Other elements of Gen 1:26ff. similarly diverge from the narrations of preceding creation acts to highlight God’s creation of humans as the goal toward which the preceding chapter has been oriented. Where the other reports of creation of living things implied their indirect production by land or sea “according to their kind(s)” (Gen 1:11–12, 20–21, 24), God’s speech in Gen 1:26 describes God calling on God’s council to join in making humanity “as our image, similar to our likeness.”82 Where God’s previous creation speeches in Gen 1 are followed by formulae of correspondence and then narrations of how God’s intentions were executed, Gen 1:26 is followed by a doubled description of God’s own creation of humanity in 1:27, with this being a heightened, semi-poetic speech that highlights the importance of this event. The blessing then given to humans in 1:28 contrasts with that given to water and air creatures in 1:22 in being more explicitly addressed to humans (ויאמר להם “and said to them”), being longer, and including the call for humans to subdue the earth and rule other creatures. The instructions distinguishing human from animal food in Gen 1:29–30a have no precedent in the preceding chapter. Finally, the whole of 1:26–30a—including the blessing and instructions about food—is followed by the correspondence formula (ויהי כן; 1:30b) that previously in Gen 1 was just focused on the creation of elements in accordance with God’s instructions. In sum, virtually every part of Gen 1:26–30 diverges from corresponding parts of the descriptions of previous creation acts in Gen 1:3–25.
Perhaps the most remarkable element in Gen 1:26–31, certainly the most debated, is what is intended in the description of God’s creation of humanity as God’s image in 1:26–27. Though this commentary is not the context for thorough review of centuries of interpretation of this section, a few central insights can be summarized, especially on how this motif is subtly developed within Gen 1 and other parts of the Priestly primeval history (Gen 5:1b–2; 9:6) in relation to ancient Near Eastern precursors.
Before exploring Gen 1:26–27 more, it should be noted at the outset that this text is not as specific about its implications as many of its interpreters would have it be. For example, there has long been a major emphasis, particularly characteristic of traditional Christian theological interpretation of the text, to stress that Gen 1:26–27 does not imply any physical resemblance between divine beings and humans.83 As will be argued below, this approach is only true in terms of what the text emphasizes. However much Gen 1:26–27 does presuppose some physical resemblance between the bodies of human beings and a God that is imagined (as in other biblical and many other Near Eastern texts) as having human form, the text is much more focused on how this physical resemblance to God is a reflection of the destiny of humans to exercise godlike rule over creation.84
That said, it should be emphasized that the text does imply a physical resemblance between humans and God, even as it qualifies just how much humans are thought to be like God (more on this below). Indeed, the text privileges (in Gen 1:26 and 1:27) a term for humans as divine replicas of god(s), צלם, which is routinely used for three-dimensional statues, including cult statues of deities, the latter of which were typically given human-like form in the ancient Near East, including the Levant.85 Moreover, the Hebrew Bible itself features numerous descriptions of God as having human(like) body parts, doing human things, and sometimes even being so similar in human form as to be confused with human beings (e.g., Gen 18:1–15; 32:23–33 [ET 32:22–32]).86 All this would suggest that the description of God’s call to “let us make humans as our image [צלם]” and subsequent act “and God created humans as the/an image of God” includes as one of its implications an actual physical resemblance between divine beings/God and humanity even if other meanings are encompassed and even prioritized in the rest of the text. And P will then later describe the first human, Adam, passing this physical resemblance on to his son (5:1–3).87
This concept of human creation “as the image of God in Gen 1:26–27 has been further illuminated through consideration of ancient Near Eastern conceptuality surrounding cultic images of God on the one hand and kings as images of deities on the other. Especially if one judges that Gen 1 was written in the Babylonian diaspora, we have good reason to believe the author and his community were familiar with Mesopotamian practices surrounding cult images of deities. These practices included the manufacture of images of gods that were (usually) in human form, the cultic activation of these images through rituals that denied the human origins of the images and attributed their making to divine intervention, and overall worship and care for such images as primary ways in which the gods made themselves physically accessible in the earthly world.88 Already the Deuteronomistic History and Ezekiel include some critique of these practices and ideas surrounding cult images. Nevertheless, the late exilic prophetic material of Second Isaiah represents the most detailed engagement with Mesopotamian conceptuality surrounding divine images. For example, Isa 44:9–20 directly challenges the idea that gods, rather than humans, were the real manufacturers of cult images.89
Likely crafted within a similar Mesopotamian diasporic context, Gen 1:26–27 represents a creative critique and alternative to Mesopotamian (and other) theology around cult images. Rather than endorsing (or critiquing, so Isa 44:9–20) human-made clay (often) anthropomorphic statues as images of God, it depicts actual humans—long recognized as divinely made in older cosmogonic traditions—as the truly God-made divine images.90 In this sense, Gen 1 plays on the widespread phenomenon of depicting God in human form, present in Israel and many other cultures as well. Rather than understanding the correspondence between human form and human pictures of god as a result of people’s projection of their own form on god(s), this text proposes that the one God who created the universe projected his form on humans. In sum, Gen 1:26–27 suggests that God had (what we call) ‘human’ form first.
At the same time, Gen 1:26–27 qualifies the similarity of humans to their divine creator in ways foreign to Near Eastern cult image theology. Where Mesopotamian and other texts stressed the strong links of cult images with the gods they depicted, even to the point of speaking of cult images as if they were identical to the gods they represented, Gen 1:26 suggests, at least initially, that God made humans as images of God’s council in general (“let us make humans as our image”), and it adds an additional specification, “similar to our likeness,” that both claims (physical) similarity and also establishes some distance between humans and the divinity that they resemble.91 The term translated here as “likeness,” דמות, elsewhere is primarily attested in Ezekiel’s (exilic) prophecy as a term for quite approximate, and difficult-to-specify similarity, a sort of image that is otherwise indescribable (Ezek 8:2; see also 1:10, 13, 16, 22, 26, 28; 10:1, 10).92 Moreover, the preposition כ (here “similar to”) asserts both similarity and separation of its object from that with which it is being compared.93 Anything that is merely similar to something else is also somehow different. Thus, within the charged diasporic context surrounding divine image practices, the crucial divine speech in Gen 1:26 states God’s intent to make humans as image-statues of divine beings in general, but also asserts, at least initially, that these statues will only be similar, in a difficult-to-quantify way (דמות) to the divinity they represent. Though Gen 1 singles humans out from other creatures as made by God as God’s image, they are also not identical replicas to God in the way that plants or other animals reproduce “according to their kind(s).”
Just as important, if not more so, for