"in the image of God" (Gen 1:27)

Reading through the story of creation

27 God created the earthling וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙

You remember that the introduction to our story, in v. 1, explained that we were about to learn what happened when God created the Sky and the Earth, using this special verb bara that only God can do. But the first time we actually saw God do this verb on camera was in v. 21, on Day Five, when “God created the sea-serpents.” That verse implicitly said that God also “created” the other creatures of Sea and Sky by adding the Hebrew word ואת v’et (“and” plus the direct object marker). However, they are verbally somewhat separated from ברא, as if that verb were being reserved for the sea-serpents, in order to contradict the versions of creation that tell of God battling sea monsters in order to create the world.

When the animals of Earth, the land animals, were created, earlier on Day Six, God in fact “made” them rather than created them. But for the very last creation, our text returns to ברא. Even though in v. 24 God says, “Let’s make an earthling,” when push comes to shove what actually happened is that God created the earthling.

I’m going to suggest that the verb is used here to point simultaneously at two aspects of the story:

• Since we do not understand what the verb ברא involves and can’t do it ourselves, how life started is a mystery that is beyond our ken.

• Since the story is introduced with the verb ברא and culminates with it, human beings are not merely the final creation but the acme of creation and perhaps its purpose.

There will be more to say about this as we continue, both in today’s post and on to the end of the chapter.

in his image בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ

We’ve already spoken at length about “in his image,” and pointed to Genesis 5, where we are once again told that human beings were created in God’s d’mut ‘likeness’ and then, in v. 3, that Adam fathered Seth “in his d’mut, according to his tzelem [‘image’],” switching the nouns of v. 26.

Is it significant that d’mut is missing here, in the verse that tells us what actually happened? I don’t think so. I’ve mentioned Mayer Gruber’s assertion that these expressions denote a physical likeness. His Hebrew article, which I’ve just re-read, points us to a bilingual inscription, in Akkadian and Aramaic, found in 1979 at Tell Fekherye in northern Syria, known in ancient times as Sikan.¹

The inscription is on an anthropoid statue, which it calls tzalmu on the Akkadian side of the inscription and both tzelem and d’mut on the Aramaic side. These usages conform with the usage of both Hebrew and Aramaic tzelem in the Bible that we discussed previously, also referring to a statue.

But human beings — we — are not a statue. What else can this possibly mean? I think the rest of the verse, in conjunction with our close reading of the chapter up to this point, is about to tell us.

In the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם׃

We were just told at the beginning of the verse that God created ha-adam in his image. What does the rest of the verse add? A number of things.

One is a reminder that (despite what Genesis 2 will go on to tell us) the singular noun here is a collective noun. I translated adam in v. 26 as “the earthling,” but to be consistent I ought to have said “the earthlings.” Just as ōph (v. 20) meant “birds” and not merely a single bird, just as b’hemah meant “animals” and not merely a single animal, ha-adam here means “human beings” and not just Adam, the character in Genesis 5 whose name is the first word of the book of Chronicles. How many humans are created in this verse? As many as there were of any of the other species we’ve seen so far.

Another is that no single human being is an exact replica of what God looks like. Even though the Bible almost always refers to God using grammatical forms that are masculine and singular — as I do myself for convenience and clarity — males and females are both representative of God. This, I think, is actually an important part of the Priestly perspective on the world: Males and females are distinct, but they are equal in the responsibility placed on them by being created “in God’s image.” For more on this, see pp. 217-218 of my book The Bible’s Many Voices. Humans, whether they are male or female, somehow replicate God’s physical form. (Don’t tell Maimonides I said so.)

A third thing this part of the verse adds is that God’s transfer of power to his creations culminates with this final creation. We have now heard three times that human beings, male and female alike, are created as an image of God. As the Bellman said in The Hunting of the Snark, “What I tell you three times is true.” That’s a comic poem, to be sure, but three-fold repetition is regularly used for emphasis as we approach a coda: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” In our case, to quote Mayer Gruber, the triple emphasis is telling us …

“Human beings are the physical representatives of divinity itself on earth!”

The late David Clines put it this way (though disagreeing on the physical resemblance of humans to God) in an article called “Humanity as the Image of God”:

Humankind is created not in God’s image, since God has no image of his own, but as God’s image, or rather to be God’s image, that is to deputize in the created world for the transcendent God who remains outside the world order.

I’ll have more to say about this in my comments on v. 28. And stay tuned (down the road a ways) for the recurrence of “the image of God” one more time in Gen 9:6.

1. Read more about it in “Notes on the Akkadian-Aramaic Bilingual Statue from Tell Fekherye,” Jonas C. Greenfield & Aaron Shaffer, Iraq 45.1 (1983): 109-116.