LET US MAKE MAN IN OUR IMAGE

Genesis 1:26 -

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

As I am focused on Genesis 1:26-31 this week in preparation for Sunday morning, I am reminded of my freshman year at Wabash College and getting shot down by a professor in front of my classmates.

The class was called "Cultures and Traditions" and we were looking at the "creation myth" in the Old Testament. The professor could hardly wait to discuss verse 26 and the plural in "Let us make man in our image". 

"Considering Judaism is a famously monotheistic religion," she asked, "why would God speak in the plural here?"

Nobody responded, so I tentatively put my hand up and answered, "Maybe this is an early reference to the Trinity."

Dr. Butler scoffed. No, the concept of one God in three persons is completely foreign to the Old Testament, she explained.

(I didn't have the guts to point out the Spirit of God makes His first appearance hovering over the deep in the second verse of the book!)

What was her explanation? The plural was a remnant of the fact that Judaism had evolved - according to her - from polytheistic roots. 

Even as a timid college freshman, I knew that was a pretty dumb idea. So someone just forgot to go back and clean up a couple of random plural pronouns leftover from earlier polytheistic drafts? Really?

I have been looking over the matter this week and I find that scholars are not at all united on any particular theory about that plural. A few agree with my freshman self that it is an early sign of a trinitarian conception of God. 

But others have suggested  - and I find this theory interesting - that God is speaking to the earth itself. God forms a creature which is a combination of spirit and dirt, resulting in Adam being "in the image" of both. 

Some scholars also posit that the plural is simply a "royal 'we'" or that it is simply meant to illustrate great deliberation over this part of His creation. (I guess He's sort of talking to Himself in order to focus?)

One of the other leading candidates is that God employs the plural because He is holding council with the angels. 

Certainly, the passage does not specify that angels were present, but the existence of "the heavenly host" is acknowledged in Scripture elsewhere. And there's no reason to question their existence as having begun prior to the creation of man. 

Since this final theory has the advantage of lining up with the traditional Jewish interpretation of this crucial moment on the sixth day of creation, it carries a little more weight in my mind. After all, "Scripture was written for us but not to us", and so it does matter how the original audience would have understood this moment.