Good and Evil, Towb and Ra

I am a linguist and I work in Bible translation.

Words can have more than one sense, and each sense has a semantic range. That means words can both have different meanings in different contexts and the best word in English to translate a given word in Hebrew might not always be the same English word. Semantic ranges rarely map from one language to another in exactly the same way.

So, yes some interpreters claim the Hebrew word for good has the element of functionality as part of its semantic range. Or maybe another way to put it is that the Hebrew concept of goodness included functionality within the conceptual domain of things that could be called good. That’s different than claiming something like “functional is the best translation of the Hebrew word ט֖וֹב,” because the best translation of a word always depends on how a word is used in a context.

John Walton has written a lot about this concept of functionality when he talks about material versus functional creation.

The work of the six days is to order the cosmos as sacred space and to prepare it to function as sacred space (“it was good”) for people in God’s image.

https://biologos.org/series/reflections-on-the-lost-world-of-genesis-1-by-john-walton/articles/material-or-function-in-genesis-1-john-walton-responds

You also might enjoy playing with this website, which allows you to look at the semantic ranges of Hebrew words in the Old Testament: MARBLE

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