‘And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made, and he rested (ceased work) on the seventh day from all the work which he had made. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because that in it God rested from all his work which God had created and made.'
Note the distinction again brought out between ‘created' and ‘made'. There is a clear distinction in activity. God both created and made. First He created the matter which He then through some unexplained process fashioned into our world. Then He created life and again proceeded over time to ‘bring forth' various living creatures. And finally He created man with the ability to know God and pierce the spiritual realm, to be ‘like the elohim'.
“Finished the work which He had made.” It was complete. We would say ‘had finished'. Nothing remained to be done.
“God rested.” Elsewhere God's resting is seen, not as suggesting a need for recuperation, but as indicating His permanent condition in His dwellingplace as He presides over creation and receives man's worship. In His ‘resting' He is present in His creation overseeing all that goes on and accepting man's homage. Thus in Isaiah 66:1 a, having identified heaven and earth as his royal dwellingplace YHWH asks Israel: “What manner of house will you build for me and what shall be the place of my rest?” (Isaiah 66:1 b; cf. 2 Chronicles 6:18; 2 Chronicles 6:41 ff; Acts 7:49). And their reply should be that the only place suitable for His rest is in the Heaven of heavens to which men should look in worship. In the same way David spoke of his desire “to build a house of rest for the ark of the covenant of YHWH and for the footstool of our God” (1 Chronicles 28:2), while Psalms 132:7-8 further exhorts, “Let us go to his dwelling place, let us worship at his footstool. Rise up, YHWH, from your resting place, arise from the ark of your strength” (Numbers 10:35-36). And it adds in verses Psalms 132:13-14, “for YHWH has chosen Zion, He has desired it for His dwelling --. This is My resting place for ever, here I will dwell”. It is true that the verbal root used here is menuchah (“rest”), and not shabath, but menuchah is the verb used of ‘rest' in Exodus 20:11 of God's seventh day rest.
It is interesting that no ending to this day is ever mentioned. No reference is made to ‘the evening and the morning of the seventh day'. This must surely be seen as deliberate. God's ‘week' is over and there will be no repetition. The seventh ‘day' does not end, for there is no eighth day. The work of creation is complete and God has no further work to do. He has seen it as ‘very good'. This is yet another indication that we are not thinking of ‘natural' days. The suggestion of God resting is thus anthropomorphic, simply meaning that He ceased His creative activity, and indicative of the fact that all now being completed He can take up His position over the Universe. In other words He ‘ceases work'. There is no indication that God is tired.
There may also be the thought here that God has now appointed someone to take care of His creation, man, so that the necessity for His direct action has ceased. The writer may indeed be thinking in his own mind, ‘and then........ His rest was broken by man's failure!'
It should especially be noted that the description of the final day is solely in the writer's words. God does not Himself act or speak. It is the writer who describes the seventh day as the culmination of the work of creation, as the ‘day' on which God ‘finished his work, and rested'. Previously when God is said to have blessed, this is followed by His words explaining the blessing, but there are no words of explanation here. It is the writer who sees it as a day blessed and hallowed by God because it was the day when the work was finished.
But notice that he does not connect this with the observance by his people of the Sabbath (a word probably taken from sabat = cease, desist), the day when they too cease work. There is in fact no suggestion that the pattern is incumbent upon mankind, and it is noteworthy that no suggestion of the Sabbath appears elsewhere in the book of Genesis. The Sabbath would later arise from this idea, not this idea from the Sabbath.
The question whether man was able to keep count of days and observe the seventh day before he was able to count and calculate does not therefore arise. It is only later when the account of creation in six ‘days' followed by a day of rest has become an accepted part of worship, that recognition of the day follows, and it is seen as applicable to daily life. We are never told when this was. Thus there are no specific grounds for seeing this as ‘the institution of the Sabbath'.
“So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it.” This is the writer's comment. It may refer to a later gradual recognition of the seventh day as a day for worship, so that it has become officially recognised by the writer's time, or indeed to the later sanctifying of the day in the time of Moses, for it is not said that God blessed it at the time, as He had the living creatures. Or it may simply meant that as the day on which nothing further needed to be done it was a blessed day, and was uniquely different from the others.
The first known application of the Sabbath as a strict day of rest is in the time of Moses (Exodus 16:1-36). There the people were gathering the manna provided by God on a daily basis, and they were forbidden to keep any until the morning after. But on the sixth day they were to gather two days supply (Exodus 16:5). This is the first introduction of what would later (Exodus 20:11) be instituted in God's covenant, the day special to God. When the leaders of the people come to Moses to point out that the people are gathering two days supply on the sixth day (gathering for more than one day has previously caused problems), Moses at that point explains the law of the Sabbath.
Had the Sabbath already been strictly in practise these leaders would have known this and would not have expected people to gather on the Sabbath. This suggests that, although up to this stage it may have been generally observed by custom, it was at this point that it became in its strict state a newly ordained institution. Later God would relate it to the ‘days' of creation (Exodus 20:11). The wording with which it is expressed in Exodus 20:11 suggests that by that stage this creation account had been written under God's inspiration, and could thus be used as a pattern of, and justification for, the Sabbath. Note that Deuteronomy 5:12-15 and Ezekiel 20:12-21 both stress the connection of the giving of the Sabbaths with the deliverance from Egypt and not with creation.
So in Exodus 16:1-36 the leaders on the one hand are not aware of the strict observance of the Sabbath, but the people on the other are aware of some kind of distinction, suggesting a conception which was not yet fully formed.
This does not necessarily mean that there had been no recognition of the seventh day previously, only that it had not previously been strictly related to total cessation of work. It may well be, possibly again arising from the Creation story, that the seventh day was previously looked on as special, although we have nowhere else any earlier indication of it. The Sabbath was in fact unique to Israel and is not paralleled elsewhere (despite numerous attempts to suggest otherwise). There is no ‘race-memory' of a Sabbath.
(The Babylonian ‘sabbatum' was not in fact a day of ceasing from work, as various labour contracts demonstrate, and those things that were excluded on the ‘sabbatum' were excluded because of the danger of ‘ill luck' not because they were work. Furthermore the Babylonians had a ‘five day' week).