What Does Genesis 1:4 Mean?

God's evaluative act, "and God saw that the light was good," is the first instance of the refrain that will govern the creative week. The Hebrew tov, "good," denotes fitness for purpose and correspondence to design intent. This is not God approving something that proved itself independently; it is the Creator naming what he has made as it ought to be. The standard of goodness disclosed in creation is God's own design-intent, not an external criterion he must measure his work against.

The separation of light from darkness is the first division in the creation account, and division is the structural principle of the entire week. Day one divides light from dark; day two divides waters above from waters below; day three divides sea from land. The God of Genesis 1 creates by distinguishing: he calls order out of the undifferentiated void by establishing meaningful categories. The world he makes is a world of distinctions, each category bounded and named. To violate these distinctions (as the prophets later warned) is to undo something God deliberately made.

God names the light "Day" and the darkness "Night," the first recorded naming act in scripture. In the ancient Near Eastern world, naming was an exercise of knowledge and authority: to name a thing was to define its nature and establish one's relationship to it. God names the fundamental conditions of existence before any creature exists to name anything. The whole of human language, beginning with Adam's naming of the animals in chapter 2, takes place within a cosmos already named from above.