Genesis 2:3

Hebrew Bible

1 The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. 2 By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. 3 God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he ceased all the work that he had been doing in creation. 4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created—when the Lord God made the earth and heavens. 5 Now no shrub of the field had yet grown on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.

Exodus 16:30

Hebrew Bible

28 So the Lord said to Moses, “How long do you refuse to obey my commandments and my instructions? 29 See, because the Lord has given you the Sabbath, that is why he is giving you food for two days on the sixth day. Each of you stay where you are; let no one go out of his place on the seventh day.” 30 So the people rested on the seventh day. 31 The house of Israel called its name “manna.” It was like coriander seed and was white, and it tasted like wafers with honey. 32 Moses said, “This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Fill an omer with it to be kept for generations to come, so that they may see the food I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out from the land of Egypt.’”

 Notes and References

"... We have already noted the two important texts from the book of Exodus, which indicate “the seventh day” as a feast for YHWH and use the verb שׁבת (š-b-t, Exodus 23:12 and 34:21). The same technique – both employing the contrasting structure of “six days” working as opposed to “the seventh day” of rest, and using only the finite form of the verb שׁבת (š-b-t) and not the noun שַׁבָּת (šabbat) – can be found in the Priestly creation account in the first chapter of Genesis. Of course, this text is not a legal prescription but a narrative, but the literary procedure is designed according to the same principle. Without using the term “Sabbath” the Priestly storyteller presents the creation of the whole world as a process following the weekly liturgical schedule (sabbatical rhythm) and reaching its target on the “seventh day,” when God himself “rested from all his work” (Genesis 2:3) ... The same logic is also used in the narrative which describes the feeding of the Israelites during their desert wandering with “the bread from heaven,” known as “manna,” in Exodus 16:23–30. This story tells how the people of Israel, having been rescued from Egypt, were provided during their sojourn in the desert with miraculous food given them by God himself, the wonderful “manna.” In this story, too, according to the principle of the six days of “harvesting” and a “break” on the seventh day, there is no manna on the seventh day. On the sixth day, there is enough for everyone to collect and to gather twice as much “manna,” so that both the people of Israel, and YHWH, their God, can rest on the seventh day, enjoying “Sabbath” ... This is also documented in the creative transmission of this idea in the Septuagint, where in several places a verbal neologism is used to express what the people should do on “Sabbath”: “to sabbath!” See e.g. Exodus 16:30 ..."

Prudký, Martin "'Keeping Sabbath': Variability and Stability of a Prominent Identity-Marking Norm" in Dušek, Jan, and Jan Roskovec (eds.) The Process of Authority: The Dynamics in Transmission and Reception of Canonical Texts (pp. 41-60) De Gruyter, 2016

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