yapheh

This is the Bible's ordinary word for being beautiful or lovely to the eye. It is the word used for a striking person, but also for anything that delights the senses, so it stretches naturally from a person's looks to a handsome landscape, a flourishing tree, healthy livestock, or even a pleasant singing voice.

The two shades below are the same idea pointed in different directions. The first describes people, and it is by far the most common use: a beautiful woman or a handsome man, often the very thing that drives a story forward (Joseph's good looks, David's, the bride of the Song of Songs). The second applies the same word to things, places, animals, and sounds, where it simply means attractive or splendid.

The word is purely about how something appears or sounds, not about whether it is good underneath. Proverbs makes the point sharply: a beautiful woman without sense is like a gold ring in a pig's snout. Beauty here can be admired, desired, or even mistrusted, but the word itself only reports that something is lovely to perceive.

In a small group of passages, mostly in Ecclesiastes, the word for beautiful is stretched from looking lovely to being well suited, the way English can call an arrangement or a moment beautiful when it really means apt and right. The famous line that God has made everything beautiful in its time is making this point: each thing is fitting, set in its proper place and season, not merely pretty.

This is a natural reach of the same word rather than a wholly separate idea, which is why some translators keep rendering it beautiful even here. But the focus has shifted from how something looks to whether it is suitable and good for the occasion, so it is worth marking as its own shade of meaning.