December 2016 - 29 July 2022 Navigate up to the Genesis Scripture index.
The first three verses of chapter two really should be counted as part of chapter one. That’s how the Hebrew text is organized. Genesis 1:1-2:3 tells one version of creation events, while Genesis 2:4ff tells another, very different version. But my random notes an Genesis 1 were already getting very long, and I was getting sleepy, so I just finished the post and called it a night. Oh well.
Remember, the modern chapter divisions weren’t added to the Bible till the 13th century, over a thousand years after the Bible was written. Usually the divisions do a decent job of breaking the text into meaningful parts, but now and then they go wrong. In particular, one reason they went wrong was that the Bible-reading world wasn’t aware of the way different sources where spliced together to create the Pentateuch. That insight would have to wait till Jean Astruc in 1753 and Julius Wellhausen in 1878.
In Genesis 2:1, translating a bit woodenly, we find Then were completed the sky and the land, and all their army. Their army? If I were a harder worker, I would survey the almost 500 uses of the Hebrew ṣbʾ (tsa-VA). Instead, I will paraphrase Gesenius’s explanation, which seems to fit with what I’ve read in the Hebrew Bible.
One meaning of tsaba is ‘army.’ I haven’t done a count, but I believe army is the most common meaning. In second place, there is the idea of the army of heaven, which refers either to the heavenly beings (see 1 Kings 22:19) or to heavenly bodies (Deuteronomy 17:3). And, because there was a tendency towards the worship of heavenly bodies, the two notions of army of heaven could overlap. So, as Gesenius sees it, the author here Genesis 2:1 is taking the notion of army of heaven and extending it “rather more boldly” to include both the heavenly bodies as well as “the inhabitants of the earth, or rather to whatever fills the earth.”
So per Gesenius reading, the sky and the land and all their army is a sort of abbreviated version of what is found in Nehemiah 9:6 “the skies . . . with all their army, the earth and all that is upon it.” Likewise, Exodus 20:11 expresses the same idea in simpler terms sky and land, the sea, and all that is in them.
Now, because today’s English language doesn’t have a concept of the army of heaven, it would fall short of real translation to use the wording the sky and the land, and all their army. One could fall back on the archaic host, as the ESV does, but then host isn’t used anymore in that sense. The NIV translates and their army as in all their vast array. My inner literalist cringes just a bit at the use of vast where the Hebrew has no equivalent word, though I do like the use of array, which preserves (I think) a little bit of the imagery of an army but is still good literary English today.
If you just want clarity, and aren’t bothered about retaining any of the metaphor, I don’t know if you can beat the Holman Christian Standard Bible: So the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed.
Verse 2, I think could potentially be misleading if you use completed to translate the Hebrew wykl (from the stem klh). Here’s what you’d get: And on the seventh day God completed his work which he had done, and he refrained on the seventh day from all his work which he had done.
When I read those words, I picture God putting last touches on the project, doing the last bits of work on the seventh day, and then stepping back. But a reader familiar with biblical law will see that what’s going on is a clear portrayal of God as the prototypical Sabbath observer. The point in observing the Sabbath is not that the last day of the week is used to do the very last bits of work left over from the week — the point on the Sabbath is not working at all. The Bible takes this very seriously, to the point of stoning a man to death for gathering firewood on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:35).
So instead of God completed his work, I think we’d better say that God was finished with his work. That better communicates the non-activity inherent in a Sabbath observance. Incidentally, you can see three things that tip you off that this verse is about the Sabbath: the word work (mlʾkh), the word refrained (the verb šbt), and the term “seventh day.” These elements all get repeated in the Sabbath legislation of Exodus 20:10-11:
But the seventh day is the Sabbath (the noun šbt) of Yahweh your god. You must not do any work (mlʾkh): you, or your son, or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your animals, or the sojouner who is within your gates. Because for six days Yahweh made the sky and the land, and all that is in them, and on the seventh day he refrained (šbt__). That is why Yahweh blessed the seventh day and made it sacred.
The Genesis 1 story is not a joke, but the Sabbath rest is analogous to its punchline. Its the moment at the end of the story when you realize why the entire story was told the way it was.
Genesis 2:3, in the KJV, ends with which God created and made. But, more literally, the text reads which God created to make. This joins the verbs, I think, a bit closer than a mere English ‘and’ might indicate. I think the NET does a fine job when it renders created to make as had been doing in creation. That seems (to my half-trained ear) to ‘weld’ the words together roughly the way they’re welded together by the Hebrew syntax.
PS. (29 June 2017) I’ve gone back to 2:3 and worked with the grammar in more detail. The result is here.