Quoted By:
>The claim that God ceased from all his works on the seventh day is striking. There is no biblical tradition in which God resumed his labors on the eighth day. Rather, Gen 2:1–3 supports the thesis that the God who created the world, having completed the creation of a perfect and beautiful kosmos, retired from further activity and essentially disappeared from view.
>The trope in which Nous or the divine intelligence initiated the movement that began the formation of the kosmos, and then retired, was found as early as the cosmogony of Anaxagoras. This picture was also explicit in Tim 41b–42e, where the Demiurge, having created a perfect kosmos in his own image, turned over the task of creating mortal life forms to his offspring, the traditional anthropomorphic gods of the Greeks, and also turned over to them the administration and rule of the terrestrial world in which they dwelled. While the invisible Demiurge was the sole actor in the theological cosmogony of Tim 29d–40d, he disappeared as active agent in the zoogony that immediately followed in Tim 40d–42e, where his generated offspring took over the creation and rule over mortal life. The supreme power exercised by the Demiurge in the creation of the kosmos at the dawn of time was viewed as a singular act of such perfection that there was no reason for continued actions in the present that could only serve to disturb the perfect regularity of nature.
>In both Tim and Gen, we have the same striking sequence of concluding transitional events: the Creator’s work of ordering the perfect kosmos is completed (Tim 42e; Gen 2:1) the Creator, his work finished, retires from the scene as the administration of the sub-lunar world is delegated to the Creator’s offspring (Tim 41b–42a; Gen 2:4–25) The eternal Creator disappears from the narrative, his sole ongoing activity in the pre-sent to ensure the continued existence of the kosmos (Tim 42e), as the story shifts to the mortal terrestrial gods.
