God Finishes His Work (Gen 2:2)

Reading through the story of creation

2 Then God finished וַיְכַ֤ל אֱלֹהִים֙

Last time, Sky and Earth “were finished” (וַיְכֻלּ֛וּ va-y’khullu). Now, with another consecutive verb indicating that this was the next thing that happened, God “finished” (וַיְכַ֤ל va-y’khal). If we follow the grammatical logic, all the things that were to be created have been created already, but that summary statement is not so until after there has been a complete Day Six — as if Day Six itself were part of the created world. I may be overthinking it, but this seems to me to confirm that the suggestion that the creation of light on Day One involved the creation of time has some meaning to it.

There’s more going on here, however. The repetition of the verb כלה ‘finish’ tells me that even though Sky and Earth and all their auxiliaries have been made, creation is not over until Day Seven. There is something more to the universe than the material world. What that something this will begin to be developed later in the verse.

on the seventh day בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י

Here is the phrase that — one might argue — confirms the grammar of the verb. To repeat what I’ve said a number of times, a “consecutive” verb means the action is continuing. Day Six is over, all the things that are to be made have been made, and God finishes on the seventh day.

If you find this logic puzzling, you are not the first to do so. The ancient translators did so as well. That at least appears to be the case from the LXX, which reads here ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ ἕκτῃ ‘on the sixth day’. The editorial note in BHS, the Bible scholars use nowadays, has the following note on the word הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י ha-sh’vi’i ‘seventh’:

^a ⅏𝔊𝔖 הַשִּׁשִּׁי

That little bit of editorial shorthand is their way of telling us that the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, and the Peshitta all have the equivalent of הַשִּׁשִּׁי ha-shishi ‘sixth’. In the case of the Samaritan, we are looking at precisely that Hebrew word, though the Samaritan Torah is written in Paleo-Hebrew, the script used before the exile to Babylonia in 586 BCE. The Syriac language in which the Peshitta is written is a dialect of Aramaic, as we’ve mentioned before, but uses a script I’ve long ago forgotten how to read. (If you can read it, the word is ܫܬܝܬܝܐ.)

But the Targumim — the Aramaic versions that have been preserved among Jews — all use the Aramaic equivalent of sh’vi’i ‘seventh’. To me, it seems that the “versions” (as scholars call the ancient translations) thought they were correcting a mistake (note that the Vulgate die septimo follows the MT).

Finishing the work on the seventh day, however, is no mistake. Something happened on that day; in fact, something was created on that day, though it was not an object. Rabbi Chaim Brovender has an amusing way of putting it:

The creation of the world started on Sunday and ended on Friday, with the exception of Shabbat, which was created on Shabbes.¹

The universe was not complete until this day for rest and relaxation was created. We’ll talk more about its name when we get to the phrase after next.

the work He had done  מְלַאכְתּ֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂ֑ה

My Accordance biblical search program finds 95 verses in the Bible where the words עשה asah ‘do, make’ and מלאכה m’la’khah ‘work’ are combined, sometimes, as in our verse, more than once. The Ten Commandments uses exactly this combination to insist:

The seventh day is a Sabbath to YHWH your God. You must not do any work.

וְי֙וֹם֙ הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔֜י שַׁבָּ֖֣ת ׀ לַיהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֑֗יךָ לֹֽ֣א־תַעֲשֶׂ֣֨ה כָל־מְלָאכָ֡֜ה

ve-yom ha-sh’vi’i shabbat la-YHWH elohekha lo ta’aseh m’la’khah

I am not going to get into the subject of what “work” is; with regard to the Sabbath, Jewish law recognizes 39 categories of work that are forbidden, based on the tradition that 39 different kinds of work had to be done to build the Tabernacle. The instructions for making it end with a warning, אַ֥ךְ אֶת־שַׁבְּתֹתַ֖י תִּשְׁמֹ֑רוּ “But you must keep my Sabbaths!” The presumption is therefore that all these kinds of work are forbidden on the Sabbath.

In our verse, I have a very different issue with the word מלאכה. This is a noun, quite a common one, that derives from the root לאך. This root is a verb in some Semitic languages, but not in Hebrew. There is one other noun derived from this root that’s quite common in Biblical Hebrew, מלאך mal’akh, which means “messenger.” When the messenger is sent by God, the word is usually translated into English as “angel.” Malachi was not the prophet’s name; it is a word that means “my messenger.”

The point I’m making here is that, just as a mal’akh is sent by someone superior for whom the mal’akh is performing a mission, so too m’la’khah is really a job, a task that is set you by someone else or at the very least by external circumstances. “Working” on your tan is not a m’la’khah.

I don’t think Genesis 2 is telling us that we are to understand what happens in Genesis 1 as a job that God was sent by someone else to do. There is a certain religious perspective, often associated with Gnosticism, that the world was created by a lesser god sent by an infinite, transcendent god to — so to speak — get his hands dirty with that job. This cannot be the message we are intended to hear from this story, for two reasons:

• This God, further identified by his actual name, will indeed get his hands dirty in the next version of the creation story, which we’ll be talking about before too long. In this version of the story, God is creating the physical world from outside it.

• Our version of the story has been careful to make clear that God created the world alone. Later in the Bible we will find many gods, but they are not on the scene here. It would make no sense to hint that God was sent to do this task by some more powerful, unnamed god.

I conclude that (as rabbinic literature often says) “the Torah is speaking here in human language” — and specifically in the same language used to prohibit work on the Sabbath, which is indeed the creation of the seventh day, as we will see next time.

There’s another meaning of מלאכה, though, that I think applies here as well. You’ll see it in Exod 22:7 (for example). This is part of the Covenant Code, a body of legal rules, and the situation in v. 7 is that someone has left some property (“money or goods” according to the NJPS translation of v. 6) in another person’s care — and the stuff has been stolen. The caretaker must swear that he himself has not laid hands on “the other’s property” — literally, on that other person’s מלאכה.

That is, the Earth and the Sky and all they contain are not merely the result of God’s work; they are God’s property — his stuff. Permit me to remind you also that the Tabernacle is a world in miniature, and the construction of the Tabernacle in some ways parallels this account of creation. That construction ends this way:

וַיְכַ֥ל מֹשֶׁ֖ה אֶת־הַמְּלָאכָֽה׃ Moses finished the work/the goods.

Perhaps both meanings are intended there as well: the מלאכה that Moses finished was the work of making the Tabernacle and its components but also the components themselves. In that case, at least, we know who assigned this מלאכה to him.

In our next post, we’ll see the implicit creation of the Sabbath. Humanity may be the acme of the created world, but it is the Sabbath that is the acme of creation as a whole. See you next time.

1. Shabbát is the Hebrew word for “Sabbath”; shábbes is the Yiddish pronunciation of the word.