Several months ago I wrote an article about the creation account in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and, in particular, about what a “day” in that passage means.I left something important out, however, in that I failed to say anything about the seventh day. I’m not alone in overlooking the seventh day, of course. Any number of Christians have written or spoken about the six days of creation. But the Bible actually gives us a seven day creation story, not a six day one. Seven, not six, is the number that signifies completion, and the more I’ve dug into this passage of Scripture, the more I’ve become convinced that the seventh day, rather than being an afterthought, is actually the climax that everything is building toward. It is the seventh day that gives the previous six their meaning.
But to explain why I think that, I need to lay some background. In my earlier article I pointed out that the Hebrew word yôm and the English word “day” have a similar range of meaning. This is important to note, because that is not always true of Hebrew and English words. For example the Hebrew word for father – ‘āḇ – is much less specific than the English word. Since yôm can mean a number of different things, it’s important to discover what it does mean in any particular instance. In the case of the creation story, I argued that the meaning is made clear within the text itself:
God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night” (Genesis 1:5).
In other words, yôm in this passage does not refer either to a twenty-four hour period (as some maintain) or to an indeterminately long epoch (as others argue), but it specifically means daytime. God is portrayed here as working all day and stopping at dusk. He then looks back and takes pride in a job well done – he calls it “good.” After that there is evening, and then morning, and God begins his work again the next day.
If you’re thinking that this sounds more like a human pattern than something an omnipotent God would do, you’re right, and that’s on purpose. Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is giving us a picture of God in human terms, a type of metaphor called anthropomorphism, that is extremely common in Scripture. And I already know that some people are going to object to the idea that the Biblical authors used metaphor, but it’s actually necessary. The Bible was written to be understood by people, and none of us has a frame of reference that would enable us to directly understand an omniscient, omnipotent being existing outside of space and time. To be understood at all, God has to explain himself in terms that make sense to finite men and women.
Examples of anthropomorphism in the Bible are abundant. To pick just a few within the books of Moses, we find God described as walking (Genesis 3:8), having an arm (Exodus 6:6), and breath (Exodus 15:10), and a hand, a back and a face (Exodus 33:22-23). Numbers 6:25-26 talks about God’s face again. In addition, God is described as coming down to see the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:5) and the sin of Sodom (Genesis 18:21). There are many more examples spread throughout the Bible. But God is not the only subject that Moses describes using metaphor. In Genesis 1:2 we read:
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
The chaos before the creation of time is pictured here as a vast, dark ocean. Not a universe filled with water but an actual ocean, with a surface that the Spirit of God can hover over. This is, again, a metaphor that appears many places in the Scriptures. Old Testament scholars sometimes refer to it as the “chaos waters.” And this metaphor of chaos as an ocean is also used in both Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythology to talk about the primordial state before the gods began shaping the world. Believers today might find it odd, and even a little disturbing, to hear that there are parallels between the Bible and pagan myth, but remember the world that ancient Israelites lived in. Pagan myths were familiar ideas. The people Moses was writing this for would not have found a reference to pagan mythology any stranger than we would find a reference to a popular movie in a Sunday sermon. It’s simply a way of helping people understand the message, by drawing on images that they’re already familiar with. The same thing that metaphors do.
Any ancient Israelite reading or hearing this beginning would have understood that Moses was taking the myths they all knew and correcting them. Not correcting the science, because mythology doesn’t have any science to correct. Myths speak through symbols, and the people in the ancient near east, who were just as intelligent as we are today, knew that. But myths also speak in terms of theology, teaching people about the nature of the gods, and that was what the Holy Spirit used Moses to correct. The Israelites needed to know that there were not many gods, but one God, without rival, existing outside the world as Creator, not acting capriciously, but bringing order out of chaos.
They needed to know also that God frequently acts indirectly, using his creation to fulfill his purposes within creation. Not always – he doesn’t have to do things that way – but often. And that’s also part of the creation story. God used the dry land to produce vegetation (Genesis 1:11-12). He used lights in the sky to create light, and to separate light from darkness (Genesis 1:14-15). (How God used the lights created on day four to do the work on day one is a subject for a different article.)
And God doesn’t just use inanimate objects, he also creates living agents. On day five we see him begin the process of filling the skies and the seas with living creatures, but then bless the creatures themselves to continue that work (Genesis 1:22). He gives the same blessing to mankind on day six, and much more besides. Moses tells us that humanity was created to “subdue” (Hebrew kāḇaš) the earth and to “rule” (Hebrew rāḏâ) the other living creatures (Genesis 1:26-28). Both of these words are violent. They are not terms that would be used for peacefully managing the world, but for bringing order to a world that is not yet what it is intended to be. An Israelite at the time of Moses would have understood this passage to be saying that mankind was created to as God’s agents to finish the work of creation that he began.
And with this background, we finally get to the seventh day:
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done (Genesis 2:1-3).
For six days we’ve seen God working all day to finish that day’s work, then stopping for the night and beginning again the next day. Now he does something different. The very fact that the pattern changes calls attention to the change. This is something that Moses wanted his readers to especially notice, although he doesn’t say why. At least, not yet. Not until Exodus does he reveal that this is the pattern that God’s human agents are also expected to follow:
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Exodus 20:8-11).
Now, it’s critical at this point to remember that Genesis was not written for Adam and Eve; it was written for the people who came out of Egypt at the time of Moses, or more likely for their children. And those people did not hear this command for the first time when they read the book, but when the commands were given to them at Mt. Sinai (or, for the children, when their parents taught them the commandments). In other words, the creation account in Genesis was read by people who already knew what God had commanded about the Sabbath. In that context, the account of the seventh day in Genesis 2:1-3 would have been an “aha” moment that made it clear just why Moses (or rather, why the Holy Spirit) used the metaphor of anthropomorphism in this passage. God is demonstrating for his human agents how they are to go about doing their part of completing the great work of creation.
At the beginning of Genesis, God humbles himself to appear as a human worker, just as later he will humble himself even further and actually take on human form. Not for any benefit to himself, but as a blessing to his agents. As Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). By this point in the narrative, God has shown that he is all-powerful, that he is orderly and that he uses his creation – including (but not limited to) the people he created – to accomplish his purposes in creation. In this final day, God reveals that he is compassionate toward his servants.
The seventh day, then, is not just one last final touch to a six-day creation. Rather, it is the climax that the entire sequence is building toward. Seven is a number representing completion, and the creation is not complete without the Sabbath. The seventh day is the very reason that the Holy Spirit describes creation in the way he does – as a six-day pattern that calls the reader’s attention to the day when the pattern changes.
There is still more to be found in Genesis 1:1-2:3. Much more. But this is enough for one article. As I’ve said before, in other articles, this passage in Genesis is not about the creation of the world, it’s about the Creator of the world; who he is, and how he wants to interact with his people. And it’s about who we are in relation to the Creator. We are not slaves (as most Near Eastern pagan mythologies assert) but agents who bear God’s image. A God who humbles himself for no other reason than to show compassion to his people. This is the message of the seventh day. And it’s a message that we, today, need to hear as well.