Hey, this is John Collins at The Bible Project.

Last week we began a brand new series examining the theme of the seventh day in the Bible.

Or in Hebrew, Shabbat.

God created the heavens in the earth out of disorder in chaos in six days and on the seventh

day, he Shabbat.

And in the same way, God's recreating the cosmos and rescuing people from chaos and

disorder.

So what can we say about Genesis 1?

We can say that the portrait of time is that the seventh day is a culminating ideal.

The seventh day also is something you have to wait for.

Genesis 1 is like a template that's just going to keep replaying over and over again

to design pattern.

For the attentive Bible reader, the idea of resting and the number seven are intimately

connected.

God stopped on the seventh day.

In Hebrew, the number seven has the same consonants as the word for completeness, a

wholeness.

So in Genesis 1, seven develops two key symbolic associations.

One of them is that one through seven altogether is a symbol of completeness.

But then also, the journey to get to that completeness requires you to go through one, two,

three, four, five, six.

So then it's about a linear journey towards completeness.

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