3 God blessed the seventh day; וַיְבָ֤רֶךְ אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־י֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י
This is the third time God has done the verb ברך:
In 1:22, God “blessed” the creatures of Sea and Sky, implicitly giving them the power to fulfill the commands that follow: Reproduce and proliferate.
In 1:28, God “blessed” the earthlings, implicitly giving them the power not only to reproduce but also to fulfill the other commands given them: to subdue the earth and control the rest of the animals.
Now God blesses the seventh day — but what follows is not a command.
We know, because the sun has been set in operation, that there will be an 8th day and even a 14th (the seventh day of the second week). This seventh day does not need to be told to reproduce or blessed in order for there to be more days, even more “seventh days.”
So what is happening here? This time, the action of blessing is followed by a second action of God:
then He set it apart וַיְקַדֵּ֖שׁ אֹת֑וֹ
We’ll come back in a moment to the translation of the verb va-y’qadesh. First I want to remind you that this verb form tells us it is a second, subsequent action. Given that it succeeds the action of blessing and that the seventh day does not need any special power of its own in order to reproduce, this blessing must be enabling it to grow not quantitatively but qualitatively.
Now the root קדשׁ q-d-sh. This root gives us the nouns קדושׁ ‘holy’, קודשׁ ‘holiness’, and מקדשׁ ‘sanctuary’. The verb can be translated “consecrate, hallow, make [something] holy,” and various Bible translations can be found that use those words.
An interesting and more unusual choice is that of NJPS: “declared it holy.” This is based on the idea of what I was taught to call a “delocutive” verb, that is, a verb declaring something to be so.1 A common example is the statement, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” Nothing about the physical world has changed, but someone who is understood to have the legal, social, and/or spiritual power to turn two single people into a married couple utters those words and effects the change by doing so. A minute ago everyone from your family to the IRS thought you were single; some air comes out of someone's mouth and now all those people think you are married.
The NJPS translation sees God making such an announcement here, making the seventh day holy by announcing it to be so. Whether God is declaring the seventh day to be qadosh or somehow making it qadosh, this is the way in which “blessing” is to be achieved.
That still leaves us with the problem of what holiness is, what it means for the seventh day to be declared holy. The once-standard Brown-Driver-Briggs dictionary of Biblical Hebrew says of this root:
poss. orig. idea of separation
Bingo! Let’s look as well at the second time this root appears in the Bible, which will not happen again for another 60 chapters:
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