The Six Days of Creation
In six days God calls the world out of nothingness—light, separation, life—and on the seventh He rests, sanctifying the Sabbath.
The six days of creation the Torah describes as work rather than as reasoning about God: the world comes into being by speech, step by step.
The Torah opens not with philosophy but with work: the world comes into being by speech, step by step, each step called good. Day one brings light not yet bound to the sun; day two divides the waters and creates the very idea of above and below; day three uncovers dry land and the earth brings forth plants on its own; day four fixes the luminaries, giving time a clock and a calendar; day five fills water and air with fish and birds; day six brings out the animals and, at its end, the human being. The seventh day adds nothing, yet it alone is called holy: the world is completed not by an act but by a stopping.
From this chapter the tradition derives the week, the Jewish day that begins in the evening, and the commandment of Shabbat. The sages also read it as a program: the world was deliberately left unfinished so that people would have something to complete. Hence the Jewish count of years begins here—at the point where time itself started.
How we know
Sources
Tanakh
- Bereishit 1–2:3 — the account of the six days and the hallowing of Shabbat
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Chagigah 12a — what was made on the first day; the light hidden away for the righteous
- Rosh Hashanah 10b–11a — the dispute of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua: was the world created in Tishrei or Nisan
- Seder Olam Rabbah 1 — the count of years from Creation on which the whole timeline rests
- Avot 5:1 — the world was made with ten utterances — and why ten
Rishonim
- Rashi on Bereishit 1:1 — why the Torah opens with Creation rather than with the first commandment
- Ramban on Bereishit 1:1 — creation from nothing in the first instant, then six days of forming
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.