Gen 2:2. God’s Ceasing of Work and Blessing and Sanctification of the Seventh DayThough the report of God’s creation work concludes with 2:1, Gen 2:2 seems to reopen the conclusion in order to introduce God’s anticipation of the later Sabbath. The core of the verse, the statement of God’s ceasing from God’s work on the seventh day in 2:2b, seems clear. As discussed in the translation commentary, it is less clear whether this statement about God’s stopping of work is preceded by a description of God concluding God’s work on the sixth day (so LXX, SP, and Peshitta) or on the seventh day (MT). Both readings are difficult, and neither is crucial for interpretation of the chapter. Either way, the statement in Gen 2:2a about God’s concluding God’s work merely introduces the following statement about God’s ceasing work on the seventh day (2:2b).
God then goes on to “bless” the seventh day and set it apart from the others (2:3). This use of the term ברך (“bless”) is somewhat unusual, since it does not directly refer in this case to God’s empowering of the life force of living beings.113 Perhaps on analogy with the idea of God’s institution of self-replicating life forms in Gen 1:11–28, this verse means to imply that God instituted a replicating seventh day, set apart in an ongoing way from the other six days of the week. Just as plants reproduced from seeds “each according to its kind” as do birds, sea and land creatures, so also God “blessed” this seventh day by not just resting on the initial seventh day, but “setting it apart” (קדש piel) in the future. Through this “blessing” and “setting aside” the seventh day thus becomes part of God’s creation order, though this day is distinguished from others by not quoting an initial divine decree. The divine speech is only implied in the verbs “bless” and “set aside.”
Nothing more is said here about how the seventh day is set apart. God never commands that anyone else cease work like God did on the seventh day. Indeed, there is no specific implication that God or anyone else will do so on another seventh day.114 Yet it is not a coincidence that interpreters have thought of later Sabbath commands to Israel when reading this text. The text’s descriptions of God’s prior creation work are infused with expressions used to describe six days of work in later Sabbath commands to Israel, such as “all of his work” (כל מלאכתו; Gen 2:2, 3)115 and “do work” עשה מלאכה (twice in 2:2), and the verb used here for God’s act on the seventh day is שבת (šbt “cease, stop”; 2:2, 3) rather than the more generic נוח (rest).116 Therefore, even though the noun “Sabbath” never occurs here and the Sabbath commands will only come much later to Israel (and be specific to Israel), this text suggests that some sort of ongoing Sabbath-oriented week structure was established already by God at creation when God “blessed” the seventh day by “set[ting] it apart” after doing “his work” for the previous six days.
The theme of divine rest after creation is seen in some famous Mesopotamian cosmogonies, such as the Atrahasis and Enuma Elish epics, but in those contexts a high god creates humanity as part of a project to ease labor originally done by lower deities.117 There is no such implication here. Genesis 1 gives no suggestion that God’s rule and creation-work was previously onerous. On the contrary, God’s sovereign creation speeches and immediate execution across Gen 1:3–27 convey a sense of effortless creation. Perhaps this is another reason why Gen 2:2–3 never uses the word “rest” that occasionally occurs in Sabbath commands (cf. Exod 23:12 and Deut 5:14). Instead, Gen 2:2 merely echoes the word “Sabbath” by using the verb šābat to describe God’s “ceasing” from God’s work on the seventh day. This avoids any implication here that God might need to “rest” from being tired from creating the cosmos by command(s).
Conclusion: Divergent Patterns Spanning Gen 1:1–2:3
Looking back at the broader whole, numerous commentators have noted broader patterns binding together Gen 1:1–2:3. Probably the most common has been the observation, often associated with Herder, of a balance between the four creation acts spread across days one through three and those spread across days four through six.118 Some of the correspondences can be indicated as follows:
| Day One: creation of light | Day Four: creation of heavenly “lights” (sun, moon, stars) |
| Day Two: splitting of primeval ocean through the heavenly plate | Day Five: creation of creatures that live in the sea and birds flying across the heavenly plate |
| Day Three: (1st act) revealing of earth by gathering waters and then | Day Six: (1st act) creation of land animals and creepers and then |
| (2nd act) Making earth sprout seed bearing plants and trees with fruit trees | (2nd act) creation of humans as God’s image and giving humans plants and tree fruits for food (animals are given seed-bearing plants for food) |
This pattern highlights how the eight acts spread over six days described in Gen 1:3–31 are distributed into two sets of three days, with the last day of each three-day set, days three and six, having two acts. All six of these days are understood here as a block, concluded by a sixth day marked separately as “the” sixth day (1:31a), and standing over against the seventh day on which God ceased from the work of all preceding six days.
At the same time, Odil Hannes Steck has argued persuasively that the acts spread across days two through six manifest an even tighter relationship with each other, with the whole framed by the creation of day and night on day one (1:3–5) and the climax of the day structure on day seven (2:1–3). He argues that the core of the creation account is divided between an initial description of God’s creation of cosmic spaces (heavenly plate, sea, earth in 1:6–13) before describing God’s corresponding population of those spaces with stars and creatures (1:14–31). Both halves of the creation account, so Steck, are oriented toward the ultimate creation of humans, with the description of cosmic spaces starting with spaces not inhabited by humans (heaven and sea) and then climaxing with the human habitat of earth and the description of God’s population of those spaces starting with sea and air creatures before climaxing with humans.
| Spaces of Creation—Life Realms (farthest from human to nearest) | Filling of Spaces(farthest from human to creation of humans) |
| Time Thematic | |
| Act 1: heavenly plate | Act 4: Making and installation of heavenly “lights” in the heavenly plate |
| Life Thematic | |
| Act 2: gathering of waters—sea(revealing earth) | Act 5: Creation of sea creatures (and air creatures) |
| Act 3: plant/fruit-bearing earth | Act 6: Creation of animals (eating plants)Act 7: Creation of humans (eating plants and fruits) |
Steck admits that this observed pattern in 1:6–31 does not have the same balance as the 3+3 day scheme advanced by others. Nevertheless, he argues that it avoids the strange parallel in the 3+3 pattern between the making of the plate on day two and the creation of sea and air creatures on day five, and it better fits the actual sequence of the creation account as it builds, step by step, toward the creation of humans as its crowning element. Most particularly, Steck’s proposal highlights the human-oriented organization of the quite similarly-structured creation acts in 1:6–31.119
That said, Steck’s