In that great fiction of cosmic origins God has eight big chunks of global stuff to work with in organizing our world. Count, for example, the number of times you find the phrase “And God said: ‘Let [something] be …’” in that opening chapter.

But those eight chunks must be squeezed into six days so that we have only one of them on the first, second, fourth, and fifth days but two of them on the third and sixth days. It would be hard for authors to signal their purpose more clearly. And it is this.

The creation of the world can take only six days because the crown of creation is the Sabbath Rest. It is not because rest is for worship but because rest is worship. It is the creational actualization of the distributive justice which is the character of the biblical God. That is why we have the Sabbath Day “so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home born slave and the resident alien may be refreshed” in Exodus 23:12 and Deuteronomy 5:12-15.

That is why the Sabbath Year is for the freeing of slaves and the remitting of debts in Exodus 21:2-11 and Deuteronomy 15:1-11. That is why the Sabbath Jubilee is for the restitution of all alienated rural property in Leviticus 25:8-31. It is always about the Sabbath’s distributive justice for animals, humans, and the land itself.

In that imaginary vision, it is Sabbath justice and not human presence which is the crown of creation. (We humans are actually the work of a late Friday afternoon—not a time, normally, for anyone’s best work.) But Genesis repeats twice in Genesis 1:26a and 27 that humanity—female and male alike in 1:27—is made in the image and likeness of God. And in what that divine image and likeness consists is explained immediately afterwards—and again twice in 1:26b and 1:28. It consists in our vocation to administer God’s distributive justice as stewards and not owners of the earth—to rule the earth like that God who so loves the world.

In terms of my last posting on religio-political bilingualism, let me try that in three different versions. A first way: We are God’s wager that human beings with free will won’t destroy God’s earth and themselves with it. A second way: We are an evolutionary experiment to see if moral conscience can replace chemical instinct. A third way: Our first parents said let’s give the kids the keys to the car and see if they learn to drive before they destroy others, kill themselves, and wreck the car.