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Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
What the image of God is
Only humans are made in God's image. What the image is has been argued for two thousand years.
Genesis 1:26-28, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: what does it mean that people are made in God's image? He is the image of his father. Does that mean he looks like him, acts like him, or stands in for him when his father is away? English uses image all three ways, and readers of Genesis 1:27 have picked each.
Lists of human capacities, reason, conscience, language, are often offered as the image of God. The text itself attaches the image to ruling and filling the earth.
The noun is tselem. The site's Word Study tool, following Strong's, gives its range as a resemblance and a representative figure, especially an idol; the King James renders it image and vain shew. It is paired here with demut, likeness or resemblance, and in Genesis 5:3 the two words trade places with their prepositions reversed, which makes a sharp distinction between them hard to hold. The image language is followed at once by the commission to be fruitful, fill, subdue and rule.
Lennox stresses that of all creation only humans are made in God's image: the heavens declare his glory, but Scripture never says they bear his image. He reads the two "God said" statements of day six as marking a discontinuity between animals and humans that no unguided process crosses, and points to the stewardship over the animals in 1:26 and the search for a helper in Genesis 2 as further marks of the difference.
Walton gives four aspects: role and function (subdue and rule), identity, representation of God's presence (as Assyrian kings set up their images in conquered cities), and relationship. Unlike the rest of the ancient Near East, where the image was the king's, the Bible gives it to all humanity. It is not stronger in some than others, regardless of age, ability, behaviour, ethnicity or gender.
Heiser argues the preposition in "in our image" can be read as "as," so that humankind is created as God's image, which makes the image a status and a function rather than a property. To be human is to image God, as his representatives on earth, which is why 1:26-27 runs straight into the dominion mandate. He rejects the usual capacity lists, intelligence, reason, emotion, self-awareness, on the ground that if the image were any of them, believers would have to abandon the sanctity of human life in the womb.
The functional readings have to say what grounds the role, since a role must be given to someone. The capacity readings have to explain why the text names none of them. Lennox's emphasis on special creation has to be squared with Walton's argument that the forming of Adam in Genesis 2 is archetypal.
Not something a person can lose by being less capable. Walton and Heiser both draw that conclusion from the functional reading, and Lennox's stress on human dignity points the same way.
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- Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015), proposition 3 and Excursus: Image of God
- Heiser, The Unseen Realm (2015), ch. 5
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 4
- JAYMS Bible Word Study Tool, tselem (H6754), from Strong's
- JAYMS Why Do Bible Translations Differ?, Genesis 1:26b
