Tool Alpha
Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
Who bears the image
Male and female, and only humans. What the image is gets argued. Who has it does not.
Genesis 1:27, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: does every human being bear God's image, or only some? Every coin carries the face. Worn ones, new ones, the ones in the gutter. Genesis 1 gives the image to humanity, male and female, and to nothing else in creation.
People ask whether the image belongs to men more than women, to believers more than others, or to some animals too. The verse answers all three.
Genesis 1:27 says God created humankind in his image, male and female he created them. The image is said of humankind as a whole, and of no other creature.
Lennox stresses that only humans are made in God's image. The heavens declare God's glory, but Scripture never says they bear his image.
Walton says the image applies to all people, regardless of age, physical ability or inability, moral behaviour, ethnic identity or gender, and that it is not stronger in some than in others. Unlike the rest of the ancient Near East, where it belonged to the king, the Bible gives it to everyone.
Nothing in the text is left open on who bears the image. Everything left open is in the entry on what the image is.
Not something earned, lost or ranked. Both poles reject that.
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 4
- Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015), proposition 3
