It all depends on what expectations you bring to a text. If you were brought up in the first generations of when the Hebrew Scriptures came into the Tanak collection, you would have been taught how to read it, and you would have been taught the Genesis 1 is teaching you how to read biblical literature.
That's why it's probably one of the most exquisitely designed pages of the Hebrew Bible. Down to syllables and word numbers, every sentence has this exquisite design. It's a remarkable page of the Hebrew Bible. And I think it's because it's the tutorial lesson. It's the Psalm 1. Tim: Yeah, you learn how to read biblical literature by spending a lot of time staring at every possible facet of Genesis 1. This is a great example. Jon: So seven words in Genesis , 14 words in Genesis , in the third verse, we begin day one, and throughout this entire literally unit poem is seven days.
Tim: Yeah, that's right. Now, let's take the next step. Remember the first sentence of Genesis , we had seven words and then the fourth word was "et" it had the first and the last. So now all of a sudden, I've learned from the first sentence, "Oh, when there is seven, pay attention to the middle and see what happens. Once I've learned that principle, when I look at the seven days, if I look at the middle, something happens.
Tim: It would be day four. When you look at the beginning and the middle and the end of the seven days, namely days one, four, and seven, the first and the last, and the middle, you notice that all of those three days are about time.
They're all about time. Day one is the darkness is interrupted by God's light, and he names that day and night. That's the order of time. Day four is about God appointing the sun and the moon as rulers of day and night, and also the stars.
Oh, and remember in Genesis , it says, "Let the lights be for signs. They're symbols. And then the next word is and for moedim is the Hebrew word, but it's the word for Israel's feast days.
It gets translated seasons in English, which makes English readers think of fall, winter, spring. That is not what it means. Tim: Moedim, that word seasons and our English translations of Genesis is the word used in the rest of the Torah for Passover for the new year, for Pentecost, for tabernacles and the Day of Atonement, and then also for the year of release and for Shabbat. I think in 23 there are seven of these moedim that Israel was to celebrate. Tim: Then you move to the seventh day, the last day of Genesis 1, which is the seventh, here we're introduced to God's Shabbat on the seventh day.
And then that Shabbat, the culminating seventh day becomes the model for the seventh year of release which becomes the model for the seven times seven year of release in the Jubilee. If you think about it, this is setting up an ancient Israelite to see that all of the patterns of my building my life around patterns of honoring Yahweh, day and night, day one, I say the Shema in the beginning of the day, I say the Shema at the end of the day.
That represents day one. Day four is all about the annual festivals. Day seven is all about Shabbat and the seventh year release - the seven times seven year Jubilee. So the whole of Jewish Jon: I only generally see the Shabbat in day seven.
But you're saying day one and day four are also speaking to them. Tim: The beginning, the middle, and the end of the seven days are all about different aspects of time that God is orchestrating and organizing. And conveniently all three of those days represent the entirety of the daily, monthly, yearly, seven times seven yearly, the whole calendar of Israel's liturgy and worship is outlined in these three days of Genesis 1.
Dude, it's just like Jon: Stepping back, you come to Genesis 1, and the story about everything coming into existence. And so it's like, why do we exist? Why does any of this matter? And day one, light and darkness are separated. Tim: And they're named day and night, which are units of time that are meaningful to humans and life - cycles of life. Jon: Then day four, the sun, moon, and stars that's when they show up. We've talked about these in-depth and other conversations.
They're rulers of the sky - and that's a whole nother conversation - but they're also symbols and they're also helping you know when to do the feast days. Jon: All seven of them. And all the feast days - and I'm sure we'll get into this - they're all about Jon: And then you get to day seven, God rests on the seventh day. And that one really stands out and Tim: That's right.
In other words, the seventh day is part of Maybe think of a pyramid. Forget Lego blocks. Think of a pyramid. Tim: Well, maybe a pyramid made of Legos. I don't know. But the seventh day is like the top piece. It's the most visible and prominent, but it is actually one piece of a whole superstructure of networked patterns of time. And so the smallest block is day and night. The daily repetition of the Shema, which corresponds to the daily morning and evening sacrifice in the temple, which corresponds to the daily maintenance of the lights, the candles of the menorah in the holy place.
Tim: We'll talk at length about it. Because there's seven of those lights in the holy place. Day one gives you the most basic little Lego block. Day four, within the scope of one year, it tells you all of the seven larger blocks that make up the whole years' worth of sacred time. Day seven points to the seventh day, which connects to the seventh year, which connects to the seventh time seventh year.
And so you put day one, four, and seven together, Genesis 1 is not just telling you about what kind of world I'm living in, it's giving you as a Israelite reader seeing that your life of worship rhythms is woven into the fabric of the universe. I' don't know if quite said it that way before. Tim: What else would it mean?
Because this is the first chapter of a book that's going to go on to tell you about all these things in the course of the narrative. Tim: Totally. At least when this came into existence. Nowadays, it's a much wider audience. But the awesome There's by whom these texts were written and for whom the first generations read it, they're seeing their own worship patterns reflected in the structure of Genesis.
And surely that's part of what it's for. Remember the opening line of Genesis 1? God created the skies and the land.
Genesis , little epilogue, thus we're finished - the sky is in the land and all their host. And then what you get next is three lines of seven words about the seventh day. Tim: "And God completed on the seventh day the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from his work which he had done.
And God blessed the seventh day and he made it holy. Followed by a final summary clause because on it, he rested from all his work which God created to do, which links "the create" second last word there is it back is "create" which links you all the way back up to the first line of "create. Genesis , you get two times seven words. Now here we are at the last little stanza, and you get three times seven words with a little ski-jump sentence that launches you with the word "create" all the way back up to the beginning again.
And then you go, "Oh, I guess I'm supposed to reread the chapter. Isn't this amazing? Tim: No, but it's the God completes his work on the seventh day, herested on the seventh day, he blessed the seventh day. You get a little triad verb. Then you get a repetition. Why did he bless it and make it holy? Because on it, he rested. It's the only line in the conclusion that tells you why he blessed and sanctified it.
So it stands out of a sequence of main sentences. Dude, we're just getting started on sevens. Tim: Yeah, totally. People have known this for a long time. There was an Italian Jewish commentator, Umberto Cassuto, who has a majestic commentary on Genesis Here's some other ones.
We've already mentioned some of these. They're seven words in Genesis There's 2 x 7 words in Genesis There's seven paragraphs in the seven days.
The concluding seventh day has three lines that have seven words each. Each of the keywords in Genesis are repeated in multiples of seven throughout the rest of the story. So God appears 7 x 5 number of times. Tim: Land appears 7 x 3 21 times. Skies with heavens appear 7 x 3 times. So skies and land each appear 21 times. Tim: The phrase "light and day" appears 7 times within day one. The word "light" appears 7 times within day four.
The word "living creature" appears 7 times within days five and six. The phrase "and God saw that it was good" appears 7 times. This is interesting. God speaks 10 times. Can I think I've got speaking, and the other times, 10 times that are going to be important? And in the book of Deuteronomy - did you know this? The phrase "ten commandments" is never used in the Hebrew Bible. Tim: God speaks 10 times. In other words, the phrase "and God said" appears ten times, but seven of those times are commands, "let there be.
So even within the ten, you get seven. Cassuto concludes this: "To suppose that all these appearances of the number seven are mere coincidence is not possible. This numerical symmetry is the golden thread that binds together all the parts of the section.
Whoever organized this narrative wants to grind into, bur into our psyche the symbolic importance of seven as a sign of completeness and wholeness. But also of seven as the culmination of a journey of one through six building up to seven. Because think about day one, day two, it's all building towards something.
The light and the waters from the waters and the land. Are we done? No, we're not done. We need to fill it with creatures. So we get the lights and we get the sky and the sea creatures. Are we done yet? No, we need the land and then humans who rule over all of it. But even the sixth day is not the culmination. It's that seventh day, which then sticks out Seven gains two meanings here: completeness and wholeness, but then also a journey towards wholeness building up to it.
That's helpful. I've never said it that way before. But I think that's right. Tim: In Genesis 1, seven, develops two key symbolic associations. One of them is that the seventh, one through seven all together is a symbol of completeness. Think about how days one through seven work together as a whole. It's like the beautiful whole cosmos is a seven. But then also, the journey to get to that completeness requires you to go through 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
So then it's about a linear journey towards completing. Seven is the complete whole. Counting up to seven is a journey to reach the complete whole. In a way, we're back to creation, the wholeness of creation, and the liberation from chaos and death and slavery Jon: One is that there's a sense of order and completion and God is in charge of all of the times. Jon: And because of that we should remember that we're not masters of our own time. But then the other idea is that the purpose of time is to culminate and rest.
Jon: And when we're controlling our time, when we're fighting, we're using our own energy to fight against darkness and disorder. There's also the sense of Sabbath, which is God will do that for you. The seventh day is about the complete harmonious order of God's world, the journey to the seventh day starting from darkness and disorder journeying 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is about the journey from darkness and disorder into that completeness and harmonious whole.
And so the seventh day contains both of those nuances. It'd be good to develop a shorthand for that. Maybe one is completeness and the other one is Tim: I mean, liberation, which is importing the Exodus into it, but that's where it's all going. In retrospect, Genesis 1 is about a kind of exodus of creation out of the darkness and disorder into Tim: Liberated into completeness. Oh, there you go. Liberation leading to completeness. But liberation and completeness are Tim: That's one main thing about Genesis 1 is think of where we start.
And that sets the table for clarifying what does it mean for God to Shabbat, to cease and rest? Jon: So we're going to talk about God resting and what does that mean. Before we get into that, why seven? Why the number seven as the number for completeness? Why not the number nine?
It could have been nine or fifteen or three. Those all would create nice symmetry as well. Tim: Yeah, three is a nice symmetry. In fact, it's simpler than seven, isn't it? Actually, I had a hard time finding resources in terms of ancient historians for any kind of consensus on the matter. However, the most repeated connection in the whole thing is actually phases of the moon. So a lunar cycle is - and here I'm quoting from an older work by a guy with a last name Farbridge wrote a classic work called Numbers Symbolism in Biblical and Semitic cultures.
The lunar cycle is Tim: The biblical Hebrew word for month is "Chodesh" and its way of talking about the moon cycle - the month. So you break that number down and what you get is a lunar month is - what?
A lunar month is essentially Tim: What you often find is ancient calendars Semitic and ancient Babylonian calendars that do a number of cycles of seven and then they have different ways to make up for Tim: Exactly. What you can also do then is instead of using the moon, do lunar cycles, which is what modern Western calendars are based off of lunar cycle.
Tim: That actually gets you a little cleaner. Because essentially you can do a solar year and then every four years you just have to add one extra day. Jon: And then every like thousand years, you don't skip that leap year.
Then because of that, we can stay on track for one year. Tim: Well, there you go. Here's something fascinating. That's true. Ancient historians in biblical scholarship have been trying to trace back the origins of the Sabbath practice in ancient Israel.
And so it's true they can spot certain cycles of time like an ancient Sumerian or Babylonian culture that use a seven structure somewhere but never as consistently as in the Jewish calendar. In the Jewish calendar, it's all about sevens. Actually, the Sabbath cycle is independent of the moon cycle. The Sabbath doesn't follow the moon. And so then some people debate, well, did it originally follow the moon cycle and then eventually it diverged from it?
But by the time you get to the shape of the Hebrew Bible, the final shape on the Second Temple period - again and always it's like a quilt - is organized way older materials. But the final shaping of the collection is second temple, then, even by that time, the seven-day cycle independent of the moon cycle is ancient even but for the Jewish people who are putting together the Tanak. In other words, the Sabbath cycle as a cycle of seven doesn't coincide with any natural phenomenon.
Tim: Nope. Which means that sometimes, there are some of Israel's feast days that connect with the first day of the month, and that stays independent. Like Rosh Hashanah is the first day of the seventh month of the religious calendar. And sometimes that's a Sabbath, sometimes it's not. Jon: It's interesting to think about how at some point in human history, it just became a normal We have the, you know, the sun and the moon of stars, but even so, the sun creates the days and that's really obvious.
That's obvious. But then you watch us lunar cycle, why break that up into four weeks? Someone had to just decide like, "You know what, it makes the most sense for us to repeat our lives in a pattern of seven-ish? Tim: Well, the strict seven-day cycle is the ancient Israelite Jewish thing that passed into Western culture through Jewish Christian tradition.
Babylonians used sevens partially but not consistently, not universally. Their calendar was not like the Jewish calendar. I haven't done the homework here in terms of ancient Greek and Roman calendars. Here's something. You and I have grown up in a culture where the seven day week is taken for granted.
We don't even understand this religious tradition, the Jewish Christian tradition was a minority ethnic-religious group for most of its earliest history.
The way they operated in their calendar was at odds with the world around them and their ways of accounting for calendar. And as we can't even imagine that. Jon: If you lived around Jewish people, and you're walking around and they'd be like, "Hey, it's Sabbath.
Think of why what we're most visible to the Canaanites or Greeks and Romans that would make Israelites and Jews stick out. Kosher food loss, circumcision, especially in the Greek and Roman era where everybody hangs out at the public pass, all the men, whether you're circumcised or not. It's public knowledge. And then calendar, they don't work. And so especially in the Greek and Roman era, the Sabbath practice earned in propaganda or anti-Semitic propaganda, ideas that the Jews are lazy.
This is where that comes from. Eventually, in the Roman Empire, Jews gained special exemptions for taxes and legal status as a legitimate religious group. So it was legal and acceptable that didn't work, and could pay certain taxes to Jerusalem. But it still was like in eyes of their neighbors they just are kooks. Jon: Making up the meaning of your calendar is kind of like November. You know like where everyone just grows a mustache, and it's like, "Why are you doing that?
It's November. This is a made-up thing. Tim: Oh, got it. Yeah, sure. Yeah, got it. And like in America anytime a new federal holiday is introduced, it's usually controversial. So yeah, the structure of time is not woven into the nature of reality. Tim: For an ant, it's just light, dark, light, dark. Humans bring meaningful structures to time and different cultures do it differently.
The biblical heritage has a structure of time that in its current shape in the Hebrew Scriptures, the seven-day cycle is not dependent on the moon or the sun or the seasons. Jon: It's not. I mean, you can see where I would have been inspired by the lunar cycle. But then to get strict and say, well, despite what the We're sticking with seven. Something about seven. Tim: And that's going to become important. It within the narrative of the Hebrew Bible; it's God's act of creation - God's ability to create organization out of out of nothingness.
The seven day pattern doesn't arise out of nature, it arises out of super nature, namely God's power to generate time and order. This is why in the Classic Jewish calendar, you can take the chronology of the Hebrew Bible all the way back to the first day of creation.
Tim: The seventh day of creation is the first Sabbath. You can work the chronology of the Hebrew Bible out I forget. We're in year 5,? Tim: Well, this is only in Jewish tradition. There's a Christian version of this too. In Orthodox Jewish circles, you mark the date by how many days and years it is from Genesis Tim: Because you can reconstruct the chronology of the Hebrew Bible in a certain way to get you all the way back to how many cycles does it take through the story of the Hebrew Bible to get you back to Genesis You can do it.
Tim: There's a common Ancient Near Eastern background to the meaning of seven as beginning something new. In other cultures it's tied to the lunar cycle of the seven day structure, but with a little Tim: The biblical seven day Sabbath structure as a symbol of completeness is also connected to another factor that's unique to Hebrew, namely, that the word fullness, for something to be full or complete, the word "fullness" or "completeness" is spelled with the same three letters as the number seven.
Sheva is the Hebrew word for seven, and then shaba is the Hebrew verb for to be full. That wordplay is capitalized on by the biblical authors many times. There's also the word shevuah or to swear an oath sheva is also a wordplay made in connection with Sabbath, namely, The Feast Day called shavuot or Pentecost is about you wait seven times seven days after Passover until Pentecost.
And then that's called shavuot, which can mean sevens or weeks. But it's also the same spelling is a Hebrew word for "oath. The Sabbath structure of time is about God's covenantal oath to structure all of time in creation. All that to say is the three letters It's God's oath or covenant about the structuring of time. All that say seven as a symbol of completeness is rich, is deep. And this is why I find the sevens all over the Hebrew Bible because it's such a common symbol of completeness.
Tim: We talked about this earlier. In Genesis , at to the completion on the seventh day, the skies and the land are complete, what God does the Hebrew verb for God resting is the verb shabbat where the word Sabbath comes from you. If you do a word study on shabbat, the verb occurs a lot, and it technically means to stop, to cease from.
Does it really matter that much? Luke, a Gentile writer of the New Testament, often refers to things that were particularly Jewish. Adam and Eve were the only two people who existed when God actually established the Sabbath. There were no Jews in the world until 2, years later, so it was never meant just for the Jews. The same word is used in connection with the institution of marriage that was also introduced at creation.
Certainly no Christian can believe that marriage was made only for the Jews. Every word is serious and meaningful. No line in them is ambiguous or mysterious.
And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made. Which day did God bless and sanctify? The seventh day. How was it to be kept holy? By resting. Could any of the other six be kept holy?
Because God commanded not to rest those days but to work. Of course. Parents pray for God to bless their children because they believe it makes a difference. Has God ever given man the privilege of choosing his own day of rest? In fact, God confirms in the Bible that the Sabbath is a matter settled and sealed by His own divine power. Read Exodus For 40 years, God worked three miracles every week to show Israel which day was holy: 1 No manna fell on the seventh day; 2 they could not keep manna overnight without spoilage; 3 but when they kept manna over the Sabbath, it remained sweet and fresh!
But some Israelites had the same idea as many Christians have today. God met them and accused them of breaking His law by going forth to work on the seventh day.
Would God say the same thing to those who break the Sabbath today? He is the same yesterday, today, and forever Hebrews But why the seventh day, exactly? Fact 4: We Know the True Seventh Day Some reject the seventh-day Sabbath over the belief that we cannot know which day it falls on today, so picking any day should be okay. But this is fallacy. Here are four proofs that identify the true Sabbath. Practically all churches acknowledge this by observing Easter Sunday and Good Friday.
And he took it down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid. And that day was the preparation, and the sabbath drew on. The women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid.
This is clear evidence that Jesus died the day before the Sabbath! Just as we know that Jesus and His followers observed the same day as Moses, we can be positive that our seventh day is the same day Jesus observed.
Pope Gregory XIII did make a calendar change in , but it did not interfere with the weekly cycle. What did Gregory do to the calendar? He changed Friday, October 5, , to be Friday, October 15, He did not affect the weekly cycle of days. An entire nation of people, all around the world, continue to observe a Sabbath they have known for more than 4, years. What does this prove? It proves that when those languages originated long ago, Saturday was recognized as the Sabbath day and was incorporated into the very name of the day.
Some people suggest this means that God gave the Sabbath as a memorial of the Exodus from Egypt. But the Genesis story of the making of the Sabbath Genesis —3 and the wording of the fourth commandment by God Exodus reveals the seventh-day Sabbath as a memorial of creation. It was not unusual for God to harken back to the Egyptian deliverance as an incentive to obey other commandments.
It is one of the pivotal moments in the history of the world. But nowhere does the Bible hint that we should keep Sunday holy. Many other wonderful events occurred on certain days of the week, but we have no command to keep them holy either. There is, of course, a memorial of the resurrection commanded in the Bible, but it is not to determine a new day of worship.
However, the Sabbath is a memorial of creation. Still have a question about this? It is His claim — His seal — over the world and all human life. It is also a sign of the redemption He offers to every single one of us. Surely this is why God will preserve Sabbathkeeping throughout eternity.
The Sabbath is so precious to God that He will have His people observe it throughout all time in the beautiful new earth to come. If it is so precious to Him, should it not be precious to us? If we are going to keep it through all eternity, why not keep it now as our pledge of obedience to Him? But with these Sabbath facts in hand, may God grant every Christian the courage to honor the Sabbath commandment as His special test of our love and loyalty.
It might be a duty to keep the seventh-day holy. But it should not be a burden. In an age of false gods and spirituality, of atheistic evolution, and the stubborn traditions of men, the world needs the Sabbath more than ever. It is more than just a test of our loyalty to the Creator. It is more than just a sign of our sanctification through His power.
It is His promise of a lasting, eternal gift of restoration. The One Unimportant Commandment? God made it very clear that, regardless of feelings, those who abuse the Sabbath are guilty of breaking His law.
For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Because God was commanding them to call something to memory that already existed but had been forgotten. Why the Seventh Day?
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