Made in the Image, Male and Female

Genesis one, verses twenty six and twenty seven, records the creation of humankind in language distinct from anything else in the chapter's account of the six days. God is quoted proposing to make humankind in the divine image and likeness, and the following verse states as accomplished fact that God created humankind in his own image, male and female he created them. No other creature in the chapter is said to be made in God's image, and the passage explicitly extends the description to both male and female together rather than to a single figure, a detail later interpreters have treated as significant in its own right. The two verses give no definition of what the image itself consists of, no physical description and no list of shared attributes, leaving the content of the phrase to be worked out entirely by later interpretation rather than by the text stating it directly. What the passage does state plainly is the image's scope, applied to humankind as a whole rather than to any particular class, role or individual within it, and the preceding verse's plural language, let us make, has itself drawn centuries of separate interpretive attention distinct from the question of what the image itself actually consists of.