What does “the image of God” mean in Genesis 1:26?

What did the word “image” mean in the ancient world?

The word for “image” in Genesis 1:26 usually names a physical likeness, most often a statue or the idol of a god. Carly Crouch counts Genesis 1:26 among the most interpreted passages in the Hebrew Bible.¹

A statue found at Tell Fakhariyeh, made in the ninth century BCE, uses the same word. The statue is of a bearded man, standing free, with his hands clasped at the waist. He wears a long wrapped garment of the Assyrian kind. An inscription in Aramaic and Akkadian says the statue of Governor Hadadyith’i bears his “image” and his “likeness.”⁴ The two words of Genesis 1:26 stand side by side there, naming the statue itself. After that find, the leading view became that the image meant the human body’s form.¹

In Mesopotamia, a god’s image was thought to be the living god itself, not only a sign of the god. In Psalms 39 and 73, the same word stands beside vanity and a dream.⁴

Roche Coleman sorts interpreters’ answers into three sets. The first places the image in something humans have, most often reason. The second places it in the relationships humans form. The third places it in something humans do, ruling over the earth.⁴

Is there a difference between “image” and “likeness”?

In Genesis 1:26, Crouch reads “in our image, after our likeness” as one idea said twice, in the heightened language of poetry. An older line of reading split the two words apart. Luther, following Augustine, took the image as the soul’s powers of memory, intellect and will. Luther took the likeness as gifts of grace.¹

Genesis 1:26-27 speaks of the image three times. Genesis 5:1 says again that God made humans in his likeness. Two verses on, in Genesis 5:3, Adam fathers a son, Seth, in his own image and likeness. The words used of God and humans are now used of a father and his child. The same study concludes that Genesis 1:26-27 makes God humanity’s parent, and humans resemble God as children resemble parents.¹

Ancient royal texts used the same family picture. A letter to the Assyrian king Esarhaddon calls his father the very image of the god Bel, and the king the same. In Egypt, texts call the pharaoh the god’s living image and his beloved son.¹

What does “have dominion” mean?

In Genesis 1:26, “let them have dominion” gives humans rule over the fish, the birds, the livestock and every creeping thing. Old Testament scholars generally tie the image to the statues of rulers that ancient kings set up to show their power over a land. Kings placed such statues where they could not be present in person.² That view makes humans a kind of living statue, standing for God on earth. Crouch objects that the rule over creatures comes in the blessing of verse 28, not in the image itself.¹

Verse 28 opens with “God blessed them” and then tells the humans to “subdue it” and to rule over every living thing. Both verbs of command have a harsh side elsewhere in the Bible. The verb for subdue is used of forced submission. The verb behind “have dominion” is used of trampling grapes.²

Andar Pasaribu and co-authors read both verbs as part of the blessing that opens verse 28. The same study notes that humans arrive on the sixth day, and the account goes on to a seventh, which God makes holy.²

Pasaribu and co-authors read the verses from the perspective of the Toba Batak people. The Toba Batak are a people of Tapanuli, the land around Lake Toba in North Sumatra, Indonesia. At the ritual that opens the farming year, the first hoeing comes with a prayer of apology to nature. In Toba Batak belief, nature is the oldest sibling of humans. The study concludes that all creation bears the divine image, not only humans.²

What does “male and female created he them” mean?

In Genesis 1:27, which reads “male and female he created them” on this page, Canisius Mwandayi finds man and woman sharing God’s image equally. The word for the first human is not a proper name but a word that means “human.” The word comes from the word for earth, so it could be rendered “earthling.” Mwandayi reads the term as covering the man and the woman together, which points to their equality before God.⁵

The same study tests the verse against Zimbabwe’s land reform, which ran from 2000 to 2002. Men led the seizures of land from white farmers and parceled it out. Most women failed to secure land in their own names. Mwandayi cites a 2014 figure: afterward, about 20 percent of landowners and leaseholders were women.⁵

When was Genesis 1 written?

Many scholars date Genesis 1 to the Babylonian exile or soon after it, the years of captivity in Babylonia.¹ The first deportation to Babylon came in 597 BCE. Jerusalem’s final destruction and exile came in 587 BCE. Babylon fell to the Persians in 539 BCE. The exiles’ return began in 538 BCE.³ Scholars credit Genesis 1 to a priestly writer or editor. Crouch writes that this view is still well established.¹ Andar Pasaribu and co-authors assign the whole creation account, from Genesis 1:1 into 2:4, to that priestly writing.²

The same study reports a view that Genesis 1 was a text for Israelite worship, composed in the Babylonian exile. That view holds that in Babylonia a temple stood for the cosmos, with a god’s statue placed inside it. The statue was thought to stand for the god there.²

Canisius Mwandayi argues that the priestly writer knew the Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish. In Enuma Elish, humans are an afterthought of the gods. Mwandayi reads the humans of Genesis 1 as a special creation of God. They are the only creatures said to be made in God’s image.⁵