As noted by others the first chapter of Genesis is generally considered to come from the Priestly source when Judah was already established as a kingdom in competition with other powers and theologies.
So another question about good and bad/evil. In these two chapters, that pair makes several appearances, first in the several ‘God saw that it was good’ refrains, and then in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Is there a point in these verses that is taken to be the creation of morality? I read ‘God saw that it was good’ as a-moral, simply the observation that things went according to plan and have reached their intended end-state, much like I might note that a piece of IKEA furniture I bought was put together correctly.
But then there is the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and there is the tree of life. What do these trees represent? The tree of knowledge of good and evil returns in ch. 3 and ends up causing the rise of good and evil in humankind, so I suppose this tree represents the ‘creation’ of morality in that it sets up the possibility for there to be immoral acts later on down the road. But what about the tree of life?
Another question: What exactly does it mean for man to be created in God’s image? Does it mean God looks like us?
Final question - the etymology of ‘woman’ as coming out of ‘man’ works fine in English but not in most other indo-european languages where man and woman are completely unrelated. Apparently woman in English is derived from something that looks like ‘wife + man’ (with the wife presumably meaning woman more generically, like it does in Dutch and German, rather than spouse) - but that’s not true for a lot of other languages. What’s the Hebrew in this passage?
Hebrew poetry is often in the form of repetition, or restating the original line, or posing contradictions. Meter and rhyme don’t really enter into it. As mentioned, there are no line breaks.
So, yes on 1:27
And God, created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
It’s repeating the same statement for literary effect.
And, similarly for 2:23
And the man said,
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman
Because she was taken out of Man.”
The first pair is a restatement, and the second’s an explanation.
Again, a lot of the language was written in a way so that it would be easy to remember. Besides, if you’re reciting before a crowd, repetition has always been the best means of driving home your point.
I agree, it’s the union of opposites: night and day is a rhetorical reference to all of time.
I’d agree with the “it all went according to plan” concept.
The tree of knowledge of good and evil shows a union of opposites, universal knowledge, including moral awareness, IMHO. Many writers on the Creation think the fruit of the Tree of Life (eternal life) was the reward God would have given Adam and Eve if they hadn’t succumbed to temptation. Others think that eating of the tree of life would have prolonged life as long as they could eat of it, and that they probably did eat of it up to their banishment from the garden.
An awful lot of scholars over the centuries believed so. Others think it means we are like him in that we have an eternal soul, and others that we are like him in that we also can create. And dozens of other, less likely interpretations.
Man in Hebrew is “ish”, woman is “isha”, so the words are directly etymologically related. “Human” is “adam”, which also means “red clay”.
Thanks, Professor!
Some years ago Everett Fox released a new translation of the Five Books of Moses. He intended to make a more literal translation of the Hebrew, to give readers a better sense of the original source material. He spent 25 years on the effort and received fairly good press.
Usefully, he includes footnotes. Footnotes here are mostly my commentary.
I’ll provide the first 3 days of the first creation story to give the reader a flavor of the text.
At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,
when the earth was wild and waste,
darkness over the face of Ocean,
rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters-- [sup]1[/sup]
God said: Let there be light! And there was light.
God saw the light: that it was good.
God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light: Day! and the darkness he called: Night!
There was setting, there was dawning: one day.[sup]2[/sup]
God says:
Let there be a dome amid the waters,
and let it separate waters from waters!
God made the dome
and separated the waters that were below the dome from the waters that were above the dome.[sup]3[/sup]
It was so.
God called the dome: Heaven!
There was setting, there was dawning: second day.
God said:
Let the waters under the heavens be gathered to one place,
and let the dry land be seen!
It was so.
God called the dry land: Earth! and the gathering of the waters he called: Seas!
God saw that it was good.
God said:
Let the earth sprout forth with sprouting-growth,
plants that seed forth seeds, fruit trees that yield fruit, after their
kind, (and) in which is their see, upon the earth!
It was so.
The earth brought forth sprouting-growth,
plants that see forth seeds, after their kind,
trees that yield fruit, in which is their seed, after their kind.[sup]4[/sup]
God saw that is was good.
There was setting, there was dawning: third day.
[sup]1[/sup] Footnote : “Gen 1 describes God’s bringing order out of chaos, not creation from nothingness.” Czarcasm’s observations regarding showmanship are not misplaced: creating the earth is a big production! Genesis is not the earliest written part of the Bible, but it does cover the main event pretty well.
[sup]2[/sup] In this translation, God seems pleased and surprised with His creation; some in his audience may feel the same via empathy. Day!
[sup]3[/sup] “Dome” is literally a beaten sheet of metal. raki’a. I wonder whether “Cap” might be another interpretation.
[sup]4[/sup]That wasn’t written for a tribe of hunter-gatherers: agriculture was pretty clearly established and I’m not sure the audience could even imagine anything else. Hunter-gathers wouldn’t have emphasized seeds so much.
I don’t know the details of history here, but I suspect people saying, “Our god, land, potassium, you name it–is better than everyone else’s!” is as old as the human race.
First, I just want to say ‘Thank you for a great thread’.
A question for those who know these things - is alliteration a common feature of early Hebrew writing, and does that indicate a ‘poetic’ intent? I’m still back at post #5 and catching up, but I’m struck by the use of ‘Bereshith bara’ as an opening rhetorical gesture, rather like Beowulf starting with ‘Hwæt!’
Alliteration, assonance, consonance, all manner of rhetoric forms that aid in the memorization of the verses are a constant feature of Hebrew prose and poetry.
You are missing the point - nothing we personally can do can cleanse us - none of our own actions suffice (Rom 3:20-23 - For no one is declared righteous before him by the works of the law … for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God).
It is only through the redemptive action of the cross that we can be saved (Rom 3:24 - But they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus) - our only act in the process is accept that this is the case - no other rules actually matter. This was the crux of the issue between Paul and those in the early church who insisted that gentile Christians underwent circumcision and obeyed jewish dietary law. Grace means we are accepted as we are, not by doing things.
Digression over - back to Genesis …
As the Prof says, this could be a thread in itself. A few thoughts (mostly from Sarna’s JPS Torah Commentary) :
First, the language:
- The term “Let us make” is unusual. Although one name for God (Elohim) is plural, God does not use plural verbs when talking about Himself. The only other cases are Gen 3:22 (expulsion from Eden) and Gen 11:7 (dispersal of humanity after tower of Babel.) The implication is some sort of “heavenly court”, God speaking to angelic hosts. That would imply such phrases are quite old, and reflective of polytheistic pantheons in Israelite terms. (Another interp is that God is speaking to the animals and plants, implying mankind to be as one with nature.)
– “…in our image, after our likeness” is again that repetitive poetic style.
– The Hebrew for “image” is Ts-L-M and only used elsewhere in the Hebrew bible to mean “graven image.” (It is not the word used in the 10 Commandments as a forbidden “graven image.”)
– The word for “man” is Adam (as noted by Prof P above) and means “mankind” (inclusive of females.) Hebrew is a gender-driven language, like French and Spanish, so “man” can mean “male person” or just plain “person.”
Now, what does it mean?
-
For the Christians, with Jesus the Son as part of the trinity of God, I assume this means that we look like God-the-Son. (Not being Christian, I don’t know this for fact, and would like someone to confirm.)
-
Since the phrase is followed by “They shall rule the fish of the sea…” etc, one implication is that mankind has power of nature because of being like God. Another approach is that the sovereignty over nature is exactly the “image.”
-
The phrase is echoed in Gen 9:6 after the Flood, saying that murder is the worst crime because “in His image did God make man.” Thus (quoting Sarna) “the resemblence of man to God bespeaks the infinite worth of a human being and affirms the inviolability of the human person.”
-
In Mesopotamia and Egypt, the king was described as “the image” or “the likeness” of a god (e.g., Tutankhamen means “living image of (the god) Amun.”) So, the biblical author[s] is using a concept of that era but re-interpreting to apply to ALL humans, not just the king. (I personally love this interp.)
-
The Jewish mystics used this to create a diagram of God in mystic terms, reflecting ten attributes. Thus the “image” includes Wisdom, Grace, Understanding, Will, Judgement, Love, etc. Thus, “in our image” implies that humans have wisdom, but it’s only an image, a shadow of God’s Wisdom.
Skipping ahead to understand the point C K Dexter Haven is making is the quote in Exodus 18:11.
Note: I cannot speak/read Hebrew, but it seems that “god” is now being referred to as God (YHVH/Jehovah or Yahweh) and is greater than all gods (yLYHM/Elohim). Is Elohim and Yahweh interchangeable or is it contextual or am I completely off the mark here?
YHWH is the name of God. Elohim, Adonai, etc. are all titles of God, but, since Hebrew is a terse language, they sometimes do double duty, and elohim can mean “gods”.
It is somewhat contextual, depending on the ascribed source, and where in the chronology it occurs. The Documentary hypothesis wiki article may provide some insight as to the use of various terms for God in the Pentateuch.
Of course, you may or may not subscribe to that particular analysis - it certainly holds no favour in fundamentalist circles. I’m a bit ambivalent myself, being of an evangelical persuasion, but I do see the point (particularly when teasing out the dual creation narratives).
And Prof. Pepperwinkle also provides some valuable context.
I already sense that my function in these threads is going to be to read carefully and try to learn a lot, while occasionally posing a question that I hope will be intelligent.
May this be such a question. I have always wondered about Gen. 1:26 - does it predate the redaction of the Biblical material or not? I wonder this because I have always thought about it in the context of distinguishing YHWH from the gods of surrounding peoples, particularly the Egyptians. “What does our god look like?” asks the child, and the grown-up replies “Well, he must look like us, because he made us in his image. That Egyptian thing over there can’t be the One True God because we don’t have dogs’ heads, now, do we?” If it dates from a time when contact had been made with Egyptians, Phonecians, Sumerians, etc., this idea makes a lot of sense to me…
Do we have any idea of when, exactly, this line dates from?
This was written by people living in a land that had been ruled/dominated/invaded by Egypt for hundreds of years, although not continuously. Resentment of the Egyptians is a big theme in the Bible. I think that contrasting a human looking YHWH with animal headed gods may have been the original intent of that phrase.
Not just Egypt, but Assyria, Sumeria and Babylonia also had zoomorphic gods. So, yes, man in God’s image goes along with man naming (and ruling over the animals) to “advance” to an anthropomorphic God.
Further to this, there is an additional contrast between the God of Genesis and the comparative gods of Mesopotamia and Eygpt …
the neighbouring pantheons were formed out of squabbling, marriage, adultery, incest, murder and a host of human-like interactions - unhappy families, if you will, writ large on creation. The gods reflect humanity in their base nature. The (somewhat later) Greek and Roman pantheons have similar origins.
By contrast, YHWH is singular, supremely in control, victorious over chaos. And humans are created in that image, and can aspire to be like that. In Genesis, humans are created to be like God, and can aspire to be so, as opposed to dragging the gods down to be somewhat more like us.
In my opinion, anyhow.
Well, no, we’ve got no idea really. Most scholars attribute this to the P-source, which is probably dated around 750 - 600 BCE. Dating the P-source is one of the significant areas of scholarly dispute. It certainly does pre-date the redaction (final editing), estimated at around 450 BCE.
I do like your interpretation, we certainly have later references (in the Pentateuch, first five books and oldest works) to things like the “finger of God,” and Moses is told that no one can see God’s “face” (Moses gets to view God’s backside) and there’s a vision of people eating at God’s “feet.”