What the lectionary this last Sunday offered up, in all of its length, was Genesis 1 and the first three verses of Genesis 2. This is the familiar "God made everything in six days, and on the seventh, he took a breather" story. The rhythms and patterns of that scripture rise from ancient liturgy and worship, with cycles of repeated words that appear to have been intended to be chanted or recited or sung by priests in the temple.
This story clearly affirms that Creation…all that we see and perceive…is good. It is to be viewed not neutrally, or as inscrutable and dangerous, but as essentially positive. That is certainly true of our tiny delicate little living gem of a planet, but it is also the operating presumption about the entirety of existence as we are able to observe it, all forty-six-and-a-half billion light years in every direction.
Seven times in this ancient liturgical chant, we are told that in the midst of his work, God observes it, and sees that it is good, or that it is very good.
In Genesis, the Hebrew word for “good” is one you probably know. You do, really you do, even if you weren't required to take Hebrew in seminary. Seriously. You can do this.
Just complete the following two word statement: "Mazel _____!"
Yeah, you know it. Tov.
The word for good is tov, as in the familiar Jewish celebratory affirmation mazel tov, which means basically “good fortune.” “Good morning,” for example, is boker tov, which is always a pleasant thing to know when you're entering your wife's synagogue for morning services.
God sees his creative work, in all of its abundance, and affirms that all of it is either tov or…if it is very good, tov me’od.
In prepping to preach on this, I went down an unanticipated linguistic rabbit hole, one I didn't subject my congregation to when I hit 'em with the sermon. The focus of that sermon was on the nature of work, and how God values all work in ways our blighted and grasping economic assumptions do not. Walloping folks with an excursus on a bit of peculiar Hebrew subtlety seemed a distraction.
I'd always considered those recurring "and God saw that it was good" statements as adjectival in nature, affirming of the character of each stage of the work of creation.
But tov is a word that serves many functions in Hebrew, and it can be both an adjective and a noun. In the construction of the verses in Genesis, it's phrased like this: vayar Elohim ki tov, which means, literally, "and saw God that good." Most English translations incorporate a logically assumed "it was" into that formulation, for obvious reasons. But in the Hebrew, that isn't actually there.
Which means, given the sentence construction, that it could be just as easily read as the nominative "And God saw that Goodness," or "And God saw that Abundant Goodness." Tov could be a noun here. It doesn't have to be, but there is sufficient linguistic ambiguity that it could be.
For some reason, this struck me as delightful, as a deepening of God's affirmation of Creation, as if Goodness and Great Goodness were so essential to the nature of God's work that it could be our name for it. It isn't a question of the Lord saying, "Yup, that's some quality work I did there." It's an ontological affirmation that Creation is fundamentally radiant with the sacred.
If only that was how we were able to perceive it and name it, not as a thing to be used and owned and controlled, but as Goodness itself.
Take a handful of warm sweet compost, filled with the richness of life and the promise of harvest. The name of that is Goodness. Look up to the first star in the night sky at dusk in the late spring, and in the cool breeze of the evening, name it all as Great Goodness.
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