Who is 'Us'? (serious question on biblical passages)

Genesis 1:26 begins:Then God said, “Let us make man in our image…”

Genesis 3:22 begins:
And the LORD God said, “Behold, the man is become as one of us…”

I could go on - but, I won’t.

Who is ‘us’?

I started asking this question many decades ago, and have researched many translations of the bible in my lifetime. This plurality exists in every instance that I can locate. Yet, finding an intelligent answer to my question has proven fruitless, so far.

Every person I speak with, who purports to believe in/live by the bible insists there is only one God. Yet, when they are directed to these passages in their bibles, they typically change the subject, or produce an explanation that even a 4y/o can see right through.

Beyond knowing who ‘us’ is, I would like to know why so many don’t want to touch the subject seriously. I have high-hopes that you Dopers will be the collective exception to my previous experiences.

Please tell me, when reading these passages (and others like it), who am I to understand that God is referring to when God uses collective pronouns regarding God, if not other Gods?

Thank you in advance for enlightening me.

Various possibilities-

The Christian Trinity: Father, Son & Spirit, One God is Three Persons
(some non-Trinitarian C’tians might say this is the Eternal Creator, the Father, speaking to His First-Created Son)

The Royal ‘We’

God speaking to His angelic court

I’m pretty sure that biblical scholars can trace references to god in the bible as:

  1. One of many gods
  2. First of many gods
  3. The only god

There’s a straight dope mailbag article about this someplace that I’m too lazy to look up. The references to Us is probably just an error left over from previous thinking about what god is. I say :dubious: to the trinitarian explanation, since that didn’t show up for a few thousand years, and the Jews and Muslims still don’t buy it.

Such things are in the Koran too. It is interpreted as the “royal we.”

The OP’s question has always had me wondering, too. I can’t really see how it could mean the ‘royal we’.

If I understand the ‘royal we’, (and I probably don’t, so I wikied it, and I probably am still not getting it right) it means ‘god and I’.

It is similar to what the Rastafarians mean when they say ‘I and I’ and I have always loved that expression, and the way that my Rasta friends have broken it down to me.

But, why would God in heaven, the Christian God, say “God and I” if there is only one god?

ETA: FriarTed, if he is speaking to his Angelic court, is it fair to say that the angels created us, as well as god?

The Christian God could DEFINITELY say “God and I” because of the Trinity. The only folks who could have a problem with the We/Us are Jews & Muslims & other absolute monotheists, and they probably don’t.

I don’t think the Royal We means “God and I”. On the human level, I think it may mean “Myself as the representative of my society”. On the Divine level, it could mean “I, God, as the Source of all that exists”.

There are some interpretations of the Creation story which hold that God allowed angels to participate in the shaping of Creation.

Another possibility, as far as the Creation of Man, IF one holds to the pre-mortal existence of souls, God could be telling the disembodied spirits that they are now to dwell in the human bodies He is preparing for them.

Rabbi Harold Kunstler, in Why Good Things Happen to Bad People, suggests that in the Creation instance, God was speaking to His animal creatures- “You supply the physical bodies and I’ll supply the human spirit and together let Us make humanity in Our Image”- and that is how human evolution happened.

I’m inclined to believing that it’s an artifact of translation. I’m sure most people have encountered translated prose that would probably have been worded differently if written originally in the target language, but the translators decided the direct translation of the source language would better reflect the (currently) unknown intentions of the writer of the source.

Or, it’s how God refers to Himself. Don’t ask why He does it, it’s His own business, we’re just copying down what He told us to write.

Jewish Genesis predates the Christian concept of the Trinity by thousands of years.

My understanding of it all is that the original Hebrew word used was Elohim which was plural for Gods, and which would explain us. El would have been the singular form of it but wasn’t used. Later when translators started translating into Latin, Greek, English and other versions, they purposely mistranslated it into singular.

There was no majestic plural (“royal we”) in Hebrew, nor was there any concept whatsoever of a “trinity” (a concept that isn’t even found in the New Testament, much less the Old) in ancient (or modern) Judaism. The plural verbs in Genesis are artifacts of an originally polytheistic creation myth. There are many such artifacts in the Hebrew Bible.

“Us” = Sheep.

From the biblical Latin, “We sheep”. Insert this phrase when you see “us”. Makes context easier. :slight_smile:

A devout Trinitarian submits this musing; according to a Wikipedia article on string theory, there might be anywhere from eleven to twenty-six space-time dimensions. How to I explain or process this info? I can’t even begin to.

But in analogous way, the idea of a Prime Cause, whether one embraces the Personal God of Judaism and Christianity or Einstein’s God of Spinoza, a sort of Aristotelean Prime Cause, composed of multiple ‘aspects’ (for lack of a better word) might not be that unpalatable.

I’ve seen the word ‘singularity’ used to describe the single point from which sprang the Big Bang. The radical secularists gleefully demean the concept of an Intelligent Designer by conflating it into a aged guy in a gown; but the Periodic Table has a lot more elements than the four classical earth, air, fire, and water. Our concepts of the Almighty should likewise be more than just the simplified anthropomorph.

[Futurama]
Sweet zombie Jesus!
[/futurama] :slight_smile:

That is still IMHO looking at a very small god, many followers of old time religions have not really looked at the very deep implications of the vastness of the universe.

I guess many images (or masks of god as Joseph Campbell said) would be more like it, but there is also the realization that the second one is talking about a trinity one is then referring to the biblical god; and well, when one takes into account how vast the universe is, one has to conclude that many do believe in a very small god.

On the other hand, there is also the position of an agnostic or soft atheist that is of the teapot variety, that goes thinking that there could be a god in all those dimensions and vastness of the universe out there, but from this pale blue dot we inhabit it is not very likely that we are important or consequential to such a being or energy field.

Hebrew has singular, dual, and plural. Elohim is the plural form of God–BUT it takes a singular verb. Thus we see that the doctrine of the Trinity is encoded or formatted, so to speak, in the text itself right from the beginning of the Bible.

Flyer: correct on the plural and singular forms, but incorrect on the Trinity being foreshadowed here. You might just as well claim that Queen Victoria confirms the Trinity because of her famous use of the royal “We.”

Many people do believe as you suggest, that the Elohim is a foreshadowing of the Trinity. But there isn’t any solid evidence for this. The New Testament is a treasure-house of backdated prophecies. Many Christians hold that Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac foreshadows Jesus’ sacrifice, except that Abraham’s story ends very differently than Jesus’ story does.

You are putting forward an article of faith, not an item of actual knowledge.

(There’s nothing exactly wrong with that…but it’s best for articles of faith to be labeled as such to avoid confusion.)

Or maybe God made the universe for someone else. Those people have gone to their heavenly reward long since, and we’re living in the dregs of their universe, convinced of our own importance.
We had just better hope he doesn’t decide to do spring cleaning.