Genesis 2:3 ends with a grammatically odd phrase: God rested from all His work "which God had created to make." Not "which God had made." Which God had created to make. Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Bereshit 17:2 treats this peculiar verb as a window into one of the strangest corners of Jewish cosmology.

R. Bannaya's unfinished creatures

R. Bannaya, a late third-century sage, read the phrase literally. Some beings were "created to make" — meaning their creation was begun but not completed. Specifically, these were the mazikin (demons).

"These are the demons, whose souls He had created. While He was creating their bodies, the Sabbath commenced. So He left them alone, and they survive to the present as spirit with no body."

The Sabbath interrupted the sixth-day work, and the demons were caught mid-formation — souls without the flesh to contain them. They drift in between, neither fully created nor fully imagined, a permanent population of half-finished beings.

What demons are in Jewish tradition

It is worth pausing to name what the Jewish tradition means by demons and what it does not. Mazikin are not cosmic rebels. They are not beings who opposed God or fell from heaven. The Jewish imagination has no war in heaven, no satanic coup, no dualist battle of light against dark. Demons here are creatures — part of God's world, like humans or animals — whose creation happened to stop early. They are not evil by nature. They are simply incomplete.

The <a href='/categories/midrash-rabbah.html'>Talmud</a> in Hagigah 16a describes demons as having six characteristics — three like angels and three like humans. Like angels, they have wings, they move from one end of the world to the other, and they know the future. Like humans, they eat and drink, they reproduce, and they die. They are a third category, distinct from both.

Their strange behavior

R. Bannaya notes that demons "are fruitful and multiply like humans, and they die like humans." They are mortal. They have offspring. And they can interact with the human world under certain circumstances.

The midrash mentions, without commentary, that the first Adam — in his long separation from Eve after the expulsion from Eden — fathered children from spirits. The reference is to a tradition preserved elsewhere in rabbinic literature (Eruvin 18b) that Adam spent 130 years apart from Eve, and during that time produced offspring with female demons. These offspring were the ancestors of later demon populations.

A competing interpretation

The midrash closes with an alternative reading. Some sages said the phrase "which God had created to make" referred not to demons but to the future Temple — the Beit HaMikdash that is yet to be rebuilt. The Temple is "created to make," meaning its ultimate form exists in the divine blueprint but awaits human hands to bring it into physical reality.

Both readings agree that creation is not finished. Something was left undone on the sixth day. For R. Bannaya, it was the demons. For the alternative opinion, it is the Temple. Either way, the world is waiting — for completion, for restoration, for the moment when the interrupted work resumes.

The takeaway: the universe has unfinished business. The Sabbath froze creation mid-stride, and some creatures — and some buildings — remain half-made. The work that stopped on day six is still stopped. It will resume only when the time is right.