Was God Tired?

Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. (Genesis 2:1-3)

Isaiah 40:28 states unequivocally,

“The Creator of the ends of the earth neither faints nor is weary.”

The word translated “rest” or “rested” in Genesis 2:2-3, as well as in Exodus 31:17, is the Hebrew word shabat, from which our English word Sabbath derives. It literally means “to repose, in the sense of stopping from exertion.” It is translated elsewhere as cease, celebrate, and keep. God ceased from the active work of creating, and in doing so, He created the Sabbath. He stopped, not because He was tired, but because He was in the process of instituting something different. At this time, He also “blessed” (barak) the seventh day, just as He had blessed the animals (Genesis 1:22) and Adam and Eve (verse 28). In blessing the seventh day, God promised to make the Sabbath a valuable and energizing occasion by which our lives are continually renewed (Isaiah 58:13-14). God also “sanctified” or “hallowed” this day—He made it holy, set apart from all other days both of that creation week as well as on a repeated and continual basis.

Exodus 31:17 says that God was also “refreshed”:

It is a sign between Me and the children of Israel forever; for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed.

The Hebrew word is נָפַשׁ naphash in the Nifal form וַיִּנָּפַֽשׁ׃, which is the same root as nephesh which has the meaning of a soul, living being, life, self, person, desire, passion, appetite, emotion. It is used in this form only 4 times in the whole Bible, and in all the other three it has the sense of a tired person regaining his strength as it were, two of those also in the Nifal form, as it is here (Ex.23:12; Josh11:14; 2Sam16:14). In the nephesh form it is abundant, with 754 occurrences.

So what could this mean? Perhaps God was “refreshed” in the sense that he was pleased how he had created the world (and established the idea of a sabbath rest). Perhaps this anthropomorphism is prescriptive of how the Jews were to respond to a Sabbath day. Because the root word is “soul” (in Arabic nafs), I think a better translation would “heartened” (because heart of a person is like his soul), and in this sense it could mean “he was pleased”. This would also be an acceptable translation in the other 3 instances, but especially here in the context of God. There is no mention of God actually being tired, so that the reading that God ceased his creative activity shabat and then looked upon it with pleasure wayinapas seems consistent.