Weekly Torah Reading, Shemini Atzeret, October 17, 2022

 

Un-Parallelism

 

One subject that biblical scholars have explored is the stylistic feature called parallelism. Especially in biblical poetry, word X, or phrase X, in one clause is paralleled by a similar word or phrase Y in the next clause. Parallelism!

 

But sometimes the opposite occurs. A pattern of paralleling is established—only for the pattern to be broken.[1] One instance of such “un-paralleling” occurs in this week’s Torah reading, which recounts the six days of creation. Each day concludes with: “And it was evening, and it was morning, Day Such-and-such” (that is, “And it was evening, and it was morning, the first day,” “And it was evening, and it was morning, the second day,” and so on.)

 

It’s easy to get drawn into thinking that this pattern holds for all the days—but actually, that’s not quite true. The sixth day is different. It continues on: “And it was evening, and it was morning, the sixth day, and the heavens and the earth were completed, with all their array.”

 

Usually, translators act as if this last clause (in boldface) is the beginning of a new thought. In fact, when medieval scholars started identifying biblical verses by numbers, this clause came to be identified as the first verse of chapter 2. But it seems that this may be a mistake. These verses should instead be understood as a deliberate un-parallelism. Until now, each day concluded “And it was evening, and it was morning, Day Such-and-such,” but the sixth day was different. That was the only day that concluded with a special addition, “and the heavens and the earth were completed, with all their array.”

 

And that’s not the only difference. On the days leading up to the sixth, there is usually some reference to God’s seeing that the thing created was “good,” though even here there is some variation. (On the second day, for example, the text says nothing about God’s being pleased. Then, on the third day, there are two mentions of God’s being pleased, in verses 1:10 and 1:12.)

 

But on the sixth day, it says: “And God saw all that He had made, and He found it very good.” This special emphasis, it seems, was intended to make the same point as the un-parallelism of the sixth day in Gen 1:31. Both are meant to assert that the Genesis account was not so much a recitation of the creation of the world per se as it was an account of God’s resting after it was over. So we as well should similarly rest on our day of rest, week after week.

 

Shabbat shalom!

 

[1] Take the classic example of Psalm 24. Its “un-parallelisms” can lead us to read verses 7 and 9 as basically the same. But they’re not.