Five-minute study · Day 363 · Genesis 1
Genesis 1:31
A word worth stopping on: very good טוֹב מְאֹד tov meod
'And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.' Six times during the creation week, God evaluates his work and calls it tov, good. On the sixth day, after making humanity, he looks at the whole of it together and adds a word: meod. Very. Exceedingly. The phrase tov meod appears here and only here with this intensity. Every previous day received a single adjective. The completed creation receives an intensifier. The verdict lands on everything: the light, the waters, the vegetation, the animals, the man, the woman, the entire system working together. God looked at the world on the day it was finished and saw nothing to fix. No flaw, no deficiency, no afterthought. The only time in Genesis 1 that tov is amplified. The original creation was not adequate. It was very good.
Word study: very good
- Hebrew
- טוֹב מְאֹד
- Pronounced
- tov meod
- Strong's
- H2896 / H3966
- Definition
- Tov: good, pleasant, excellent, right, beautiful. Meod: exceedingly, greatly, to a high degree. Together: exceedingly good, supremely excellent.
Tov appears 741 times in the Hebrew Bible. BDB defines it as 'good' in the broadest sense: pleasant to the senses (Genesis 2:9, the trees were good for food), morally upright (Micah 6:8, what is good), functionally complete (Genesis 1:4, the light was good), and aesthetically beautiful (Genesis 6:2, the daughters of men were fair/good). Meod appears 299 times as an adverb of intensity: very, exceedingly, greatly.
Walton's commentary on Genesis (NIVAC) argues that tov in Genesis 1 carries a functional meaning. When God calls the light tov (1:4), the seas and dry land tov (1:10), the vegetation tov (1:12), he is declaring that each element functions as designed. The creation is ordered, purposeful, operating correctly within the system. Walton reads tov as 'functioning according to purpose,' which makes the final tov meod a statement about the entire system: everything works together, all parts integrated, nothing out of place.
Walton observes that the six evaluations build toward the seventh. Each 'it was good' is a partial assessment, one component examined in isolation. The 'very good' of verse 31 is the comprehensive assessment, all components examined together. The addition of meod signals that the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. Light alone is good. Water alone is good. Vegetation alone is good. The entire creation, interacting as a unified system, is very good. The intensifier appears only when everything is in relationship.
This matters theologically because the rest of the biblical narrative is a story of the tov meod being damaged and restored. Genesis 3 introduces the fracture. The prophets describe the world as broken. Romans 8:22 says creation groans. Revelation 21:5 promises restoration: 'Behold, I make all things new.' The Bible's arc moves from the tov meod of Genesis 1:31 to the kainos of Revelation 21:5. The final renewal restores what the original verdict declared: everything, together, working as designed, very good.
Historical context · c. 2000-500 BCE
Creation Narratives in the Ancient Near East
Genesis 1 exists within a world of competing creation stories. The Babylonian Enuma Elish, composed in the second millennium BCE and recited annually at the New Year festival in Babylon, describes creation as the byproduct of divine violence. Marduk kills the goddess Tiamat, splits her body in half, and fashions the sky and earth from the two halves. Humans are created from the blood of a defeated rebel god, Kingu, and their purpose is to serve the gods by performing the labor the gods no longer wish to do. Creation in Enuma Elish is an accident of war, and humanity is a labor force.
The Egyptian creation accounts vary by city and period. In the Memphite theology, Ptah speaks creation into existence through his word. In the Heliopolitan theology, Atum emerges from the primordial waters and generates the gods through self-generation. In both traditions, the created world is populated with divine forces that can be hostile, capricious, or indifferent to human welfare.
Walton situates Genesis 1 against these traditions and identifies the critical difference: the verdict. No ancient Near Eastern creation text contains a divine evaluation of the finished work. No Mesopotamian or Egyptian god looks at the created world and declares it good. The world in those narratives is a battlefield, a workshop, a byproduct. In Genesis 1, the world is a work of art examined by its maker, who pronounces it excellent. The tov meod of verse 31 has no parallel in the literature of the ancient world.
The theological implications are substantial. If creation is the result of divine violence, then violence is embedded in the fabric of reality. If creation is the result of divine speech and divine satisfaction, then the fabric of reality is purposeful and valued. Genesis 1:31 establishes the baseline. Whatever has gone wrong since, the original verdict stands in the record. God made the world. He looked at it. He called it very good. That assessment precedes every story of failure, every flood, every exile, every crucifixion. The tov meod is the first word. The kainos of Revelation is the last. The story between them is the long work of bringing the verdict back to life.
For reflection
God looked at everything he had made and intensified his adjective. Good became very good when the whole creation was seen together. Consider the parts of your life that feel ordinary, unremarkable, merely adequate. What would shift if you saw them as components of a system that God designed to work together? Look at your day, all of it, and ask whether the original verdict still applies to how you see yourself.
Tov meod was spoken over a world that included you. The intensifier landed on the whole picture, not just the parts that impress you.
Sources: BDB; Walton, "Genesis"