Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Let us make man in our image
Genesis 1:26-31
26 God said, “Let’s make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” · WEB
The making of man is announced differently from everything else, and the image is given to male and female alike, with work attached.
Everything else in the chapter was commanded into being. Here the pattern breaks: God said, "Let's make man in our image, after our likeness." There is deliberation before the act, a plural in the speech, and a stated resemblance — three things that occur nowhere else in the week.
The plural has been read as a royal manner of speaking, as God addressing the angels, and as a plurality within God himself. The first two run into difficulties the text itself creates. A king's plural is not a usage the Hebrew Scriptures show elsewhere in God's mouth, and the angels are nowhere said to share the image man is made in — the very next verse makes the image God's own, twice, in the singular: God created man in his own image. In God's image he created him. What the passage gives is a plural speaker and a singular maker, held together without explanation.
The reading that fits the whole of Scripture takes the plural seriously, and it does not have to be built out of this verse alone. The Spirit of God is present in the second verse of the Bible, hovering; the New Testament states that all things were made through the Son and that nothing was made without him John 1:3 Colossians 1:16. Genesis does not teach the doctrine here; it leaves a plural that later revelation fills, and this is the first of several places where it does so.
The image itself is not defined, and the text is more restrained than most attempts to explain it. What it supplies is context: the sentence that grants the image runs straight on into the grant of dominion, so the image has something to do with representing God's rule over what he made. A king's image set up in a province marked whose the territory was. Human beings are that in a world.
And it is given without division: male and female he created them. The sentence is emphatic and structurally central to the chapter. Whatever the image is, both sexes hold it equally and hold it from the start, before any of the arrangements that follow the fall.
The commission is Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it — the same blessing given to the creatures, with two additions. Subduing and having dominion are the language of governing, and the diet appointed in the next verses shows what kind of governing was meant: seed-bearing plants and fruit for the humans, green plants for the animals. Nothing is killed for food in the world as it is first described.
Then the verdict changes. Six times God saw that it was good; now, with man in it, God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.
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