image and likeness (Gen 1:26)
Reading through the story of creation
in our image, according to our likeness בְּצַלְמֵ֖נוּ כִּדְמוּתֵ֑נוּ
God’s sneak preview of the adam (“earthling”) who will complete the work of creation on Day Six is that the earthling will be created “in our image, according to our likeness.” (See the previous post for discussion both of “earthling” and of the first-person plural.)
We begin today’s discussion with the word צלם tzelem ‘image’ and the meanings offered for it in the Hebrew & Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament:
—1. statue, inscribed column
—2. idol
—3. pl.:
—a. images, figures
—b. replicas, likenesses of the boils and mice
—4. a. transitory image
—5. likeness:
—a. of a man as the צֶלֶם of God
—b. the son as the צֶלֶם of his father
Akkadian, the East Semitic language known to us from thousands of clay tablets with cuneiform writing dug up over the last several centuries in Mesopotamia, has the related word ṣalmu, which has these meanings (according to HALOT):
the statue of a god;
the statue of a king;
a statue in general;
a figurine;
a relief, bas-relief;
metaphorical, a constellation, shape, likeness, representation
The Hebrew word actually appears in the Bible only 15 times, though you will find its Aramaic cognate 17 times in Daniel 2-3, referring to the statue that King Nebuchadnezzar insisted on everyone worshiping. The Hebrew word can refer to a statue as well, and when that statue is meant to become an object of worship, we would translate tzelem as “idol.”
God is certainly not creating an idol for himself to worship, but another of the meanings given in HALOT for the Hebrew word is replica (you can find some examples of that usage in 1 Samuel 6). I am leaning toward that meaning, because now we add the word דמות d’mut ‘likeness’, from the verb דמה d-m-h ‘to resemble’. Both the verb and the noun appear in Isa 40:18 (given here in the NJPS translation), a verse which I take to be arguing against God’s announcement here:
To whom, then, can you liken [תְּדַמְּי֣וּן] God,
What form [דְּמ֖וּת] compare to Him?
2 Kgs 16:10 shows us King Ahaz visiting Damascus, admiring the altar in the temple there, and sending the priest Uriah a דְּמ֧וּת of it along with a blueprint [תבנית tavnit] of how to build a similar one.
It seems clear from this comparison, and from the combination of tzelem and d’mut, that God is intending to create a replica of himself in some sense. The question is, in what sense?
The one other place these two words occur together in the same verse is in Genesis 5. Definition 5b in HALOT has already pointed us to it, so let’s have a look:
1 This is the family tree of adam. On the day when God created adam, it was in the likeness [דמות] of God that He created him. 2 Male and female He created them, and He blessed them and named them adam on the day of their creation.
3 Adam lived 130 years and sired a child in his likeness [בִּדְמוּת֖וֹ bid’muto], according to his image [כְּצַלְמ֑וֹ k’tzalmo]. He named him Seth.
The first two verses of the chapter remind us that God created human beings (using language that we will see in v. 27) in God’s own דמות (“likeness”). Then v. 3 tells us that Adam fathered a son in his likeness, according to his image. The simplest, most straightforward way to understand what it means to say that God intended to create earthlings “in our image, according to our likeness” is that the finished product will look like God in some physical way, just as children resemble their parents, just as Seth resembled Adam.
And now for a responsible opposing viewpoint.
Image [ṣelem] and likeness [demuth]. People have thought that in the Hebrew language image denotes the shape and configuration of a thing. This supposition led them to the pure doctrine of the corporeality of God, on account of His saying: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness [Gen 1:26]. For they thought that God has a man's form, I mean his shape and configuration. The pure doctrine of the corporeality of God was a necessary consequence to be accepted by them. They accordingly believed in it and deemed that if they abandoned this belief, they would give the lie to the biblical text; that they would even make the deity to be nothing at all unless they thought that God was a body provided with a face and a hand, like them in shape and configuration. However, He is, in their view, bigger and more resplendent than they themselves, and the matter of which He is composed is not flesh and blood. As they see it, this is as far as one can go in establishing the separateness of God from other things. Now with respect to that which ought to be said in order to refute the doctrine of the corporeality of God and to establish His real unity — which can have no true reality unless one disproves His corporeality — you shall know the demonstration of all of this from this Treatise.
Now I say that in the Hebrew language the proper term designating the form that is well known among the multitude, namely, that form which is the shape and configuration of a thing, is toʾar.
…
[The term to’ar is never applied to the deity.] The term image, on the other hand, is applied to the natural form, I mean to the notion in virtue of which a thing is constituted as a substance and becomes what it is. It is the true reality of the thing in so far as the latter is that particular being. In man that notion is that from which human apprehension derives. It is on account of this intellectual apprehension that it is said of man: In the image of God created He him [Gen 1:27].
[Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed 1:1, Pines translation]
It’s a long-standing argument: Is the resemblance between human beings and God …
visual? — We look like God.
intangible? — We have certain mental or spiritual qualities like those of God.
I have let Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish legist and philosopher, advocate for the second possibility because it seems to me that nothing about the biblical text itself points in that direction. The “intangible” likeness, I believe, derives from the philosophical — that is, scientific and rational for its era — conclusion that God has no material being. There is nothing for us to “resemble.”
The Bible, however, largely rejects that perspective. That’s why Maimonides had to write his famous book: to explain away all the Bible’s references to God’s eyes, hands, and so forth. I can add that humanity’s “intangible” likeness to God is just as imperfect as our “physical” likeness would be. We are not as rational or as spiritual as God, any more than we can match God’s imagined physical characteristics (in the Bible) of power or majesty.
My teacher Mayer Gruber asserts that, for the priestly writers, human beings are the equivalent of a cult statue representing God. I’m buying into this perspective. The Egyptians (like the Hindus) are well-known to have had gods with upright forms but animal heads, though I’m not aware of this from ancient Mesopotamia. But I do agree that “in our image, according to our likeness” is meant to suggest a physical resemblance.
An old Jewish tradition, followed by Maimonides, has long linked Ezekiel 1 to Genesis 1. Ezekiel, besides being a prophet, was also a priest, and unlike the Isaiah verse we saw earlier,1 he certainly seems to have thought that our resemblance to God was physical in some way. More or less the climax of the psychedelic vision which Ezekiel 1 opens with is this, in v. 26:
Above the cupola (raqia) that was over their heads [those of the four creatures with four faces], like an appearance of sapphire, was the d’mut of a throne, and on the d’mut of the throne above it was a d’mut like the appearance of an adam.
I won’t go any further down that rabbit hole. To me it’s clear that our resemblance to God is being framed in Genesis 1 as some sort of physical resemblance. But there is another aspect to it, which we’ll look at next time.
This is from “Isaiah” of chapters 40 and following the one who calls King Cyrus of Persia “messiah” in Isa 45:1. He is the first in the Bible who makes a sustained argument that the God of Israel is the only God that exists.