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Genesis says that God finished his work on the seventh day, while the Samaritan Pentateuch reads “sixth day,” a variation also found in the Greek Septuagint. This removes any possibility that God did any work on the seventh day and violated 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)
Samaritan Genesis 2:2
Samaritan Penteteuch
Samaritan
1 And the heavens and the earth were finished, and everything in them. 2 And on the sixth day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all his work that God had done in creation. 4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, when Shema God made heaven and earth.
Date: 130–120 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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