Oh, My! What Now?
and God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:12 ESV (and others)
That it was – Familiarity is the enemy of investigation. How many times have you read this phrase? How many times have you recalled the Genesis story and considered the goodness of God’s actions? And how many of those times have you noticed that the words “that it was” were added to the text?
There’s a problem in Paradise. The Hebrew actually reads vayahr elohim ki tov, literally “and saw God ki good.” We have not translated the particle ki because it is a good deal more complex than the rendering “that it was.” First, ki is not a verb. BDB suggests that there are times when ki cannot be represented in English. TWOT suggests “kî is used in four ways: to introduce an objective clause especially after verbs of seeing, saying, etc. and translated ‘that’; to introduce a temporal clause and translated ‘when.’”[1] But Kushner would object. “But ki feels different from ‘that’—it’s both more complex and more elegant.”[2] Kushner points out that ki is used sometimes simply for emphasis (and typically never translated as such). It’s like an exclamation point. “And saw God – Good!” “That” tends to truncate the thought, as if the subsequent idea (good) is the logical result of God’s seeing. Translating ki as “that” makes the sentence a matter-of-fact statement rather than an exclamation of delight.
Ah, but that’s not the only problem here. We notice that “it was good” is a Western interpolation of the Hebrew ki-tov. There is no verb here, particularly no “was.” The two Hebrew words are run together to make one expression, not two distinct thought like “it” and “good.” Now the emphatic use of ki is even more significant. The little exclamation point behind the word “good” changes things. No verb needed.
And we also have to comment on the only real verb in this phrase, that is, “saw.” This verb has some unusual characteristics too. Not in English, of course. In English it is merely a past tense of “to see.” But in Hebrew the verb yireh is a future tense with an added vav, converting the future tense into a past tense. What this means is that “the resulting verb, vayahr, lives in a special time zone of biblical time, a past tense that lies on the foundation of a verb in the future tense.”[3] What does it mean for God to see “Good!”? Perhaps it is much more than just a news report of some already-completed event. Perhaps what God sees is what has been done in terms of what will be done. Try translating that into English.
We have a lot to learn, don’t we? Kushner comments:
“. . . to see what other verses and ideas lie just beyond the boundaries of that particular page. The reader’s task is not to be lulled by the promise of the familiar, not to simply accept a refrain as seemingly clear as the cheerful “and God saw that it was good.” The reader’s task is to ask what is going on. No matter how many readers have read before him, the reader must ask again, must investigate, must lift the veil to seek the face of the text, over and over again.”[4]
Topical Index: Genesis 1:12, ki, that, vayahr, saw, tov, good
[1] Oswalt, J. N. (1999). 976 כִי. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer, Jr. & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer, Jr. & B. K. Waltke, Ed.) (electronic ed.) (437). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God, p. 37.
[3] Ibid., p. 39.
[4] Ibid., p. 41.
Skip, you could just keep right on going. Thank you! To be able to know that this has a connotation of the future informing the present (and with it, the past, too!) is amazing insight for me!
So to read it that way, could you say it that He was saying that, reading it all from the end to the beginning, in spite of all that was going to happen as a result of sin, and death, and sorrow, and loss – the decay of it all, from the second law of thermodynamics to genetic chaos to the yanking around backwards somehow of time itself in that the universe FROM OUR PERSPECTIVE is ‘running down’ – all, all of it, in spite of the worst anyone could do, was still “good”? I am going to have to go chew this delicious morsel for a good long time!
Come to think of it, I think this one had best be thought with the mind of the One Who thought it first. I was thinking this morning about what Paul had to say when he said that we needed the mind of Christ. So many times, as I started to pull out of the insanity that sin is, I would realize that I needed a brain transplant; that fear and shame and guilt were thoughts that never even went through His mind, but if they didn’t go hurting His mind, why should I put up with them hurting mine? So I would pray and earnestly ask, and I then would say “I choose the mind of Christ”, and it would feel like an extremely tight muscle would relax and let the blood flow, and I could breathe in that place: from shut off and shut out to a prime seat at the country club; from the dunce seat to Mensa, it so many times returned me to a place where I could see my true options, and a better way to look at reality. Looking through the eyes of love is not the vision of mortals, has been my firm conclusion. Love is just not something that we can even hold – it has to be held in us and for us; no, love comes from beyond us to somewhere else. No way Jose’ does it start with me!
This thought has to be one of those brain transplant thoughts, I think; best thought with the Mind that thunk it first. I gotta go; me and Him have some business here, thanks to Skip. Oh, joy! New thoughts are just the best!
Very Interesting, Skip.
Question. Isn’t it “vav yud resh aleph” va’yar, “and to see” or “and seeing”? Instead of resh aleph hay, ra’ah saw.
We also see the same construction of ki tov in Gen 1:4. Literally, and saw God the light ki tov. In this case, it’s the same thing, “vav yud resh aleph”, “and to see” or “and seeing”, we know what God is looking at because of the ‘et”, the light. And “ki good”.
The HALOT seems to think “ki” is the subordinate clause of “that”, after a verb of seeing, hearing, saying, noticing, believing, remembering, forgetting and of joy or regretting.
So, it appears to me, regardless, God saw the light as good.
I think HALOT is correct. But, nonetheless an interesting thought.
Or maybe it’s a “causative” statement (as it is often (maybe always) elsewhere), which puts the emphasis on “saw”. It’s interesting to compare the structure of what God “saw because good” to what Eve “saw because good” in Gen. 3:6, and then of course in day 2, no “saw because good”.
YHWH bless you and keep you…….
Ki seems to be sometimes (perhaps often) translated as “for” or “because”, as in Hodu l’Adonai ki tov, ki le-olam chasdo – “Give thanks [to] YHVH for [He is] good, for his chesed [is] for ever.”
The vayiqtol form of the verb at the begining of a sentence is characteristic of narrative prose. I was taught that in this case it represents the narrative past tense and thus can be (and most often is) rendered in English as a simple past tense. A more literal reading would seem to me to be “And God saw the light for [it was] good”, (which may lead to some other interesting questions). This could be read as a tautology of “light” and “good”, requiring us to add the copula (“it was”) for readability in English.
In verse 5 there are some other subtleties with relative verb tenses that I’ve never seen brought over into an English translation, either, but that might be a discussion for another time. 🙂
My understanding is that Gen.1:1-2:4a was written by YHWH himself and I have been lifting “the veil to seek the face of the text, over and over again” for the past 20 months. Today’s bread has been a feast in this regard. Thanks!
To put tenses to this introductory statement of YHWH to TORAH does not make sense… and to add words are even worse.
I will not extrapolate on Yah and time as Skip would just refer me to his book… which I have not finished!
This quote seems odd to me: “What this means is that “the resulting verb, vayahr, lives in a special time zone of biblical time, a past tense that lies on the foundation of a verb in the future tense.”[3].” At first this sounds profound; but, it would have to apply to every wayyiqtol in Scripture. It reminds me of Ecclesiastes 1:9 which says “That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” I see this verse as profound truth. That aside, I often see ki as causal (for… because…); it’s often followed by a qatal creating a dependent clause. But there isn’t one here. I imagine that’s why “was” was inserted. English can but doesn’t always use a relative pronoun; but, it seems Hebrew always does. Another place where we see ki tov is Genesis 40:16 when the baker saw that (ki) Joseph’s interpretation of the cup bearer’s dream was good (tov)…it’s a dependent clause. Perhaps there are other cases where it’s possible to use it as you described. It’s an interesting concept that I will have to be on the lookout for.
Cool! This is going to hold my attention for some time.