The Creator – 6a – Making humans in God's Image

[Reposting from its first publication October 11, 2012.

 

This is the commentary from the post:  

Genesis/Bere’shith 1: “At the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth”

 

 Sources are: Pentateuch and Haftarah, ‘EF’ is Everett Fox; ‘RA’ is Robert Alter.

 —Admin1]

 

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26. God said:  

Let us make humankind, in our image, according to our likeness!  

Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the heavens, animals, all the earth, and all crawling things that crawl about upon the earth!

 

let us make man.  Mankind is described as in a special sense created by God Himself.  To enhance the dignity of this last work and to mark the fact that man differs in kind from the animals, Scripture represents God as deliberating over the making of the human species (Abarbanel).  It is not ‘let man be created’ or ‘let man be made’, but ‘let us make man’.  The use of the plural, ‘let us make man,’ is the Heb. idiomatic way of expressing deliberation, as in XI,7; or it is the plural of Majesty, royal commands being conveyed in the first person plural, as in Ezra IV,18.

 

man. Heb. ‘Adam.’ The word is used here, as frequently in the Bible, in the sense of human being’.  It is derived from adamah ‘earth’, to signify that man is earth-born; see II,7.

in our image, after our likeness.  Man is made in the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of God:  his character is potentially Divine.  ‘God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of His own eternity’ (Wisdom of Solomon, II,23).  Man alone among living creatures is gifted, like his Creator, with moral freedom and will.  He is capable of knowing and loving God, and of holding spiritual communion with Him; and man alone can guide his actions in accordance with Reason.  ‘On this account he is said to have been made in the form and likeness of the Almighty’ (Maimonides).  Because man is endowed with Reason, he can subdue his impulses in the service of moral and religious ideals, and is born to bear rule over Nature.  Psalm VIII says of man, ‘O LORD . . . Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.  Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands.’

 

[EF] in our image: The “our” is an old problem. Some take it to refer to the heavenly court (although, not surprisingly, no angels are mentioned here).

 

[RA] a human. The term ‘adam, afterward consistently with a definite article, which is used both here and in the second account of the origins of humankind, is a generic term for human beings, not a proper noun.  It also does not automatically suggest maleness, especially not without the prefix ben, “son of,” and so the traditional rendering “man” is misleading, and an exclusively male ‘adam would make nonsense of the last clause of verse 27.

 

hold sway. The verb radah is not the normal Hebrew verb for “rule” (the latter is reflected in “dominion” of verse 16), and in most of the contexts in which it occurs it seems to suggest an absolute or even fierce exercise of mastery.

 

the wild beasts. The Masoretic Text reads “all the earth,” bekhol ha’arets, but since the term occurs in the middle of a catalogue of living creatures over which humanity will hold sway, the reading of the Syriac Version, ayat ha’arets, “wild beasts,” seems preferable.

 

27. So God created humankind in his image,

in the image of God did he create it,

male and female he created them.

 

male and female.  A general statement; man and woman, both alike, are in their spiritual nature akin to God.

 

[EF] God created humankind: The narrative breaks into verse, stressing the importance of human beings. “Humankind” (Heb. adam) does not specify sex, as is clear from the last line of the poem.

 

[RA]  In the middle clause of this verse, “him,” as in the Hebrew, is grammatically but not anatomically masculine.  Feminist critics have raised the question as to whether here and in the second account of human origins, in Chapter 2, ‘adam is to be imagined as sexually undifferentiated until the fashioning of woman, though that proposal leads to certain dizzying paradoxes in following the story.

 

28. God blessed them,

God said to them:  

Bear fruit and be many and fill the earth and subdue it!  

Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the heavens, and all living things that crawl about upon the earth!

 

and God blessed them. CF. v. 22.  Here the words, ‘And God said unto them,’ are added, ‘indicating a more intimate relationship between Him and human beings.

 

be fruitful and multiply. This is the first precept (mitzvah) given to man.  The duty of building a home and rearing a family figures in the rabbinic Codes as the first of the 613 mitzvoth (commandments) of the Torah.

 

and subdue it. ‘The secret of all modern science is in the first chapter of Genesis.  Belief in the dominion of spirit over matter, of mind over nature, of man over the physical and the animal creation, was essential to the possession of that dominion’ (Lyman Abbott).  ‘What we call the will or volition of Man . . . has become a power in nature, an imperium in imperio, which has profoundly modified not only Man’s own history, but that of the whole living world, and the face of the planet on which he lives’ (Ray Lankester).

 

29. God said:  

Here, I give you 

all the plants that bear seeds that are upon the face of all the earth,

and all trees in which there is tree fruit that bears seeds,

for you shall they be, for eating;

Image from www.crcna.org

In the primitive ideal age (as also in the Messianic future, see Isaiah XI,7), the animals were not to prey on one another.

 

[EF] I give you: “You” in the plural.

 

30. and also for all the living things of the earth, for all the fowl of the heavens, for all that crawls about upon the earth in which there is living being—

all green plants for eating.  

It was so.

 

[EF] all green plants for eating: Human beings in their original state were not meat-eaters.  For the change, see 9:3.

 

31. Now God saw all that he had made,

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What does it mean for man to be created in the image of Elohim? How is man “after the likeness” of his Creator? When we look at humankind, how do we resemble a non-material deity and not just any deity, THE DEITY, One and Only, First and Last?

 

Some explanations from Rabbinic writings included in past posts [The Creator 5a – How is Man in God’s “Image” or “Likeness?]:

 

• That God is male and female in essence because of verse 27.
• That it refers to man’s free will, the only creature so given by a God who HImself has free will to choose He pleases, except we cannot do the same, do as we please, we have to choose to do as God pleases and it is His pleasure to do good, to do what is right.
• That it refers to our ability to procreate and recreate from what the Creator has already placed in the created order of the universe.
• It could include man’s ability to do evil for God has that capability to do evil as well, if He so chooses, for his purposes and ends.

 

This explanation comes from Arthur Kurzweil’s The Torah For Dummies, one of our highly recommended  resource books, because it’s one of those How-to-for-Dummies series which is great for clueless people who need a crash course in any topic at all, “a Reference for the Rest of Us!“:

 

 

Making humans in God’s image

 

This unusual phrase appears in the book fo Genesis:  Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).  Many students of the Torah have asked the question, “Who is the ‘us’ and the ‘our’ referred to in this line?”

 

Torah sages suggest that the “us” refers to the ministering angels with whom God consulted.  The Talmud and many other Jewish spiritual texts also teach that a person is to be considered a whole world, so when God said “Let us,” He was referring to the entire universe. (And “world” and “universe” are synonymous.)

 

People also have asked how God actually created man.  

 

 

• The great Torah commentator Rashi (rah-she) indicates that the verse implies that God first created a mold, or a conceptual archetype, from which to create humans.  
• The great Torah commentator known as the Ramban (rahm-bahn)  teaches that humans are a microcosm of the whole Creation and that contained within each person are elements of everything in the universe. 

 

Physical descriptions of God in the Torah text in no way literally describe God; rather, the words were chosen based on familiar things to attempt to express the inexpressible.  So, for example, when you read of God’s “eyes,” the Torah isn’t suggesting that God has physical eyes.  It’s suggesting that one attempt to know the unknowable God is to try to grasp God as being infinite and therefore as knowing (or seeing) everything.  

 

 

Given the nonphysical nature of God, the great rabbis ask in what way man is made in God’s image.  The answer is in the fact that man has free will.  

Man is given the ability to choose freely and therefore to create and destroy.  

The Torah sees a human being as the pinnacle of creation, the reason for the creation of the world.  Man occupies a unique place in the cosmos of the Torah:  He’s considered the only actor on the comic stage who has a spark of God within, as evidenced by man’s power of will and power to create and destroy.  

 

 

One of the profound paradoxes of Jewish theology is expressed in the Talmud by Rabbi Akiva, who says, “All is forseen and free will is given.”  This paradox is a great challenge  but is an essential part of Jewish life and thought:

 

 

• On the one hand, God is in control of everything, 
• and yet, at the same time humans function under the assumption that there is free will.  

Jewish tradition requires students of the Torah to meditate throughout life on this theological riddle or paradox.