Blessing & Separation (Gen 2:3)

Reading through the story of creation

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 8^th day and even a 14^th (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:

Separate [קַדֶּשׁ] for Me every firstborn issue of every womb among the Israelites, of humans and of animals; they are Mine. [Exod 13:2]

We’ll have more to say about the status of the firstborn even before we get to Exodus. For now, the point is that they are distinguished from the rest of the animals who otherwise are just like them.

We have already seen, starting on Day One, that the idea of separation and distinction is tremendously important in the story of Creation Week. We earthlings — being the final created things in the world, and being created in God’s image — like to imagine that we are the culmination of the biblical story of creation, and in some sense that is certainly true. But the true culmination is this more metaphysical one: the ultimate separation, in which time itself is separated into ordinary time and sacred time.

We should not be surprised. The fact that the six days of Creation Week formed a diptych, in which the first three days somehow corresponded to the second three, are enough to help us realize now that the seventh day is separate. Jewish tradition suggests that the “lonely” seventh day was consoled by being given the Jews as its partner. As computer programmers used to like to say, God “made it a feature” (not a failing).

in that on it He had sabbathed from all His work כִּ֣י ב֤וֹ שָׁבַת֙ מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּ֔וֹ

This is the first time we have been given a reason for anything in the creation story. We’ve been able to follow a certain logic in it, and we’ve certainly seen that some of the creations had a purpose; now we are told in plain Hebrew why the seventh day is being given this special, separate status. The fact that God finished creation on this day and ceased to create any more elevates it above other days.

The Original Six days of creation (you’re welcome, hockey fans) are succeeded by a unique day of special blessing, made so because God’s cessation of work somehow — through “blessing” and “setting apart” — has imbued it with a unique character. I translated כי ki here as “in that” for a simple reason: This is the same Hebrew word we have previously seen six times when God saw “that” something was good. The word itself is extremely common, occurring (per DCH) 4488 times in the Bible, and I will guarantee you that I will not use the English word “that” 4,488 times to translate it. But I wanted to highlight this seventh ki here. “In that” of course means that God blessed the seventh day and set it apart because that was the day on which he had “sabbathed” from his work.

We’ve talked before about the rest of this phrase. I’ll just add here another comment by Gary Rendsburg, matching what he said about “the big light” of Gen 1:16, that the writer specifically avoids using the noun shabbat here “so as not to invoke Saturn/Shabtai.” I think, rather, that the earthly Sabbath is being saved in order to give it to the Jews when they become God’s “kingdom of priests” (Exod 19:6). This is the cosmic Sabbath, built in to the structure of the universe but separate and apart from the world of created things.

There are only two more words left in this version of the creation story — but they are much more complicated than they look to be in English translations of the Bible. So we are going to save them until next time.

1. A discussion of such verbs in Hebrew, including ברך as well as קדשׁ, is in Jose Faur, “Delocutive Expressions in the Hebrew Liturgy,” JANES 16 (1984).