“By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that He had done.”
Does Genesis 2:2 mean God needs to sleep?
To answer questions like this it is best to first gather up all the verses which talk about the subject of God sleeping. For example, let’s start with Psalm 121:3-7.
Psalm 121:3-7 (NIV)
He will not let your foot slip—
he who watches over you will not slumber;
indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord watches over you—
the Lord is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all harm—
he will watch over your life;
Those verses clearly claim that God doesn’t sleep. So now we have a bit of a problem because if Genesis 2:2 says that God does sleep, then the Bible would appear to be contradicting itself.
Contradicting, simply means to say one thing is true but then say that the opposite of that thing is also true and when someone contradicts themselves it makes people think that they are either wrong or lying.
Well, two things we know about God are that He knows everything, so that means He can’t be wrong, but also we know He does not lie. So, when we come across two parts of the Bible that seem to contradict themselves we have to think about the possibility that maybe we are misunderstanding something.
One important thing to remember is that words can have multiple meanings. For example: the word “cool” can mean to make something cold, but it can also mean that something is fashionably attractive or impressive.
Now the verses in Psalms are pretty straightforward, verse 4 says, “God will neither slumber nor sleep. So, we probably did not misunderstand those verses. So let’s look at Genesis 2:2 again.
Genesis 2:2 (NIV) By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”
Okay, so it says God rested, now here’s where it gets interesting. Some of you may not know that the Bible wasn’t originally written in English, it was written in Hebrew and Greek. Genesis, specifically, was written in Hebrew. Sometimes the specifics of the meaning of some words can get a little lost in translation. If you are unsure if you understand what a word is meaning, you can look at the original language to make the meaning more clear.
Now if you are like me, you probably do not speak Hebrew, but we live in a very blessed time because there are lots of people who work very hard to make sure the Bible can be understood by everyone in every language and some of them came up with a book called a concordance.
A concordance is an alphabetical list of the words (especially the important ones) present in a text, usually with citations of the passages concerned.
In the concordance we can look at the original Hebrew word that was used for the word “rest” in Genesis 2:2.
I looked this up in Strong’s Concordance and found this:
The Hebrew word we are looking for is a verb. It is spelled shabath and pronounced (shaw-bath'). It means to stop doing what you were doing. In other words Genesis 2:2 is simply saying: God was done creating the world and everything in it, so He stopped creating it. When this verse says God rested it means He stopped the work of creation.
It does not say that God slept.
Now when we take all of this information into consideration; I would have to say that the answer to the question of whether or not Genesis 2:2 is saying that God needs to sleep, is, no. I have not found anything in the Bible that says God needs to sleep.
Now, what does this mean for us today?
It means that we can know that God will never be sleeping when we need Him. You can come to Him at any time of day or night and He is ready and willing to listen.
We can also learn from this that if you ever come across a part of the Bible which you don’t understand, don’t just ignore it. There are tools out there, like the Concordance, which can help you better understand the Bible. And if you need help learning how to use those tools, don’t be afraid to ask someone like your parents or pastor for help.
This series of blog posts titled, “Holding on to Reason”, is named after Amanda’s favorite C.S. Lewis quote: “Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”