Genesis 2:1-4

Thus in six days God completed His work of creation, and as He reviewed it He uttered the same verdict on the whole, only in a heightened form (very good and not merely good) that He had uttered on the successive stages. For the whole is not the mere sum of the parts, it is a unity in which these separate parts dovetail into each other and work together in perfect mutual adjustment and co-operation. It is here described as the heaven and the earth. and all the host of them. The host of heaven generally means the stars, though it is sometimes used for the angels, and since the stars were often regarded as animate bodies (e.g. Judges 6:20; Job 38:7 *, Revelation 9:1 f.), the transition from one sense to the other was easy. Our author ignores the angels, and treats the stars simply as lamps in the firmament. In Job 38:7, the morning stars sang when the foundations of the earth were laid, and the sons of God (i.e. the angels) raised their joyful shout. The host of earth is not elsewhere mentioned, its occurrence here is due simply to the combination of earth with heaven. The whole phrase means the total contents of heaven and earth. After work is finished man rests, so also God. Here, indeed, the word used implies simply that He ceased to work, but our author elsewhere says of God that He refreshed Himself or, to render more literally, took breath on the seventh day (Exodus 31:17), a startling anthropomorphism in P, all the more so that in the creation narrative itself all is achieved by the utterance of the word. Since, then, the author seems to have regarded the work as involving no toil, and therefore as causing no weariness which demanded rest, we must assume that he is here using an idea which he did not originate. He is not interested in the rest of God in itself so much as in the institution of the Sabbath, for which it provides the basis. The seventh day which had brought rest to God is singled out for His blessing, and hallowed or set apart as a sacred day on which man may rest. On the origin of the Sabbath see pp. 101f. Our story is an explanation to account for an already existing institution. The Heb. text of Genesis 2:2, however, creates a difficulty. It seems to state that God completed His work on the seventh day. But the whole point is that no work at all was done on the seventh day; the task was finished by the end of the sixth. The expedients to impose a satisfactory sense on the text do not seem to be successful, and the simplest course is to read (with Sam., LXX, Syr.) And on the sixth day God finished. This is so much easier that it might seem to be a correction to remove a difficulty (p. 42), but seventh was probably introduced by the inadvertence of a scribe under the influence of the references to the seventh day in the rest of the passage.

Genesis 2:3. created and made: more strictly creatively made, i.e. God acted in His work as creator, this was part of His creative as distinguished from other forms of His activity.

Genesis 2:4. these. created: this clause is probably a later insertion (see Skinner's full discussion). If so, the editor probably intended it to refer to the narrative which follows, the formula meaning this is the history of.