"Let’s make an earthling" (Gen 1:26)

Reading through the story of creation

26 God thought, Let’s make an earthling  וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה אָדָ֛ם

Now we are beginning our discussion of the last creation of the last day of active work, the culmination of the six days of material creation: us.

“Let’s make” is going to require a lot of discussion, so I’m going to skip past it for a brief discussion of “earthling” before returning to that phrase.

I warned you when discussing v. 24 that I was not going to be able to continue translating eretz as “Earth” throughout the story.  That verse already made it difficult, and I was looking ahead to this one.  The Hebrew word אָדָ֛ם is adám (ah-DAHM) and as we’ll see in Genesis 2 it is clearly related to אדמה adamah ‘ground’.  But a “groundling” is someone who is watching Shakespeare from the cheap seats — or, rather, from the ground floor where there were no seats and you stood to watch the play.

I don’t translate it here as Adam because in v. 27 what is created is האדם ha-adam ‘the earthling’.  Only in Gen 2:20 can we first plausibly be talking about Adam the person, and we are not certainly doing so until Genesis 5.  We’ll resume our discussion about this word when we get to v. 27 and will continue it as we follow the story into the next few chapters.

Now: “Let’s make.”  The apostrophe is just my way of de-familiarizing the text so I can think out loud about it.  The truth is, “let’s” is a bit too chatty for Genesis 1.  It would feel much better in the garden sequel that will follow.  I’m using it here anyway because, despite the scientific, lab-notebook feel of Genesis 1, there is a person — God — behind this experiment.

Why could this word נעשה (na’aseh) not mean “we will make”?  In isolation, it certainly could.  In Num 32:31, when Moses has told the tribes of Gad and Reuben that if they want to settle east of the Jordan, they must first cross and help the rest of the Israelites conquer Canaan, they reply: כֵּ֥ן נַעֲשֶֽׂה ken na’aseh: “We will do so.”  (Hebrew uses this same root, עשׂה, both for “do” and for “make.”)

Later in our verse, though, there is a grammatical clue that נעשה is cohortative (“let us”) rather than indicative (“we will”).  Let’s discuss that … excuse me, we will discuss that when we get to the phrase “let him control.”  In the meantime, it’s worth noting that both context and grammar must influence our understanding, and therefore our translation, about the biblical text.

Now for the bigger question:  Who is God talking to?  Here are some possible answers:

• himself (but why?)

• Wisdom

• himself (because there are three of him)

• the angels (because this will change their relationship with God)

• the other creations (because they are getting a new boss)

Let’s examine these possibilities in reverse order.

The other creations.  Since they are spoken of, as the verse continues, in the third person, this announcement is not aimed at them.

The angels.  The angels will require a great deal of discussion once we actually encounter any of them, which will be a ways down the road.  What we can say right now is that their jobs put them in close contact with God on a regular basis.  The creation of human beings will impinge on that relationship, and the midrash — a kind of rabbinic fanfic — pictures them as protesting against it.

The other two “persons” of the Christian trinity.  It’s not obvious to me why God the Father would have to say this to God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.  Perhaps to get buy-in from both of them?  In any case, it would not be appropriate for me to try to argue against this Christian idea.  As you know, I’m reading my Bible on this Substack and I take God to be one, not three.

Wisdom.  I’ve capitalized Wisdom in the list above because I am indeed speaking not about a quality but about Wisdom as a personified being.  This is actually a reasonably strong possibility, since elsewhere in Proverbs 8 Wisdom in fact speaks up and asserts that she was there:

22       “The LORD created me at the beginning of His course

         As the first of His works of old.

23       In the distant past I was fashioned,

         At the beginning, at the origin of earth.

24       There was still no deep when I was brought forth,

         No springs rich in water;

25       Before [the foundation of] the mountains were sunk,

     Before the hills I was born.

…

30       I was with Him as a confidant,

         A source of delight every day,

         Rejoicing before Him at all times,

31       Rejoicing in His inhabited world,

     Finding delight with mankind. [NJPS translation]

As we saw in our study of v. 1, the curtain goes up on this story with something already in existence.  Proverbs 8 makes clear that the idea of Wisdom being with God as creation began is a perfectly biblical one.  Can Genesis 1, which hints at other aspects of the prequel to creation, be hinting at this idea as well?

The reason I don’t think so is that the other hints only function as hints if you know what they are alluding to — and what they are hinting is that what you may have heard about creation in other stories is wrong.  If “let’s make” were an allusion of this kind, it would be (1) intrusive, bringing the alternative version of the story to the awareness of every reader, and (2) confirming the alternative version.  If Genesis 1 wanted to tell us that someone or something else on the scene other than God, it would not surprise us with that information here.  It would simply say so.

Himself.  That still leaves us with the problem of why God would have to say “Let’s make an earthling.”  We have already seen God make (עשׂה) things in vv. 7, 16, and 25, and in none of those cases does God say “Let’s make.”  But as I noted briefly in commenting on v. 24, I picture creation as a dynamic process, with God considering, at each step, how to proceed.

That’s not to say it wasn’t planned in advance.  The careful patterning of the story clearly shows that it was.  But there was no button pushed in Gen 1:0 after which the process proceeded automatically.  God considered each step after evaluating the situation so far, to make sure it was “good.” 

One last point. This is not the we of majesty, which, Jouön-Muraoka 114e explains, does not exist in Hebrew; this is the “plural of deliberation with oneself.” The drama has reached its final step.  God is about to create something — at last — in his own image and likeness.  Under those circumstances, it isn’t tremendously surprising to hear God say to himself, “You know what? Let’s do it.”

Next time, we’ll talk about what it means that humanity is created “in God’s image.”