Thursday 7 April 2016

Ki Tov

Grammar

Word: כי טוב
Representation: KY TVB

Transliteration: Ki Tov
Expression: "for good", "because of good", "that good"
Strong Concordance: H3588 and H2896


Exposition

This is one of the few times where a pair of words cannot be separated. This is because it is an expression that appears more then 40 times in Scripture.

Because of it's ambiguous meaning that seems to change with every translation, it has lent itself to being a catch-all phrase for something that basically means "satisfied" or "more than acceptable".

For example, when it says that the Elohim "saw the light "ki tov" and then separated the light from the darkness", you end up with such comments as:
  1. The light was good, so the darkness was not good.
  2. THAT light was good, but not all light is good
  3. That light is only for the good [people] and it was set aside for the "world to come".
  4. God can only see good, and so he saw it because it was good.
The list goes on.

The simple meaning is "God made light, examined it, was satisfied with His creation (it was more than just acceptable), and separated it from the darkness".

But because of people expectation, I will often use "that was good" alone or with another modifier/

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