Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 1:26b
In our image, after our likeness. Two nouns, and probably one idea.
Genesis 1:26, in every translation this tool compares.
Safe and sound. Null and void. English pairs words that mean nearly the same thing all the time, and nobody hunts for the difference between null and void. Hebrew does the same, and readers hunt anyway.
Because image and likeness get treated as two different things by an entire tradition, and the Hebrew nouns do not support the distinction. Two words, one idea, and a lot of theology built on the gap between them.
Every version reads image and likeness. Some older theological systems treat them as separate endowments, one lost at the fall and one retained.
צֶלֶם tselem · H6754 / דְּמוּת demut · H1823
Tselem is a physical representation, including a carved idol. Demut is a resemblance. In Genesis 5:3 the two are swapped around with the prepositions reversed, which is what makes a technical distinction hard to sustain. Read together they say one thing: humanity is God's representative image on the ground, the way a king's statue in a province represented the king.
English can print both nouns but cannot signal that the pair is a single idea, so readers naturally assume two.
When two near-synonyms appear together, check whether the writer ever swaps or reverses them. If he does, the distinction you are looking for is probably not there.
There is no translation dispute. There is a long tradition of distinguishing the two, and the internal evidence at Genesis 5:3 is the argument against it.
- Genesis 5:3 reverses the prepositions and the order
- tselem of an idol: 2 Kings 11:18; Amos 5:26
- The royal-statue background is standard in ANE treatments; Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament
