Tool Alpha
Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
The seventh day has no evening
Days one to six close with evening and morning. Day seven does not. Both poles make that silence carry weight, in different directions.
Genesis 2:1-3, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: what does it mean for God to rest? He rested on Sunday. Did he lie down because he was tired, stop because the job was finished, or sit down at the head of the table to run things? English rest covers all three. God does not get tired, so it is one of the other two, and the readings below pick different ones.
If God does not get tired, what is his rest? And if the seventh day has no closing formula, is it still going on?
The verb in 2:2 is shabat, to cease, the root of Sabbath. Exodus 20:11 describes the same seventh day with a different word, nuach, to settle into a place of stability. Psalm 132 calls the temple God's resting place, menuchah, from the same root, and puts his throne there.
Lennox calls the missing evening and morning striking. He follows Augustine: the seventh day is an epoch that runs on into eternity, God rests from the work of creation and not from upholding the world, and we are still in God's Sabbath rest, which is why Jesus could say his Father is working until now (John 5:17). Hebrews 4 then uses this rest for the gospel: God did the work and rested, and we enter his rest by resting on what Christ has done.
For Walton the seventh day is the climax, not an appendix. Everyone in the ancient world knew that deity rests in a temple, and only in a temple. Divine rest means taking up the throne and beginning to rule from it, the way a new president takes up his rest in the White House. Psalm 132 ties rest, temple and enthronement together, and the Babylonian epic has Marduk build his house after creation and the gods declare they will find rest there. On the eighth day and every day since, God has been running the cosmos he set up.
The young-earth reading takes day seven as a 24-hour day like the six, and Exodus 20:11 as tying it to the human week. Lennox points out the danger of reading day seven as an era and then assuming the other six must be eras too: the text itself marks day seven as different.
Lennox's reading makes day seven a different kind of day from the six that precede it, which he accepts and then has to stop from spreading to the others. Walton's reading depends on readers accepting that an ancient audience would hear "rest" as temple language without Genesis 2 using the word temple.
Not God recovering from effort. Both poles agree on that. Lennox cites Psalm 121:4, he neither slumbers nor sleeps, and Walton describes rest as engagement without obstacles rather than disengagement.
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 3 and ch. 5
- Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (2009), proposition 7, with Enuma Elish 5.121-24 and 6.51-52 as Walton cites them
