Dex, you’re mistaken when you state that the world was created in 7 days, according to the Bible. The book of Genesis states that God created the world in 6 days and rested on the seventh day:
Genesis 1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was
very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Genesis 2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host
of them.
Genesis 2:2 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.
And, Bookworm, you’re certainly free to read the Bible as you choose, but commentators and mystics have always viewed seven as the number of completion and six as the number of not-having-completed. The only thing God “creates” on the seventh day is the sabbath, so He has finished creating but it is not complete. Thus, six is symbolic of bad (incomplete, unfinished) things while seven is symbolic of good (complete, finished) things. So biblical symbolism, anyhow.
I count 12 days. The Beta Universe in Genesis 1, with Adam Sr. and Unnamed Woman (who some believe is Lilith) and then the Universe 1.0 in Genesis 2 with Adam Jr. and Eve.
This assumes of course that He Who Is wasn’t creating two universes in parallel, which would be 6 very long days, and the order in Genesis merely reflects a serialization of parallel events. (Semaphores not having been invented yet.)
So what happened in day 8? day 9? all the subsequent days? If he’s not resting, he’s apparently on some kind of vacation. Mabey he misplaced his tools.
Seriously, what’s up with the Sabbath anyway? Granted that people like to take a day off every so often, but why was it institutionalized into a religious duty? Did it originally mean “perform the holy observances every seven days”? How rigorously can farmers and herders avoid “working” anyway- goats need to be milked, sheep rescued from predators, etc.
Okay, as Dex said, seven is the mystical number of completeness, insofar as numerology and Kaballah count for anything. (This is not a statement of concrete-universe fact, but a statement of fact about human conceptualizing.) Further, in Jewish thought the Sabbath was an integral part of the Universe, one of the first created things. So the creation of the Sabbath on the seventh day is significant and symbolic.) Remember that the division of the Bible into chapters far postdates the writing of Genesis, being sometime in the early Middle Ages; Gen 2:1 follows directly on Gen 1:31 in the written text.
The idea that man needs some rest from his labor and time to commune with God is further integral to Jewish and Christian thought. Institutionalizing it into the Sabbath is a very early phenomenon in Israelite history, though I believe that precisely when is still up for debate.
While it’s not clear what actually happened in ancient times, the concept of having a day off once a week was a revolutionary innovation from the bible. I suggest that, if modern-day corporations had their way, they’d happily reverse such a long-standing tradition. Many of them, in fact, have, and expect employees to work 24/7. OK, I exaggerate, but only slightly.
The rules about what was prohibited as “work” are fairly complicated. They were undoubtedly developed over time, from say 1000 - 500 BC, but were not formalized until around 100 BC - 200 AD, so I can’t tell you what shepherds did in terms of protecting the herd, etc. However, my understanding is that sitting watch and chasing away predators was not considered “work.” Neither would feeding animals be prohibited. Gathering in grain, however, would be prohibited. Similarly, cooking is not prohibited, but starting a fire is – so, basically, the fire had to be started before the Sabbath and then kept burning.
I checked out B&H Photo on Friday. They had a pop-up that said they were not accepting orders at the present time, but would resume taking orders Saturday evening. They had a link to their closed periods, showing when they stopped taking orders on Fridays and when they resumed Saturdays. (The times varied. For example, they might resume taking orders on Saturday at 2100 one day and 2045 on another.) I assume this is because of one of the Sabbath rules.
But why would a computer-based check-out system be shut down? Is it considered ‘work’ for a machine to take orders?
Jewish days are reckoned from sundown to sundown, not by any particular clock time (I believe the rabbinical standard for “sundown” is “when it’s dark enough that you can’t distinguish between a red thread and a black thread held at arm’s length”). This will vary from day to day through the year (and of course, doesn’t care about Daylight Savings time), so the opening and closing times of a Jewish business will also vary.
That said, I have no idea what person they’re protecting from work in this case. Maybe some human has to go collect all the film? But the Sabbath rules do not apply to machines (they do to golems, though).
What Chronos said: if the shut-down is for Jewish observance, then it would be from before sunset on Friday (allowing their employees time to get home, etc) until well after sunset on Saturday. And there’s lots of possibilities here:
If the owner of the establishment is an orthodox Jew, then he would not want his business open during the sabbath.
Starting a machine is one of the categories of work, although it depends on the machine. Basically, electricity is considered “fire,” so one cannot start a fire on the sabbath. That means, turning on an electric light bulb. Orthodox Jews use timers, set before sabbath, to turn on the lights, etc. That’s why I say the rules are complicated: you wouldn’t think that flicking a light-switch was “work,” but it’s defined as (symbolically) starting a fire, which is work. See?
This is an old joke from All In The Family . Archie says the world was created in 7 days and Edith corrects him. She says "No Archie on the 7th day he rested. To wit (to wit??) Archie replies… "Well maybe for half a day but the rest of the day he spent checking over his work
The word translated “completed,” here (from “Youngs’ Literal Translation”) is often translated “finished,” but the sense of “completed” is understood. Note that passage claims that the work was completed (or finished) on the seventh day and that God “sanctified” that day (or “hallowed” it in other translations).
In Jewish theology, the completion and resting were part of the whole creative act and when they went to devise their numerology, seven was reckoned as the whole number. Had not God rested and blessed that final day, the creative act, itself, would have been incomplete.
*For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. *
The original post by Dex states:
God creates the world in seven days, so seven is the number of fullness, completion, perfection; but six is short of perfection.
I agree with Bookworm51: Dex is off the mark: the bible clearly states that the earth (i.e. “world”) was created in six days, and has nothing to do with “reading the bible as you choose”, as stated in Dex’s response:
For that matter, when did the Straight Dope start relying on “commentators and mystics” to support its position?!
As a final point, I think Dex is also wrong with regard to God creating the sabbath: again from KJV, God rested on the seventh day, wherefore he blessed the sabbath day. There is no mention of God “creating” the sabbath day, only his blessing of it. The act of blessing something (e.g., a priest blessing a child) is not equivalent to creating it. Furthermore, you can’t bless something that does not yet exist. Therefore, God must have arrived (in a temporal sense) at the seventh day before he could bless it. This interpretation is further strengthened by the term “wherefore”, meaning therefore. God did not bless the sabbath day in the sense that he sprinkled it with holy water, his act of resting on the seventh day was what blessed it. Once again, he couldn’t have rested on the seventh day without first arriving at the seventh day, and so God did not “create” this day.
Yes, God continued to do things after the first six days, but he also continued to do things after the seventh day, or else the Bible would be a very short book!
Didn’t the earth spin a lot faster when it was created? If so, then the days were a lot shorter, which leads me to think that the Big G was… well, nevermind.
When the question in question is about mystical poetry, where else do you suggest we get information? Astronomers? Biochemists?
Look, my whole take on this is that the phrase I’m being asked to interpret is mystical poetry. Interpeting any poetry can be tricky: who knows what the author intended? And when the poetry is mystical, you can twist meanings to almost anything – as witness the list of historical interpretations.
We have plenty of scholars (“commentators and mystics” among others) who have tried to shed light on it, but it certainly needs to be interpreted in the terms of other mystic works. The only way to get a handle on what the author might have meant is to use what we know about similar apocalyptic writings (which is damn little.)
On the “created in seven days,” I think this is a matter of semantics. And it doesn’t matter much what your translation of the bible says. The mystics over the centuries (including gematria and numerology) were pretty much unanimous that seven is the number of completion – seven days involved in creation, etc. hence identified with goodness, fullness – and that one less (six, for the numerically challenged) is the number of incompletion, hence identified with failure, the fallen, and evil.