21st Century Bible Hebrew -- What's it all about?

Genesis 2:2-3

 

ב וַיְכַל אֱלֹהִים בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה וַיִּשְׁבֹּת בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה:

ג וַיְבָרֶךְ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־יוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי וַיְקַדֵּשׁ אֹתוֹ כִּי בוֹ שָׁבַת מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים לַעֲשׂוֹת:

 

Translation:     Gd completed on the seventh day His melakhah that He did; He ceased on the seventh day from all His melakhah that He did.

            Gd blessed the seventh day and “sanctified” it, because on it He ceased from all His melakhah that Gd created for the purpose of doing.

 

And now a cognitive dissonance. Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 58b says non-Jews are prohibited from full Shabbat observance. But at the time Shabbat was established, there were no Jews at all.  So how could anybody share with Gd in observing Shabbat before Jews existed?

 

I don’t have a midrash for that. It would mean that as the universe was incomplete until Shabbat existed, so it was incomplete until there were humans who were allowed to observe Shabbat – the Jews. But first Gd went through lots of generations to get to the patriarchs. Why?

 

Because that’s the history experienced by the Jewish people. Axel Olrik says that oral narratives always are based on historical or cultural reality. When history got to the point that there were Jews, they did not retroactively change their history to pretend that it only began when they existed. They even glory in the fact that although their ancestors – like Terach – worshipped many gods and even images of those gods, the patriarchs changed all that.

 

So the first narrative in Torah not only made Shabbat inevitable, it made the Jews inevitable.

 

Final issue. Why seven days?

 

That’s another Olrik principle.  Oral narratives do not contain timing unless it is crucial to the goal of the narrative. If the narrative originated with a historical event, the narrative proceeds according to our sense of real time, that is, things take however long they normally take. After the denouement, the narrative wraps up and if it deals with the later history of the protagonist, it may kill him or her off almost immediately, even if the real historical character lived for decades after the crucial events of the narrative.

 

In this case, Shabbat occurs every seven days in the Jewish calendar, and the very first one, the prototype, also occurred on the seventh day – from the start of creation. It is perfectly conceivable that if Shabbat happened every three months, the narrative with the goal of specifying the first Shabbat in history would have taken three months to finish creation.

 

And now at last we’re done. Next week we’ll move on to the second narrative in Torah, and it will focus on a completely different issue.