101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

yth #15:
God rested on the seventh day.
The Myth: And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it
he had rested from all his work which God created and made. (Gen. 2:3)
The Reality: In the original Genesis account of Creation, God did not rest on the
seventh day, but he did create humanity on that day.
As we discovered in the discussion of Myth #14, the biblical narrative includes a
textual formula that marked the end of each day’s activities. We saw that in the present
version of Genesis, the scribes omitted the blessing from the end of the second day
but inserted one in the middle of the third and sixth days. Logical analysis showed that
the omission of the blessing on the second day and its insertion in the middle of the
third day resulted from a scribal error. Moving the events in the first half of Day Three
to the second half of Day Two restored logical and textual consistency to Genesis.
Such an arrangement caused each of the first six days to conclude with a blessing, but
it still left an extra blessing in the middle of the sixth day.
That blessing occurs after the creation of beasts and crawling creatures and before
the creation of humans. A second blessing occurs after the creation of humanity. Following
the logic of the textual formula, we should conclude that in the original source
for the Creation story, beasts and man were each created on separate days. This would
push the appearance of mankind to the seventh day and moves God’s day of rest to
the eighth day.
The Sabbath rest on the seventh day of the week constitutes one of the holiest traditions
in Western civilization. But if God rested on the eighth day, not the seventh,
then the practice derives from a scribal error.
The idea of a Sabbath rest appears to be of late origin. Evidence that ancient Israel
actually observed such a practice is faint at best. The Bible records no such observance
in any portion of Israel’s history prior to the Exodus from Egypt. True, in the story of
the Exodus some biblical passages include a commandment by God to observe the
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