The Image of God

Genesis 1:26 puts two Hebrew nouns in play, and the fastest way into the passage is to find out what those nouns usually do elsewhere. Tselem, image, is overwhelmingly concrete. It is the carved and cast images Israel is commanded to destroy in Numbers 33:52, the image of Baal torn down in 2 Kings 11:18, the images of a detestable god in Ezekiel 7:20, and, in one memorable case, the gold models of tumours and mice the Philistines send back with the ark in 1 Samuel 6:5. Demut, likeness, is a little more abstract: the pattern of an altar in 2 Kings 16:10, the likeness of the living creatures and the likeness of a throne in Ezekiel 1:5 and 1:26, and in Isaiah 40:18 the question of what demut anyone could compare with God (the BSB renders it 'image' there, but the Hebrew is the word for likeness). So the standard sense of tselem is a representation that stands in for something, which is exactly what idols do. There is an irony built into Genesis 1 which is almost certainly intended: humanity is the image God made, and images that humanity makes are forbidden.

People have tried to build doctrine on the difference between the two words, and you should know why that project failed. Irenaeus, in the second century, distinguished the image, which he located in human rationality and freedom, from the likeness, a supernatural endowment lost in the fall and restored in Christ. That distinction shaped a great deal of later Catholic theology. But it does not survive the Hebrew text, because Genesis uses the two words interchangeably. In 1:26 both appear, in 1:27 only tselem, in 5:1 only demut, and in 5:3 both again with the prepositions swapped: Adam fathers Seth 'in his own likeness, after his own image'. If the two words named two different things, 5:3 has them in the wrong order. The sober conclusion, reached independently by commentators across traditions, is that the pair is a single idiom with two near-synonyms reinforcing each other.

There is a further grammatical argument worth knowing because it changes the sense slightly. The preposition on tselem in 1:26 is be, normally 'in', and some Hebraists read it as a beth essentiae, a use in which the preposition means 'as' rather than 'in'. On that reading God does not make humanity in something called an image; he makes humanity as his image. Humanity is the statue. D. J. A. Clines argued this in a 1968 article in the Tyndale Bulletin that is still the starting point for the discussion, and it fits the usage of tselem better than the alternative, since an idol is not in an image, it is one. The grammar is not decisive by itself, and good scholars resist it, but the reading has one clear virtue: it stops students hunting through human nature for a hidden component called the image.

Before leaving the words, notice the one in 1:26 that English hides. 'Let Us make man' translates adam, which here is not a personal name but the collective noun for humankind, and the chapter proves it twice: the verb that follows in 1:26, 'to rule', is plural in the Hebrew (literally, 'and let them rule'), and 1:27 goes on to say 'male and female He created them'. The individual Adam of Genesis 2 to 5 arrives later with the definite article and then as a name. In Genesis 1 the subject is the species.

And notice the plural in 'Let Us make'. There are four standard readings and you should be able to give all of them: a plural of deliberation, in which God addresses himself, which has some parallels but not many; a plural of majesty, which Hebrew grammarians regard as poorly attested for verbs; an address to the divine council of heavenly beings, which has real support in Job 1:6, 1 Kings 22:19 to 22, Isaiah 6:8 and Psalm 82:1; and the traditional Christian Trinitarian reading, which the church fathers held and which the New Testament's creation texts encourage. The honest summary is that the council reading best explains the grammar in its own setting, the Trinitarian reading is a legitimate canonical judgement made with the whole Bible in hand, and neither is established by the verse alone. One caution about the BSB here: it prints 'Us' and 'Our' with capital letters, which is the translators' judgement, because Hebrew has no capitals. A capital reads naturally as God speaking of himself, whether in deliberation or as Trinity, and less naturally as God including the heavenly court. The council reading does not need the capital and does not lose its evidence without it, so look at the Hebrew plural verb and the parallels in Job, 1 Kings and Isaiah rather than at the typography. Note that on the council reading the image is still God's own, since 1:27 says twice that it is the image of God.

To hear 1:26 as its first readers did you have to know what an image of a god was for in the surrounding cultures, and the evidence is abundant. In Egypt the pharaoh is routinely the image of a god. The name Tutankhamun, which the boy king took on his accession in place of his birth name Tutankhaten, means living image of Amun. Amenhotep III carries epithets of the same kind, image of Re. The language is royal and it is theological: the king is where the god's rule becomes visible. In Mesopotamia the usage is the same. Tukulti-Ninurta I is the eternal image of Enlil. Neo-Assyrian court letters address Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal as the image of the god Bel. The Akkadian word is salmu, the straightforward cognate of Hebrew tselem. One note on where this list comes from, because you should know and because most summaries do not say. These epithets are collected and translated in the secondary literature on Genesis 1:26, principally in Clines's 1968 article and in Middleton's The Liberating Image, and that is where almost everyone who cites them has got them, this lesson included. The list is standard and uncontested; it is also second-hand, and if you intend to build an argument on any single epithet you should chase it to an edition of the inscription rather than to a commentary.

Then there is the practice that gives the idiom its edge. A king whose empire reached further than his body could travel set up statues of himself in the provinces. The statue did not commemorate him; it represented him. It declared whose territory this was and under whose authority its inhabitants lived, and defacing it was an act of rebellion rather than vandalism. That is the hard core of what an image does in that world: it stands in for an absent sovereign in a particular place. The Tell Fekheriye statue is the best single control on the vocabulary. It is a ninth-century BC statue of Hadad-yith'i, a governor of Guzan in what is now northern Syria, inscribed in Akkadian and Aramaic, and the Aramaic text uses cognates of both tselem and demut of that one object. Two words, together, of a royal image, in a Semitic language, from roughly the world of the Hebrew Bible.

Now hold that beside Genesis 1:26 to 28 and the shock registers. The title that Egypt and Assyria reserved for the king, the one man at the top of a pyramid of forced labour, Genesis gives to the species. Not to a dynasty, not to a priesthood, not to the free and the literate. To adam, male and female, before any nation, law or temple exists. The commission that follows is royal vocabulary too: fill the earth, subdue it, rule. J. Richard Middleton, in The Liberating Image, argues that this is the chapter's most subversive act, and that Genesis is doing to Babylonian royal ideology what the first lesson of this module showed it doing to Babylonian cosmology. Take the two moves together and Genesis 1 denies both that the world is wreckage and that most people in it are tools.

This is also where the commission's geography comes from. The image is not placed in the abstract; it is placed on the earth and told to fill it. The pattern is the provincial statue: a representative in a territory. Walton makes the further connection to the temple theme of the seventh day, so that the image is installed in a cosmos being inaugurated as God's dwelling, which is how idols normally entered temples in that world. You do not have to accept the whole of his reading of Genesis 1 to see that the placement of an image in a sanctuary is the right background noise for 1:26 to 28 followed by 2:1 to 3.

One qualification about the Egyptian evidence, since it is usually reported too simply in both directions. The royal pattern is not quite exclusive. The Instruction of Merikare closes with a hymn to the creator god, and in Miriam Lichtheim's translation it runs: 'Well tended is mankind - god's cattle, / He made sky and earth for their sake, / He subdued the water monster, / He made breath for their noses to live. / They are his images, who came from his body, / He shines in the sky for their sake.' There it is in an Egyptian text: images, plural, of mankind in general, not of the king. So Genesis is not the only place in the ancient world where image language reaches past the throne. What the Merikare passage does not do is displace the overwhelmingly royal pattern of the rest of the corpus, and how much weight one contested hymn can bear against that pattern is a matter of judgement. Give students the line and the caution together, and do not let anyone tell them the parallel is an invention of biblical scholars.

Because Genesis does not say what the image is, every account of it is a proposal about how to fill a gap the author left open. Three families of proposal dominate, and a teacher owes a class all three at their best. The Systematic Theology track works these through as doctrine; the job here is to see what each one does with the Genesis text.

The substantive or structural account holds that the image is something a human being possesses: a faculty or set of faculties that no animal has. Aquinas locates it in the intellect, in the Summa Theologiae at the first part, question ninety-three, reasoning that only a rational creature can bear the likeness of a God who is pure intellect. Calvin, in the Institutes at 1.15.3 and 1.15.4, places it chiefly in the soul and specifically in knowledge, righteousness and holiness, though he also says the whole person shows it. Its strengths are real. It explains why the image is predicated of humans and not of the animals created on the same day. It accounts for continuity, since a possession can be retained after the fall in a way that a job performance cannot. And it supplies exactly what Genesis 9:6 seems to need: a standing fact about every human being that makes killing one an offence against God. Its weaknesses are also real. Genesis says nothing about faculties, the image-and-likeness distinction the account often leans on does not survive 5:3, and if the image is a capacity then the severely disabled infant appears to hold it in reduced measure, which the tradition itself has refused to say. That last objection has been pressed hard in recent disability theology, by Hans Reinders among others, and it is not a cheap shot.

The functional or royal account holds that the image is not a thing humanity has but a role humanity occupies: representative rule on God's behalf. Its case starts with the syntax of 1:26, where the resolution to make humanity in God's image runs straight into the plural verb 'to rule over the fish of the sea', and continues through the commission of 1:28 and the royal usage set out in the last section. Psalm 8:5 to 8 reads Genesis 1 in exactly these terms, crowning humanity with glory and honour, making it ruler of the works of God's hands and placing everything under its feet. Clines, Middleton and Walton all stand here, with Claus Westermann's large Genesis commentary pressing a related point from a different angle: that the question 'what is the image?' is the wrong question, because the text is reporting an act of creating rather than describing a component of human nature. The difficulty is Genesis 9:6. If the image is a function, it is odd that losing or neglecting it would not void the protection, and odder that a murderer, who has just abused the function badly, still has the protection himself. Functional readings answer that the office is given by God rather than earned, so it cannot be forfeited by misbehaviour, and that answer works, but it has quietly turned the function into a status.

The relational account holds that the image consists in being made for relationship, to God and to one another, so that a human being in isolation is not fully what the image names. Karl Barth gave the account its most forceful statement in the Church Dogmatics, in the third volume, where he reads the third line of 1:27, male and female he created them, as the content of the image rather than an additional fact about it. On that reading humanity images God as an I and a Thou, in what Barth calls an analogy of relation. The strengths: it takes the structure of 1:27 seriously instead of treating its last clause as an aside, it coheres with the plural of 1:26, and it is confirmed from the other direction by Genesis 2:18, where the one thing in the garden that is not good is a man who is alone. The weaknesses are substantial and come from exegetes rather than opponents of Barth's theology. Phyllis Bird argued in a 1981 Harvard Theological Review article that the male and female clause is there to prepare the blessing of fruitfulness in 1:28, since reproduction requires sexual differentiation, and Westermann argued much the same. Animals are also male and female, and Genesis 1 does not call them images.

You will also meet a Christological reading, which takes Colossians 1:15, 2 Corinthians 4:4 and Romans 8:29 and defines the image by Christ, who is the image, with Genesis 1 read backwards from him. Treat that as a theological ordering of the material rather than a fourth competing exegesis of the Hebrew, and notice that it can be combined with any of the three. What you should not do is present one of the three as the obvious reading. Each survives because it is holding onto something real in the text, and the three things they are holding onto are all in Genesis 1.

Start with the hard fact about the vocabulary of 1:28, because the usual pastoral move is to soften it and that is not honest. Radah, to have dominion, is used of a king's rule in 1 Kings 4:24 and Psalm 72:8, and in Leviticus 25:43 it appears in a prohibition precisely because it can describe ruling harshly. Kabash, to subdue, is stronger still: it is used of conquering the land of Canaan in Numbers 32:22 and 32:29, and in Jeremiah 34:11 of forcing freed slaves back into servitude. These are not gardening words. Anyone who tells you Genesis 1:28 says nothing more than tend the shrubbery has not looked up the verbs.

Then set three controls from Genesis itself beside them. The first is the one you worked in the inquiry. The diet assigned in 1:29 to 30 is vegetarian, for humans and animals alike, and permission to eat meat is granted only after the flood in 9:3. So whatever subduing the earth meant when it was given, it did not at that point include killing an animal for dinner. Dominion as commissioned is not the same thing as dominion as currently practised. The second control is Genesis 2:15, where the man is put in the garden with a different pair of verbs, abad and shamar, to work and to keep, which the BSB renders 'to cultivate and keep it', and that pair is used in Numbers 3:7 to 8 of the Levites' service at the tabernacle. The third control is the identity of the ruler. An image rules as a representative, which means the standard of its rule is set by the one it represents, and Genesis 1 has just spent six days establishing what that one is like: he makes, he blesses, he feeds, he calls things good. A viceroy who devastates the province is not a bad image; he is a rebel against the king he stands for.

That gives a clean answer to a famous charge. In 1967 the historian Lynn White published an article in Science arguing that the ecological crisis has its historical roots in Christianity, which he described as the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen, and he pointed at Genesis 1:28. The charge should be taken seriously rather than brushed aside, because the verse has in fact been used that way, and because large parts of the church have been slow to say otherwise. But the text does not support the use. A commission to rule on behalf of someone who declared the world good, issued to creatures who were at that point not even permitted to eat the animals they ruled, cannot be converted into a licence to strip the place. What Genesis 1:28 does license is cultivation, settlement, the filling of the earth, and the ordering of it, which is to say culture; and it does so with a warrant, which is why Genesis has no category for the earth as a mere resource pile.

Now follow what Genesis itself builds on the image, because the book makes two further moves and both are easy to miss. The first is in Genesis 5:1 to 3. The genealogy opens by restating 1:27, says that God created them male and female and blessed them, and then says that Adam had a son in his own likeness, after his own image, and named him Seth. The same word pair, now describing descent. So the image is transmitted; it is not a privilege held by the first couple and lost. This is said after Genesis 3 and after Cain, which means the narrator knew what had happened in between and said it anyway.

The second move is Genesis 9:6: 'Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man his blood will be shed; for in His own image God has made mankind.' That is a legal sanction with a theological reason attached, and note where it stands: after the fall, after the first murder, after the flood, and inside a covenant made with murderers' descendants. The image is the premise of the protection, and the protection is universal, since this is said to Noah's family long before there is an Israel or a law code. James 3:9 later applies the same logic to speech, condemning the blessing of God with a tongue that curses people made in his likeness. Pull the three passages together and Genesis teaches that the image is given to all, transmitted to all, and makes every human life inviolable. That is the conclusion all three of the accounts in the last section have to be able to reach, and it is the part of the doctrine that has done the most good in the world.