The Image of God

• English source texts.

• Hebrew source texts.

Important Studies (plus some personal reactions to them)

In the future I hope to express my own thoughts on some of the outstanding studies that have been done in this area:

• Yair Lorberbaum, Ẓelem Elohim (Jerusalem, Shocken, 2004). In rabbinic thought, human beings are God's icons in the world (and this is perhaps true in biblical thought as well as he suggests in the conclusion to the book). This thesis is borne out not only in aggadic material, but also throughout Tractate Sanhedrin in halakhic contexts. Much material related to Lorberbaum's book may be downloaded at the webpage for his academic course on the subject. To the best of my knowledge this book has not been translated into English yet, which is surprising and unfortunate.

• Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary (London: Augsburg, 1984), translated from the German. In biblical thought, man as a whole is God's counterpart in a relationship with human characteristics (but not an icon). Westermann's commentary on the image of God is here (including a history of exegesis), and the entire commentary may be acquired here.

• In my opinion, Joshua A. Berman's Created Equal (Oxford University Press, 2008) is all about Ẓelem Elohim, even though he has very little to say about it directly. Rather than dwelling on the exegesis of the specific phrase, Berman shows that pentateuchal law is based on God's personal covenant with each and every Israelite, and how this was a revolutionary egalitarian idea in the ancient near east. In my opinion, such a covenantal relationship can only be imagined based on the image of man in the beginning of Genesis. Or in other words, Berman's outstanding book shows how Ẓelem Elohim is applied throughout the Torah, especially in its laws. (It may be that Berman feels the exegesis of the phrase Ẓelem Elohim has been beaten to death as a topic, and if so then he is probably correct! But I still think that it has important larger implications for how we read the Bible as a whole, and that his book bears this out.)

• The most recent full-length academic study of Ẓelem Elohim in the Bible is G. A. Jonsson, The Image of God: Genesis 1:26-28 in a Century of Old Testament Research, trans. L. Svensden (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1988). Yet I fail to see why the important aspect of dominion makes for more convincing exegesis than any of the other equally important alternatives.

• This is also a very nice summary and analysis of scholarship on the topic: Chris Mueller, "What It Means to Be Created in the Image of God" (Senior Honors Thesis, Liberty University, Fall 1999), PDF. I'm surprised that Mueller didn't find and use Jonsson along with his other sources, but I'm not surprised that he reached a different conclusion.

Abstract

The Bible is about the story of Israel, but it does not begin with Israel. It begins with humanity. Human beings are unique in the world because they are capable of meaningful relationships with each other and with God. They are volitional creatures capable of acting on their will, for better or for worse. This capacity for meaningful action within interpersonal relationships is the plain meaning of the "Image of God" in the Bible and rabbinic literature. God is a personality, not a concept.

Interpersonal relationships are just that: personal and contextual, not universal. Each one is unique. It is in this sense that the Ten Commandments are best understood, and this is indeed how rabbinic midrash understood them: "Religious" commandments and "social" commandments are the very same thing, namely matters of personal loyalty and integrity. The only difference between them is that the first set is about integrity towards God (who is a personality), while the second set is about integrity towards other human personalities.

In this sense, the "Image of God" is the basis for morality in the biblical and rabbinic view.