In honor of Earth Day on April 22nd, I want to talk about Creation. Creation was good. We find a declaration of goodness at the end of each day of creation, with the strange exception of day two, after separating the waters above and below the firmament. However, the work of day six was declared good twice; first for the animals, and the second time after making Man. That final declaration of goodness was applied to “everything that he had made” (v. 31), so yes, even the work of day two was eventually declared good.
But what does it mean to be “good”? That’s a very multi-purpose word in English. Good can mean moral excellence, high quality, or proper. The Hebrew word used here is tob. Genesis one uses tob every time we see the word good. At least that means there’s no change going from day to day that is hidden to us because of the translation.
But in what sense is creation good? We have to look elsewhere to see how tob is used in the Old Testament. In Genesis 2:9 and 2:17 it mentions “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. This is clearly using “good” in the moral sense, meaning righteousness. And tob is the word used, confirming that it can be used for moral goodness. We find tob used also in Genesis 2:12, stating that “the gold of the land is good”. Clearly, this isn’t referring to righteous gold, so it must mean high quality gold. We see a similar usage when Moses was born and his mother saw that he was tob. She couldn’t see that he was righteous, but she could see that he was healthy and beautiful, or in other words, of good quality. Lastly, we see in Genesis 2:18 God saying, “It is not tob that the man should be alone”. The definition of “proper” fits best here. It has nothing to do with righteousness or quality. Tob in this sense has to do with fitness within a given context. Even in just this very brief examination of how tob is used primarily in Genesis, we see all three meanings that we also have in English. This makes our job of exegesis difficult. We are still wondering, in what sense was creation good?
I believe to a degree it is all three. Creation was righteous because God made it, and there was no sin yet, so it was obviously morally good. However, because we find no mention of evil in Genesis one, I don’t think that’s the primary meaning. We can also say that creation is high quality. Again, that is obvious from the fact that God made it, and important for us to know that there were no flaws in God’s design. But as with the first definition, there is no mention of any contrast, so I don’t think quality is being emphasized. That brings us to proper. Was creation proper? Absolutely. And we do find the properness emphasized by the frequent mention of separating. Five times in days one through four we find that God was separating things: light from dark, waters from waters, and day from night. The act of separating is inherently giving order where before there was none. We also find the phrase “according to their kind” take over from separating in the latter days of creation. Plants and trees yielding fruit and seeds, sea creatures, birds, and beasts all according to their kind. In other words, we find a deep commitment to order, or contextual properness.
At the pinnacle of goodness is God’s declaration: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (v. 31, emphasis added). All of creation was righteous, high quality, but above all, very proper. Why was it only declared very tob at the end of creation? I think that goes back to the meaning of proper. Because properness can only exist in context, as creation progressed, the properness, or order, increased. Creation became more ordered each day, until when it was complete, creation was perfectly ordered. That’s why the ”very good” had to wait until the end.
