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The Samaritan Pentateuch and Greek Septuagint changed Genesis to say God finished his work on the sixth day, unlike the Masoretic text, which says the seventh day. The change avoids the possibility of saying that God did any work on the Sabbath.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
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)
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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