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

yth #16:
God rested after the Creation.
The Myth: And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and
he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. (Gen. 2:2)
The Reality: God did not take a day of rest.
Regardless of whether God sanctified the seventh day or the eighth day, we must
still ask whether God actually rested on this sanctified day. After all, what need does
an omnipotent deity have to sit around relaxing?
A careful reading of the actual biblical text seems to contradict the idea of a day of
rest. It says“on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made” and then he
rested. But if the creation of humanity constituted the final act in this enormous
scheme of events, the Bible should say that God ended his work on the sixth day, the
day of completion. Instead, the text says that he finished work on the seventh day.
The text implies that God performed additional acts after he created humanity.
The reference to finishing work on the seventh day may have resulted from sloppy
editing of the original story in which God created humanity on the seventh day rather
than the sixth.
This error closely follows the efforts to create a Sabbath on the seventh day. In
order to insert a day of rest for God, the biblical scribes had to combine the events of
the sixth (animals) and seventh (humanity) days together. In doing so, the scribe overlooked
this little phrase—“And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had
made”—that appeared after the creation of the human race on the seventh day. The
scribe forgot to move those words to the end of the sixth day after he combined the
seventh day’s activity (humanity) with the events of the sixth day.
There may be a Near Eastern precedent for this belief that the Sabbath and the
day of rest are inextricably intertwined. One likely explanation comes from Enuma
Elish, the Babylonian Creation epic. In it, Marduk, who defeated his enemies and
became chief deity of Babylon, summoned forth the god Kingsu, one of the ringlead-
39