"wow! it was really good" (Gen 1:31)

Reading through the story of creation

31 God saw all that He had made, and wow! it was really good.

וַיַּ֤רְא אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־כָּל־אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂ֔ה וְהִנֵּה־ט֖וֹב מְאֹ֑ד

We have already seen six times the phrase “God saw that it was good” (counting v. 4, where God saw that “the light” was good). It was missing on Day Two, but occurred twice on Day Three to compensate. Now on Day Six, the day parallel to Day Three in the pattern of Creation Week, we have it twice again. But this time, for its seventh occurrence, it packs an extra punch.

A student in an Intro to Judaism class asked me once, “Is the final exam cumulative?” If Genesis 1 is any indication, the answer is Yes. Up to now, God looked at his most recent creation and judged it good. This time, God looks at “all that He had made,” presumably including the most recent creation, and it is really good — not just tov, but tov me’od, good to the max.

This word מאד me’od is normally translated as “very,” and that is how it is most often used in the Bible — but it is actually a noun. In its second-most famous occurrence, in the first paragraph of the traditional Jewish “Shema” prayer (Deut 6:5), it is often translated as “with all your might.” I’m translating it somewhat colloquially as “really” instead of “very,” because, as Ed Greenstein notes:

It is not the narrator who finds creation to have been pleasing, but the Powers [his idiosyncratic translation of elohim], who take pleasure in their own work.¹

How does Greenstein know, and what makes me think, that this evaluation of creation as “really good” is not the narrator’s, but God’s own estimation? The word הנה hinneh. This word is often translated (as the KJV does here) with the English word “behold.” But with the exception of the frozen and somewhat jokey phrase “lo and behold,” no one actually uses this word in English any more.

There are two important things to keep in mind when you see הנה (or “behold”) in the Bible, and I have tried to put both of them into play here:

• It is a point-of-view word. At its most basic, הנה points at an event from a particular person’s perspective. It’s the word you use when you are telling someone your dream (see Genesis 37). When spoken by the narrator rather than a character, it encourages us to see something through that character’s eyes. Exod 3:2 does not say simply say of Moses, “He saw the bush was burning,” but “He saw and hinneh the bush was burning.” We are supposed to see it from Moses’ perspective. Here too we are to understand that tov m’od is from God’s perspective and not the narrator’s.

• It is a word invoking surprise. The word does not merely orient us to a particular character’s angle of vision. It is a word of noticing something that one hasn’t noticed before, something that changes your perspective, as when (surprise!) you give birth to twins. (See Gen 25:24 and 38:27.)

God’s perspective on creation is, no doubt, a pleasant surprise, and certainly not a shock. But the word hinneh tells us that this was not an inevitable outcome of the process. We have not yet learned God’s name, and there is a somewhat lab-notebook feel to this chapter. Nonetheless, as with “let’s create an earthling” (v. 26), we are being given just a hint here that God is not an affectless entity of some kind, but a being with emotions. (Don’t tell Maimonides I said so. But you can tell Abraham Joshua Heschel.) That’s why I’ve translated hinneh here as “Wow!” God is feeling good about his work and about himself.

In v. 30 we saw the seventh occurrence of “and it was so” (counting “let there be light” as one of them), and as I said at the top of the post this is the seventh occurrence of “and it was good,” slightly different from the first six just as “let there be light” was different from the last six occurrences of “and it was so.” In this regard, James Barr asks a question I won’t attempt to answer now — but when we get to Gen 2:18 I will have something more to say about it:

Finally, why is there emphasis, so evident in Genesis 1, on the fact that the creation was good—an element for which, so far as I know, no close Mesopotamian parallel has been found, and which is so strongly emphasized nowhere else in the Old Testament?²

Barr was interested in contrasting the Bible with the dualism of Zoroastrian belief, a question that is more relevant to Genesis 1 from the perspective of Isa 45:7. I don’t recall mentioning this verse yet, and perhaps I should have. Here it is:

‏ יוֹצֵ֥ר אוֹר֙ וּבוֹרֵ֣א חֹ֔שֶׁךְ עֹשֶׂ֥ה שָׁל֖וֹם וּב֣וֹרֵא רָ֑ע אֲנִ֥י יְהוָ֖ה עֹשֶׂ֥ה כָל־אֵֽלֶּה׃

In the NJPS translation:

I form light and create [ברא] darkness,

I make weal and create [ברא] woe—

I the LORD do all these things.

“The LORD” is a euphemism for God’s personal name, which we’ll see in Gen 2:4. “Woe” is really “evil” [רע], the opposite of “good.” I will leave you to consider this verse on your own for now, though it may come into our discussion again when we reach Gen 2:9.

Next time, we’ll finish Gen 1:31 and sum up what we’ve learned about Creation Week — or at least the first six days of it.

1. Edward Greenstein, “Presenting Genesis 1, Constructively and Deconstructively,” Prooftexts 21 (2001): 1-22, at 14.

2. James Barr, “Question of Religious Influence,” JAAR 53 (1985): 201-235, at 208.