Let Us Make Man, and Who the Us Might Be

Genesis 1:26 opens with a puzzle its own author never explains: Let us make man in our image. Three readings compete for the plural. One takes it as a plural of majesty, a royal we, but Claus Westermann's commentary points out that Biblical Hebrew has no other clear example of a divine speaker using such a form, which weakens the case considerably. A second, favored by Nahum Sarna's commentary, reads it as God addressing a heavenly court, the same assembly that appears surrounding the divine throne in Job's opening chapters and in Isaiah's call vision, with God alone acting in the verse that follows. A third reading, trinitarian, arrived centuries later with Christian doctrine and depends on a framework the text's own author could not have held.

The image and likeness pair raises a second, narrower question. Later theology built whole systems on the assumption that tselem and demut mark two separate properties, one retained after the fall and one lost. James Barr's philological study of the terminology across the Hebrew Bible found no such consistent distinction: the two words function largely as parallel near synonyms, paired for emphasis rather than to divide the human person into separable parts. What survives the argument is the claim itself, that the text asserts humanity bears God's image, and not any particular account of what bearing it technically requires.