Myth #16:

God rested after the Creation.

The Myth: And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. (Gen. 2:2)

The Reality: God did not take a day of rest.

Regardless of whether God sanctified the seventh day or the eighth day, we must still ask whether God actually rested on this sanctified day. After all, what need does an omnipotent deity have to sit around relaxing?

A careful reading of the actual biblical text seems to contradict the idea of a day of rest. It says “on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made” and then he rested. But if the creation of humanity constituted the final act in this enormous scheme of events, the Bible should say that God ended his work on the sixth day, the day of completion. Instead, the text says that he finished work on the seventh day.

The text implies that God performed additional acts after he created humanity. The reference to finishing work on the seventh day may have resulted from sloppy editing of the original story in which God created humanity on the seventh day rather than the sixth.

This error closely follows the efforts to create a Sabbath on the seventh day. In order to insert a day of rest for God, the biblical scribes had to combine the events of the sixth (animals) and seventh (humanity) days together. In doing so, the scribe overlooked this little phrase—“And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made”—that appeared after the creation of the human race on the seventh day. The scribe forgot to move those words to the end of the sixth day after he combined the seventh day’s activity (humanity) with the events of the sixth day.

There may be a Near Eastern precedent for this belief that the Sabbath and the day of rest are inextricably intertwined. One likely explanation comes from Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Creation epic. In it, Marduk, who defeated his enemies and became chief deity of Babylon, summoned forth the god Kingsu, one of the ringleaders of the opposition, and as a punishment hacked him in pieces. From his blood, mankind was created, and Marduk imposed upon humanity the duty to serve the gods. In a passage echoing the biblical claim that God rested after creating mankind, we find the following passage from the Babylonian text.

Who removed the yoke imposed upon the gods, his enemies;

Who created mankind to set them free;

May his words endure and not be forgotten

In the mouths of mankind, whom his hands have created.

In other words, after Marduk created humanity, the gods were free to rest. This Babylonian tradition parallels the biblical account. Both stories show the gods resting after the creation of human beings. In the Babylonian account, Marduk created humans to act as servants for the gods and attend to their needs, freeing up the gods from their labor. In Genesis, God rested after the creation of humans, but did not condemn humanity to servitude. Of course, the later biblical tradition holds that God and Israel had a special covenant, with Israel devoted to serving God.

While it is true that in the Babylonian story humans do not rest along with the gods, as Hebrews are required to do by the Ten Commandments, the Genesis Creation account talks only about God resting and says nothing specific about humans refraining from work. That humanity should rest entered the biblical tradition much later on, perhaps no earlier than the seventh century B.C.