in these chapters, not a single shocking sentence.

What this forecloses can be stated carefully, distinguishing what the text says from what we infer. The text directly states that there is no other god (45:5–6) and that YHWH himself creates both poles, including the dark ones (45:7). The necessary inference is that there is no room for a two-power universe: if one God creates the darkness, no rival deity owns it. A probable historical inference — not stated in the text, and labeled as inference — concerns the setting. The oracle addresses a Persian world, and Persian religion carried a strong dualistic tendency — a god of light (Ahura Mazda) set against a power of darkness (Angra Mainyu). How sharply that dualism was framed in the Achaemenid period of Cyrus is debated; the developed system of two co-eternal, uncreated powers is most clearly attested in later Zoroastrian tradition. But a religious world disposed to divide light and darkness between rival powers is the plausible backdrop. Even the softened, created dualism found later at Qumran — the "two spirits" of light and darkness in the Community Rule (1QS III:13–IV:26), cited here only as external Second-Temple background and not as a witness to this verse — gives the darkness its own mediating prince. Isaiah 45:7 dissolves the whole scheme at the root: if YHWH himself directly creates the darkness and the calamity, there is no need, and no place, for a dark co-power to account for the shadow side of the world. The one God holds both ends of the rope.

Second-Temple Reception: Sirach and Wisdom

The centuries between Isaiah and the New Testament show Second-Temple Judaism pulling this claim in two directions, and the deuterocanonical books — valuable as historical witnesses to how Jews read their Scriptures, though not authoritative as canon — preserve both. Sirach, written in Hebrew around 180 BC and surviving in a Greek grandson's translation, restates Isaiah's claim almost without flinching. "Good things and bad [κακά, G2556], life and death, poverty and wealth — all are from the Lord" (Sirach 11:14): the same pairing of good and bad as gifts from one hand. And in the great hymn on creation Sirach writes that "good things were created [ἔκτισται, from κτίζω, G2936] for the good from the beginning, and so also bad things [κακά] for sinners" (Sirach 39:25), going on to name fire, hail, famine, and pestilence among the things "created for vengeance" (Sirach 39:29–30). Sirach's potter image — "as clay in the potter's hand... so are men in the hand of their maker," shaped "two by two, one opposite the other" (Sirach 33:13–15) — even picks up the potter language and the paired-opposites structure, echoing the very verse that follows our text (Isaiah 45:9, "shall the clay say to the potter?"). Sirach simply holds Isaiah's ground.

The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek perhaps a century later (deuterocanonical, and not carrying the Strong's apparatus the canonical books do), pulls the other way. "God did not make death," Wisdom insists, "and he does not delight in the destruction of the living" (Wisdom 1:13); rather, "God created man for incorruption... but through the devil's envy death entered the world" (Wisdom 2:23–24). Here a mediating agent — the devil — is introduced precisely to keep the darker outcome at a distance from God. This is the beginning of a theodicy trajectory that Isaiah's verse does not take. The tension should not be overstated: Wisdom is addressing the origin of physical death and moral corruption, while Isaiah 45:7 is asserting cosmic and historical sovereignty over weal and woe. They are not answering quite the same question. But the two books do lean in opposite directions, and the difference is real.

The canonical text holds the ground that the later witnesses then divide. Isaiah 45:7 will not let YHWH off the hook for the hard half of the world, and it will not hand that half to anyone else. It keeps the categories distinct — light is not darkness, well-being is not calamity — and it lays them all, both the bright and the bitter, in the hand of the one God who says, "I am Yahweh, and there is no other."