The Daily Office · Genesis 1:26–28
In our image
Genesis 1:26–28
26Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
28And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
What's happening here
In the ancient Near East, only kings were called "the image of god" — a living statue of the deity, planted in a place to represent the god's rule. Genesis takes that royal language and gives it to every human being, male and female, with no exceptions for status, tribe, or power. It is one of the most quietly radical sentences ever written.
The word that matters
Hebrew · image, statue, representation
Tselem is the same word used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible for the carved idols of foreign gods. Genesis flips it: the only legitimate image of God in the world is a human being. Every other image is a counterfeit.
Where else this shows up
Genesis 9:6
After the flood, the prohibition against murder is grounded in the image — to kill a person is to deface God's representation.
Colossians 1:15
Paul calls Christ "the image of the invisible God" — the true human, the one we were always meant to be.
James 3:9
James points out the absurdity of blessing God and cursing the people made in his likeness with the same mouth.