Tool Beta
Divine Council Index
Passages where the unseen realm is acting, grouped by thread.
Genesis 1:26-27
Let us make man in our image, and then a singular verb does the making.
Genesis 1:26-27, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: why does God say “let us make” and then act alone in the very next line? The candidates are multiple gods, the Trinity, or something else. Let's build a shed. I built a shed. The first sentence includes other people. The second one says who actually swung the hammer. Both can be true about the same shed, and nobody thinks the second sentence contradicts the first. This card reads it as an announcement to a real council, not a description of who did the work.
God speaks in the plural and then acts in the singular, one verse apart. Any reading has to account for both halves, and most accounts only handle one.
Read as an announcement to the council rather than a description of who does the work, both halves stand. Verse 26 addresses a room. Verse 27 records a single actor.
It does not tell us who else was in the room or what they contributed, and the honest answer is that the text does not say.
The plural of majesty explanation has trouble with the verb form. The Trinity reading may be true theologically and still does not describe what a first hearer would have understood. Both leave the singular-plural seam unexplained rather than resolved.
Not multiple creators. The singular verb in verse 27 closes that off, and it is the answer to the strawman that this framework has God sharing the act of creation.
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- Heiser, “Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism? Toward an Assessment of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible,” BBR 18:1 (2008): 1-30
- Heiser, “Monotheism and the Language of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Tyndale Bulletin 65:1 (2014): 85-100
- Unseen Realm chs. 3, 5
