Genesis 2:2 - Exposition

And on the seventh day God (Elohim) ended his work which he had made. To avert the possibility of imagining that any portion of the seventh day was consumed in working, which the English version seems to favor, the LXX ; the Samaritan, and Syriac versions insert the sixth day in the text instead of the seventh. Calvin, Drusius, Le Clerc, Rosenmüller, and Kalisch translate had finished . Others understand the sense to be declared the work to be finished, while Baumgarten and Delitzsch regard the resting as included in the completion of the work, and Von Bohlen thinks "the language is not quite precise." But calah followed by min signifies to cease from prosecuting any work ( Exodus 34:33 ; 1 Samuel 10:13 ; Ezekiel 43:23 ), and this was, negatively, the aspect of that sabbatic rest into which the Creator entered. And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. Shavath , the primary idea of which is to sit still, depicts Elohim as desisting from his creative labors, and assuming a posture of quiescent repose. The expression is a pure anthropomorphism. "He who fainteth not, neither is weary" ( Isaiah 40:28 ), can be conceived of neither as resting nor as needing rest through either exhaustion or fatigue. Cessation from previous occupation is all that is implied in the figure, and is quite compatible with continuous activity in other directions. John 5:17 represents the Father as working from that period onward in the preservation and redemption of that world which by his preceding labors he had created and made.