God Rests: Genesis 2.1-3

Over the last couple posts, I’ve said a few times something to the effect of how the creation of humanity “can be” “in many ways” considered to be the pinnacle of the Genesis 1 creation story. One might ask why such hedging is necessary. Well, the Genesis 1 story does not end at 1.31, but carries on for the first three verses of chapter 2. And one could easily propose that these verses, describing God’s rest on the seventh day, are the true climax of the story. And it’s these three verses that will be the focus of today’s post

Text

[2.1] Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. [2] And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. [3] So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

Experience & Encounter

These verses always fascinate me. Both the words themselves and the God we encounter in them open up a series of questions — or better, mysteries — unanswerable, profound, and compelling. What is the significance of the number seven? Who is this God who rests? Since (presumably) God cannot tire, what does this rest mean? And what does it mean to bless and ‘hallow’ the seventh day?

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Seven

The number seven is an essential structural motif in the Genesis 1 story. Not only is the narrative organized into seven days, but seven appears throughout in the story’s “microstructure” (Baukham 177; cf. Sarna (1989) 4):

• The description of the primordial state of affairs is (in Hebrew) made up of three sets of seven words (1.1 is seven words long, 1.2 is fourteen)
• The narrative comprises seven literary units
• The formula for the ‘effectuation of the divine will’ appears seven times
• The formula of divine approval appears seven times
• God blesses the seventh day

Seven is important throughout the Scriptures, symbolizing perfection. It forms the basis of ancient Judaism and Christianity’s numerology (distinct from the medieval, base-10 Jewish numerology, well-known from Kabbalah), so that the number six is considered ‘the worst’ number (e.g., 666 in Revelation 13), seven is ‘perfection’ (e.g., the seven praises of Psalm 119, or Jesus’ teaching to forgive 77 times in Matthew 18), and eight is ‘hyper-perfection’ (e.g., early Christian teaching about Jesus’ resurrection happening on the eighth day of the week). The priestly calendar was also organized around the number seven (see Numbers 29.17-32), which may have informed the seven-day structure of the Genesis 1 story (Sarna (1989) 14, Smith 88). (See the ‘Challenge’ section of the post on the structure of this story for some discussion of why Genesis 1 likely uses a pre-existing signification for the number rather than creating it.)

The importance of seven in the Hebrew tradition was both in keeping with and divergent from its Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) neighbours. We have evidence of seven-day symbolism as early as the 22nd century BCE, and seven-day units of time are found in literatures throughout the ANE (Sarna (1989) 4). While there is no evidence of anything like the Bible’s Sabbath tradition elsewhere in the ANE, there was apparently a trope of the seventh day marking a sharp turn after a six-day pattern, whether in a story or festival (Sarna (1989) 4, Smith 88). This is exactly what we see here in Genesis 1, with God resting on the seventh day after working for six. While seven-day structures were common in the Bible and the wider ANE literary world, Genesis 1 appears to be unique in deploying this structure in a creation story (Sarna (1989) 14).

All this seems to point to God’s rest on the seventh day, and not the creation of humanity, as the climax of the Genesis 1 story. It suggests that, while the creation of humanity may be the final movement of the first six days, it still remains part of that action, and not the ‘game changer.’

This interpretation could be seen to fly in the face of the general thrust of 1.3-31, which unquestionably feels like it’s building a world specifically for human habitation, with humanity, made in the image and likeness of God, as its crowing glory. This potential mismatch is another reason why some scholars have posited that the seven-day, Sabbath-oriented, structure was a later imposition on the story (Carr). The problem with this suggestion is that God’s rest at the end of the story seems to mirror a scene of the gods participating in a religious festival at the end of the Enuma Elish, which as we’ve seen, is a text after which Genesis 1 seems to pattern.

However we understand this, it’s clear that the number seven was sacred in ANE cultures, including ancient Hebrew culture. The number symbolism indicates that creation, and especially God’s rest at the end of creation, is understood to be perfect, complete, and whole.

But why is God’s rest given such importance in this story?

God’s Rest

Surprisingly little space has been dedicated in biblical scholarship to the question of the nature of or reason for God’s rest on the seventh day. The text itself gives no clues, simply saying that God rested on the seventh day and blessed and hallowed it for ever. One solution could be found in, once again, the Enuma Elish. This story ends with the gods erecting a temple to Marduk and celebrating with a great feast (Sarna (1989) 15).

I’ve encountered two different hypotheses for how God’s rest in Genesis 2.1-3 might be playing with that story. First is a simple contrast in character: the God of the Bible does not need to be feted in grand style with temples erected in their honour; this God simply looks at creation, declares it to be ‘very good’, and then rests after a good week’s work. Second is the suggestion put forth by Jewish scholars that, while the Babylonian story ends with the sanctification of space through the building of a temple, the Genesis 1 story ends with the sanctification of time (Sarna (1989) 15, Heschel). Heschel proposed that Judaism was a religion of time, not space, and grounds this idea in this story, where the first occurrence of the concept of holiness is about time, not space. He wrote:

While the deities of other peoples were associated with places or things, the God of Israel was the God of events: the Redeemer from slavery, the Revealer of the Torah, manifesting Himself in events of history rather than in things or places.

This is a fascinating idea, but it falls by the either/or attitude. For the holiness of places and things is certainly a major theme in the Old Testament, with altars built in the wilderness at places where the patriarchs had encountered God (e.g., Genesis 12.7-8, 13.18, 26.25, etc.), the holy mountains of Horeb/Sinai (e.g., Exodus 19.23) and Zion (e.g., Psalm 48), the Tabernacle (e.g., Exodus 26), and Temple (1 Kings 8), and those who irreverently touched holy objects put to death (e.g., 2 Samuel 6.6-8)! And, the religious aspects of the trauma of the Exile were precisely because place was so closely associated with God. As the famous Psalm puts it, “

By the rivers of Babylon — there we sat down
and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
[…]
How can we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land? (Psalm 137.1, 4)

So I don’t think we can say that the Scriptures sanctify time instead of space. But, I do think that we can say that Judaism is a religion of time, rather than space, and that the experience of the Exile — most likely the setting for the writing of this story — was what marked the start of this shift, which came to its ultimate fruition with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. Forcefully pulled away from their holy places, the exiles in Babylon discovered that God was still present with them. They could in fact sing the LORD’s songs on the banks of the Euphrates as well as they could on Mount Zion.

And with this in mind, this could very well be what the writers or editors of the Genesis 1 story were doing here, re-shaping the ending of their captors’ myth to make the newly-discovered point that God does not need a temple or holy mountain as a dwelling place, and that the blessing and holiness of time should take precedence.

Rest and Sabbath

The custom of Sabbath-keeping hangs over this passage, but is not explicitly mentioned here. God rests (and the Hebrew is a verbal form related to the word for the Sabbath), and blesses, and sets the seventh day apart, but it is not linked directly to the Jewish custom (Barton & Muddiman 43, Sarna (1966) 19). A direct link is made in Exodus 20.11, but not in Deuteronomy 5.14-15, which grounds Sabbath-keeping in the Exodus. Both are instructive, I think. For who better to understand the value of labour and rest than those freed from enslavement? The setting apart of the seventh day here in Genesis 2.1-3 separates work from rest, in a sense hallowing both.

That there is an intended link between God’s rest here and further Sabbath-keeping, however, is clear. The question again becomes which inspired the other: Are our verses here an after-the-fact justification of Sabbath-keeping (which also happened to disrupt the dominant narrative of their enemy’s story) or did Sabbath-keeping originate in the Hebrews’ core beliefs about creation? I’ve already spent time both above and in a previous post talking about this relationship, so I won’t rehash it here. The point for us is that this story certainly has the Sabbath in mind and deploys it creatively in its theological take-down of Babylonian mythology.

Expand

So what do these verses contribute to our understanding of the Genesis 1 story, which they conclude? The study of how the number seven was used in ANE literature suggests that rather than being the story’s denouement, the seventh day is actually its climax, a dramatic narrative turn. This mitigates the anthropocentrism with which the rest of the story can be charged; it is God, not humanity that is the focus of the story. Here, this ‘6+1’ turn is from work to rest, signalling the importance of the Sabbath and promoting a worldview where work and rest are both held in value.

We’ve also seen that by hallowing time rather than space in this way, these verses reveal the dawning of the realization, forged in the harsh realities of Exile, that God truly is universal, and can therefore be worshiped anywhere and will not leave the people, even when they are not present in the Land of Promise.

All in all, this is a powerful end to a powerful story.

 

* For full information, see the series bibliography.