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Genesis says that God finished his work on the seventh day, language that could be interpreted to mean he did some work on the seventh day. The Greek Septuagint changes it to the sixth day to avoid any possibility that God worked on the Sabbath.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Genesis 2:2
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.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
LXX Genesis 2:2
Septuagint
1 And the heavens and the earth were finished, and the whole world of them. 2 And God finished on the sixth day his works which he made, and he ceased on the seventh day from all his works which he made. 3 And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it he ceased from all his works which God began to do. 4 This is the book of the generation of heaven and earth, when they were made, in the day in which God made the heaven and the earth,
Date: 300–201 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The LXX agrees with the Samaritan Pentateuch (הששי) and S in reading “sixth” for “seventh” of the Masoretic text. This reading probably derived from contextual theological harmonization because it was found difficult to explain how God could finish his work “on the seventh day” without having worked on that day. It is impossible to determine whether the easier reading of the LXX was based on an actual variant הששי or whether the exegetical tendency developed independently in all three sources ..."
Emanuel Tov, The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research, 3rd ed. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015), 88.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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