What prompts this exception is the extraordinary novelty of the Shabbat within the ancient Near East. The idea of a full day of rest every seven for all inhabitants of Israel — including servants, strangers and even livestock (Exodus 20:10) — was as unprecedented as the idea of monotheism.
Genesis 1 affirms both. The emergence of order out of chaos in six days is the singular achievement of one solitary deity, and culminates in a seventh on which God rests. Strikingly, the cessation from labor, and not its glorious products, elicits God’s blessing.
But why should a deity with the capacity to create the cosmos need to rest? Even to entertain the idea diminishes the grandeur of God.
The association of rest with creation is a motif left over from the mythologies of Israel’s neighbors. In the Mesopotamian creation epic “Enuma Elish,” the god Marduk creates humanity to provide his divine vassals with a retinue of servants to free them from life’s menial chores.
The Bible reverses the direction of this interaction. It posits that God chose to desist from work to enable humans to enjoy a weekly day of rest.
God crowns creation with self-restraint to enhance human life, giving the first example of the proposition that to become fully human, we must strive to emulate the divine.
The opening chapter also establishes the number seven as the basic pattern of its calendar system. It is as “unnatural” as the Sabbath, the result of construing creation in terms of a seven-day period. The cosmic precedent sanctifies the centrality of the numerical unit.
Thus in the Torah both the spring and fall harvest festivals of Passover and Sukkot extend for seven days. Moreover, each begins at the end of the 14th day of the month.
While the date of Shavuot is left imprecise in the Torah, it is to follow Passover after the completion of seven full weeks, that is, on the 50th day.
Today Shavuot is fixed to begin on the sixth of Sivan. But a minority view in the Talmud said it should fall on the seventh, which would have been but another instance of the predominance of the number seven.
The seventh month of the Hebrew calendar, Tishri, which we are about to finish, is freighted with more holy days than any other: Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot.
Similarly, the preeminence of the month and the number is underscored by the paradoxical fact that by the rabbinic period, we commemorate the start of a new year in the seventh month.
The sacrifices offered in the Tabernacle and Temple on holy days also reveal a seven-fold pattern. On every new moon, each day of Passover, the one day of Shavuot, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur the priests sacrificed a set of “seven yearling lambs without blemish” (Numbers 28).
For the festival of Sukkot, the daily allotment of lambs was doubled to 14, while the total number of bulls added up to 70, both multiples of seven.
Finally, the Bible ordered the sequence of years by seven, creating the institution of a sabbatical year. Every seventh year fields were to be fallow.
Whatever grew naturally did not belong to the owner, but to any servant, stranger or animal that chanced upon it (Leviticus 25:1-7). The same spirit of compassion dictated that all unpaid loans extended to a fellow Israelite were to be forgiven in the seventh year (Deuteronomy 15:1-6).
Seven cycles of sabbatical years culminated in a Jubilee on the 50th year when “you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants” (Leviticus 25:10).
For the Torah, seven was not merely a lucky number, but the indication of a deep and pervasive structure. Imprinted on the Jewish mind by the creation story, the number seven is a constant reminder that existence as we know it did not spring into being by accident.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is the previous chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary.
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