Renewable Energy

The first translation of the Torah into another language, Greek, took place in around the

2nd century BCE in Egypt during the reign of Ptolemy II.

It's known as the Septuagint, in Hebrew Hashivim, because it was done by a team of 70 scholars.

The Talmud, however, says that at various points, the sages at work on the project

deliberately mistranslated certain texts because they believed that a literal translation

would simply be unintelligible to a Greek readership.

One of these texts was the phrase,

On the seventh day, God finished all the work he had made.

Instead, the translators wrote,

On the sixth day, God finished.

What was it that they thought the Greeks wouldn't understand?

How did the idea that God made the universe in six days make more sense than that he did so in seven?

It seems puzzling, yet the answer is simple.

The Greeks couldn't understand the seventh day.

Shabbat as itself part of the work of creation.

What is creative about resting? What do we achieve by not making,

not working, not inventing? The idea seems to make no sense at all. Indeed, we have the

independent testimony of the Greek writers of that period that one of the things they ridiculed in

Judaism was Shabbat.

One day and seven Jews do not work, they said, because they're lazy.

The idea that the day itself might have independent value was apparently beyond their

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