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Welcome to TOV.
This is the story of the word that defines life on earth and human existence.
It’s the Hebrew word for good, as in that’s good ! But what do you mean when you say, “that’s good?” We hope to answer that question in these pages.
TOV is how creation was described in the the ancient Hebrew story called Bereshit, meaning “in the beginning.”
English Bibles call it Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament. Its words have profoundly shaped our culture, morality, laws, and even how we think. We think we know what’s good.
בְּרֵאשִׁית
Bereshit – in the Beginning
Bereshit was significantly different from many other creation myths circulating anciently. Most of them, like the Babylonian Enuma Elis, told of multiple gods fighting for supremacy and creating humans to be their slaves.
Bereshit suggests that just one god did it all.
The change from belief in multiple gods to the monotheism associated with the Judaism, Christianity, and Islam did not occur abruptly. Around 1000 BCE, many cultures, including ancient Hebrews, simply believed that their own god was more awesome than other peoples’ gods.
A World Created by Words
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
In the bible story of creation, as each of the declared stages for life was complete, each was pronounced to be good, TOV (טוב)
The story is also unique among early creation myths because of its explicit focus on life being good, rather than glorifying the gods’ ability to tame chaos through battle.
The creator made a Goldilocks zone, and it was good. He made it all, and man in his own image, and said it was very good.
Then came the rain. Plants sprouted. The man made from dust came to life with a puff of air up his nose. His Hebrew name was simply “Man,” (ת־הָֽאָדָ֗ם עָפָר֙)- Man from Dust.
Seeing that Man was all alone, the creator in Bereshit proposed that the man have a compatible helper. As the story in English translation continues, “Woman” was made from the man’s famous rib. Yet the Hebrew word צֵלָע (tsela), conveniently translated as rib, may actually mean his entire side, as in a side of beef. Any suggestion that there was to be a 50-50 partnership is dispelled as the narrative continues.
Adam eventually gave her a name: Eve, because she was to become the mother of all (human) life. Faithful to the command to be fruitful and replenish the earth, Adam and Eve had a bunch of children.
The parents having no prior parenting experience, and the children lacking appropriate interpersonal skills, it is easy to imagine how these people failed to meet their creator’s expectations. From this point on in the biblical narrative, the story takes a dark turn and we are introduced to the opposite of good: lying, deceit, murder, slavery, child abuse, robbery. Evil…
It got so bad that “every imagination of the thoughts of his (man’s) heart was only evil continually.”
The Opposite of Good -רַע = Evil
Know good and evil – ידעי טוב ורע
The Biblical creation narrative introduces the concept of evil as a consequence of disobedience.
“And the LORD God said Behold the man is become as one of us to know good (ט֣וֹב) and evil (וָרָ֑ע).”
It can be argued that the disobedience itself was not labeled as evil; it only brought about the humans’ ability to know both good and evil… just as one of “us.”
וירא יהוה כי רבה רעת האדם בארץ וכל־יצר מחשבת לבו רק רע כל־היום
(And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.)
Translating the modern Hebrew word רע (ra’a – evil), into a lot of other languages suggests that evil is simply the opposite of good. But here is where it gets a little tricky because Hebrew isn’t like some of our modern languages that conveniently keep nouns and adjectives separate. Notice in the above Hebrew sentence, רַ֖ע in yellow, is an adjective modifying imagination. ” Man’s imagination was evil.”
As we take a deeper dive into how the noun וָרָ֑ע (rā-‘aṯ) and the adjective (ra’) are actually used, other meanings start to emerge. To know good and to know evil suggest that they are things we ought to know. Things have substance; that’s why they are called substantives, or just plain nouns. That opens us up to arguments about natural evil and moral evil, as well as a lot of philosophers who believe that evil does not exist.
Soon we remember that we who invented language also define what the words mean, and those meanings evolve.
If a word comes to mean everything, it becomes meaningless. This has happened with the word evil. We have a growing number of Evil-skeptics who question if evil is a real thing, along with Evil-revivalists fighting a semantics battle with their skeptical philosopher brothers, and a few sisters.
If we are to know TOV, the opposite of RA’, we must settle on a definition of EVIL, especially if evil was not erased from man’s heart by the biblical flood.
If our definition of good includes things and conditions favorable to perpetuation of a cycle of life, evil is simply the opposite: the unnecessary destruction of life. Destruction is a real thing. Unnecessary is open to debate.
It’s a lot more than unnecessarily killing things; it’s bad language, ideas, and beliefs that result in the wanton destruction of life, including the ecosystem that makes life possible.
As we look at our world today, evil exists on all sides and we homo sapiens, the wise ones, are its authors…
“…every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
Bereshit (Genesis) – Chapter 6, verse 5
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