a store of good things: actual goods and produce, prosperity and well-being, fine quality, or, above all, God's own generous goodness
This word comes from the same root as the common adjective for "good," (טוב) but it is not simply that adjective turned into a noun. Almost every time it appears, it is tied to someone by a possessive: not "good" in the abstract, but the good things, or the goodness, that belong to a person, a place, or God. That grammar shapes the whole word. It names a fund or supply of good things rather than a floating quality.
The range runs from the very concrete to the very lofty. At one end it is the actual produce and property a household or a country holds:
- the goods a servant carries
- the grain and wine a family sends home
- the crops of a fertile land
In the middle it shades into a person's or a nation's prosperity and general well-being, the sense that life is going well. Toward the aesthetic edge it can mean the finest or most attractive part of something. At the far end, and this is where the word does its most important work, it becomes the standard term in the Psalms and elsewhere for God's own goodness, the kindness and bounty he reveals and gives.
These are not separate, unrelated words that happen to look alike. Cousins of this root in older Near Eastern languages already show the same kind of noun covering both fragrant, pleasant produce and a person's well-being, so this range is old and built into the word rather than a later blur. Scholars disagree about which end of the range is the word's center of gravity: some read it as fundamentally concrete and relational, a matter of goods and gifts; others read it as fundamentally moral, an attribute of character. The evidence supports treating it as one word whose sense simply widens or narrows with context, most memorably in Exodus 33:19, where God tells Moses he will make "all my goodness" pass before him, the very moment the word crosses from ordinary bounty into a name for who God is.
Nuances
Whether the word here means God's ethical, relational "goodness" or, in an older reading, his visible "beauty."
- majorityThe word names God's goodness: his kind, gracious character, which he discloses to Moses in place of a direct sight of his glory, and which the following chapter unpacks as mercy and grace.; Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), 595-97; William H. C. Propp, Exodus 19-40, AB 2A (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 604-07
- minorityThe word names something closer to beauty or fairness on display.; Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), s.v. tuv, sec. 3.a; Wilhelm Gesenius, A Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, trans. S. P. Tregelles (London, 1857), s.v. tuv
Disputed
Whether the word's center of gravity is fundamentally concrete and relational (a supply of goods and gifts) or fundamentally moral (an abstract attribute of character).
- contestedThe word is at heart a concrete, relational noun for bounty and its effects; even the "goodness of the LORD" is the tangible gifts and results of God's relationship with his people, not a Greek-style abstract attribute.; I. Höver-Johag, "tov," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren, trans. David E. Green (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 5:296-317; H. J. Stoebe, "tov, good," in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann, trans. Mark E. Biddle (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1997), 2:486-95
- contestedThe word can also carry a genuinely moral or even philosophical sense of goodness as such, distinct from any one gift or benefit.; Andrew Bowling, "793 tov," in Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, ed. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., and B. K. Waltke (Chicago: Moody, 1980), 1:345-46