Humanity in God’s Image and Likeness: Genesis 1.26-31, Part 1

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Over the past couple weeks, we’ve been working our way slowly through Genesis 1. So far, we’ve seen that it’s a highly stylized text that plays with existing Babylonian mythology in order to present a vastly different idea of God and creation, one in which God’s authority is unchallenged by the forces of chaos and disorder, and creation is intentional, rational, and purposeful, with everything having its own role and purpose. Today we come to what is arguably the pinnacle of this story: the creation of humanity. Without further ado, let’s jump into the text.

Text

[26] Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’

[27] So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them,
male and female he created them.

[28] God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ [29]  God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. [30] And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. [31]  God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Experience & Encounter

As I read this text, I find myself delighted and gratified by its ‘high anthropology,’ that is, its positive and elevated vision of humanity, as signaled by the wonderful and mysterious phrases “the image and likeness” of God and “dominion” over the creatures of land, sea, and air. But, in light of the ecological crisis, I also find myself concerned at some of the ways this text has been used to justify a careless and violent approach to the environment and the creatures that inhabit it.

In terms of encounter, once again the only character in the story is God. But there’s an odd detail here in which God addresses Godself in the plural (”let us make…”). I’d like to know what’s going on here, especially in a text that, as we’ve seen so far, seems to be promoting monotheism over and against the polytheistic religion of Babylon.

These reflections set up the three main questions that will guide this study:

  • What’s going on with the divine plural in verse 26?
  • What might creation in the ‘image and likeness’ of God entail?
  • What does humanity’s ‘dominion’ over other living creatures say about our relationship with the wider world?

Today I’ll look at the first two of these questions; the third will have to wait until the next post.

Explore

‘Let Us Make…’

There’s no question that the plural verb here is one of the most marked aspects of the Genesis 1 story. It’s a mode of divine speech we see two other times in the Bible, both in the Genesis primeval material:

  • “See, the man has become like one of us” (3.22)
  • “Come, let us go down and confuse their language…” (11.7)

All three of these are deliberative, and it’s interesting that the other two are in response to humanity becoming a problem set loose on the world by the results of this one. The question before us now is who is the ‘us’ God is talking about. There are four ways we might answer this.

Majestic Plural

The simplest, but also the least likely, is to take it as something like the English ‘royal we’, in which a ruler speaks in the plural to denote their authority and grandeur. Ancient Hebrew most certainly used a majestic plural, but crucially it was found almost exclusively with nouns. The most famous example is the generic word for God, Elohim, which is technically the plural of the name of a Canaanite god, El; similarly, the word ‘Lord’, when used of God is Adonai, the plural of the noun adon, ‘lord’. But, Hebrew just didn’t use a majestic plural with verbs; even these plural nouns were consistently used with singular verbs, making this an unlikely explanation for the construction here.

Polytheistic Remnant

The most controversial possibility is that the plural here describes a council of the gods (Sarna (1989) 12).* By the end of the Exile, monotheism was a primary mark of Judaism, but this cannot be said for pre-Exile Israelite and Judahite religion. Many of the titles used in the Old Testament for God are in fact names of gods of Israel’s polythetistic neighbours. El, for example, was a common god among the West Semitic peoples (and a priest of El, Melchizedek, ends up becoming a heroic figure in later Judaism (see Genesis 14 and Hebrews 5). Shad, best known to us from the name El-Shaddai in the Bible, where it’s used almost exclusively in conversations about fertility, is known from divine names in Ammonite inscriptions. We also know that throughout the monarchic period, YHWH could be conflated with the Canaanite god Baal (Hosea 2.16, which fits archaeological evidence showing YHWH with the same basic storm-god iconography as Baal), and was often worshiped alongside Asherah (see Judges 3.7, 1 Kings 15.13, for example; cf. archaeological finds portraying Asherah as YHWH’s wife). And we’ve already seen how Tehom, the word translated as ‘the deep’ in Genesis 1.2, could elsewhere function as a name and be personified as a force opposing God — like its Babylonian cognate Tiamat — and how the Bible makes regular mention of sea monsters (Leviathan, Rahab, and the tanninim more generally), who among Israel’s neighbours were either gods or servants of gods. Even the Ten Commandments do not deny the existence of other gods, insisting only that the Israelites were to have no gods above YHWH (Exodus 20.1-3). All this is to say that the Bible’s own report suggests that monotheism emerged only slowly and belief in many gods persisted for much of biblical history (irrespective of the question of whether this was ‘orthodoxy’ at the time.)

In light of this, some have suggested that the plurals here in Genesis refer to an actual meeting of the gods. This could fit in well with Psalm 82.1, where God (Elohim) presides over a council “in the midst of the gods [elohim]”. This is really the cleanest solution, but it also doesn’t fit well with either the general sensibility of Old Testament canon as a whole, or the monotheistic aims of Genesis 1, and so tends not to be seriously proposed as a solution here.

(One solution as to why a polytheistic text might be found here in Genesis 1, could be that it is an element retained from the Enuma Elish, in which Marduk presides over such a council (Sarna (1966), 4-6). Either that, or it could also be an attempt to harmonize God’s deliberation here with the (canonically later but most likely temporally earlier) Genesis 3 and 11 stories (Carr).)

Angelic Council

The most popular suggestion is that it refers to a divine council, in which God consults with an angelic council. We see such a council in Job 1.6-12, where Satan convinces YHWH to test Job’s faithfulness. The Prophet Micaiah also has a vision of YHWH seated in council with “the whole host of heaven” (1 Kings 22.19). This interpretation allows for genuine deliberation without other gods coming into play, and so is favoured by most scholars (Carr, Barton & Muddiman 43, Sarna (1989) 12). This solution does, however, have some logical difficulties — mostly in that it would mean that the angels also share God’s image and likeness, which would have implications for the rest of the passage.

Trinitarian

The curiosity of this passage proved to be very fertile ground for early Christians seeking Old Testament justification for belief in the Trinity. If we come at the text with the same aim as they had — believing its main job was to foreshadow the subsequent revelation of God in and through Jesus of Nazareth — this is a perfectly reasonable interpretation. They understood God to work always in concert with God’s Word and God’s Spirit; deliberation among the three makes total sense. But this is eisegesis — bringing outside ideas into the text — and while theologically justified from a Christian perspective (especially in light of a lack of solid alternatives), is exceedingly unlikely to have been what Genesis 1’s original editors intended.

Assessment

This is one of those cases where there are a lot of interesting ideas, but little to commend any one interpretation over another. I’m most tempted to split the difference between the two types of council, and leave in the interpretation open enough to allow for the later, Christian and Trinitarian reading.

Made in the Image and Likeness of God

Few topics have garnered as much discussion over the past three thousand years than the meaning and implication of humanity’s creation in the image and likeness of God. While most interpreters would agree that it represents something unique to humanity in our highest, God-given capacity, very few would be able to agree about what exactly it entails. Perhaps one reason for the profusion of different ideas about what the image of God means is that theologians, philosophers, and social scientists alike have tended to try to reduce this essential question of what it means to be human to one single trait or another, whether it’s our ability to think, create, worship, play, or any of a dozen suggestions made down the centuries. Rather than go through the list of historical suggestions, I’d like to focus here on what clues we might glean from the text itself, and from correlating ideas in the Ancient Near East (ANE).

Image and Likeness in Genesis 1.26-31

Looking closely at the text, the terms image and likeness refer to something in how God creates Adam. Here the word refers to humanity as a whole; Adam the species doesn’t become Adam a person until the Genesis 2-3 story, and doesn’t become Adam a man until later still (Sarna (1989) 12). The text goes out of its way to tell us that both male and female are made in God’s image and as God’s likeness. But what does this mean?

The text offers us a very strong clue in the form of a parallelism in 1.26:

Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.
And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea …

Since one of the main uses of parallelism is for the second expression to define or clarify the first, it makes sense to hypothesize that the image of God is to be understood as having something to do with how we are to relate to the other living creatures.

Image and Likeness in the Rest of Genesis

There are other references in the Old Testament that seem to be relevant to this study, both in Genesis. Genesis 5.1-3 also pairs the two terms, saying that “Adam … begot a son in his own likeness, after his image.” Here the words describe a family resemblance, a connection parent and child. Then, in 9.6, part of the covenant of Noah reads: “One who spills human blood, by a human their blood will be spilled, for in God’s image He made humanity.” So here we have the idea of humanity’s creation in the image of God connected to a universal sense of human dignity and honour: To kill another human is to kill something of the image of God.

So, as we turn to comparative data from the broader ANE cultural world, we have three ideas connected to the image of God to keep in mind: a family resemblance, the dignity of the one in whose image we are made, and the call to ‘have dominion’ over other living creatures.

Image and Likeness in the ANE

The first thing to point here is that this is a place where Genesis 1 diverges completely from the Enuma Elish or any other known ANE myth. Considering just how closely the beats of Genesis 1 follow the Enuma Elish, this is pretty remarkable and instructive. ANE myths are universal in portraying humanity as created to be subservient to the gods and to supply their needs and wants (Sarna (1966) 15, Carr). But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any corollaries to the concepts of the image or likeness.

The Hebrew word for image here, tselem, more generally refers to a cult statue. These could be of the gods or of kings. In their own different ways, both Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures imagined some degree of divine authority, if not divinity itself, for their kings, so these amounted to much the same thing. These images were set up to represent and manifest the deity in a given place, whether a temple, a court, or conquered territory (Walton (2010) 82, Carr, Harper). The imagery of these statues was so strong that it came to be used as a way of describing the king’s relationship to the gods: Just as a cult statue represented the god on Earth, so too did the king (Walton (2010), 78-82, Sarna (1989) 12, Harper, Carr). In other words, the gods governed the Earth through the king as their image on Earth.

This evidence lends credence to our hypothesis that the image of God in Genesis is connected to dominion over the animals. As a statue made a god manifest on Earth, so too is the human to represent and act on behalf of God among the other living creatures. But this is of course a significant departure from — and critique of — ANE practice too. For it is not just the king who stands as God’s representative, but all humanity. Note how different this is from the usual biblical critique of idols. Normally, the argument is that God cannot be contained in material things like wood or stone, but here, it’s that God has already been made manifest, in each and every human! (Carr)

The term ‘likeness’ gets less discussion, and indeed seems to have been less common in the ANE. But where it is used, it seems to imply family resemblance, as it did in the Genesis 5 example (Harper, Walton (2010)). Carr makes the interesting suggestion, however, that likeness does not imply an exact replica, but difference as well as similarity. If we keep this proviso in mind, we might say that just as the king represents the god but is not the god, and just as a daughter may be like her mother but is not her mother, so too is the humanity envisioned here ‘like’ unto God but is also decidedly not God.

This study of how the ideas of God’s image and likeness were used in the ANE and in the Genesis 1 story has supported the initial hypothesis that connects them with the human vocation to have dominion over the other living creatures. But this only makes the question of what this ‘dominion’ is to entail (and just as crucially, what it isn’t!) all the more important. And that’s a question that must wait until next time.

Expand

With that important question left unresolved for now, what has this study contributed to our understanding of both humanity and the Genesis 1 story? To the first question, it’s clear that Genesis 1 has a much higher view of humanity than ANE cultures as a whole. It is one that suggests a family resemblance to God which gives humanity an inherent dignity and honour within creation. This dignity also comes with a vocation: to govern the other living creatures. We are given a mastery and agency the rest of creation is not. While it remains to be seen just what this means, it’s a pretty powerful perspective on what it means to be human.

In terms of Genesis 1, humanity is God’s final creative act, in some ways the climax towards which the whole story has been building. If the story has been about creating order and purpose out of chaos and functionlessness, we humans are not only part of that order — which God calls ‘very good’ — but also are given an important role to play within it.

 

* For full details, see the series bibliography.