Unlike
Ezekiel, the P documents in the Pentateuch do not describe the shape of the kabod,
but they do speak of the form and shape (דמות, צלם) of humans in Genesis
1.26-27, 5.1, and 9.6. In the first of these passages we read,
God said,
“Let us make humanity (אדם) in our form (בצלמנו), after our shape (כדמותנו),
so that they may rule the fish of the sea, the bird in the sky, the beast,
all the earth and all the creeping things that creep on the earth.”
Then God created humanity in His form;
in the form of God He created him;
male and female He created them.
These
verses assert that human beings have the same form as God and other heavenly beings.
That the shape in question appears not only in God’s body but also in the bodies
of other heavenly beings is clear from the first-person plurals of 1.26, in
which God speaks to members of the divine court: “Let us make the human
in our form and shape.” (here we should recall that there is no “we” of
majesty in Hebrew verbs.) As Randall Garr points out, angels or divine beings
in the Hebrew Bible are generally conceived as being humanoid in form. (Garr, Image,
53-4) Consequently, the use of the first-personal plural in Genesis 1.26 shows
that humans, angels, and God all have the same basic shape. (Incidentally, God’s
decision to reach out to other divine beings in this verse was purely
rhetorical, nothing more than a polite gesture; in the next verse, God crates
humanity by Godself, before the other divine beings can even respond.)
The terms
used in Genesis 1.26-27, demut and ṣelem, the, pertain specifically
to the physical contours of God. This becomes especially clear when one views the
terms in their ancient Semitic context. They are used to refer to visible,
concreate representations of physical objects, as verses such as 2 Kings 16.10,
Ezekiel 23.14-15, 1 Samuel 6.4-5, and 2 Chronicles 4.3 make clear. (Benjamin D.
Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009], 69)
In a related endnote, we read that:
One might
object to my assertion that these words in Genesis. 1-26-7 refer to visible,
concrete representations of concrete objects by noting that at times כדמות can function
essentially as a preposition meaning “like”—e.g., in Isaiah 13.4. In such as
case, דמות loses its physical denotation. Nevertheless, the combination of the
two words in Genesis 1.26-7 in all likelihood is intended to stress the
concrete sense of the more ambiguous דמות. In making this claim, I disagree
with Garr, who argues that “the two terms are different. In combination or
separately, each nominal phrase expresses and implies a very different
characterization of the human race” (Garr, Image, 166). In fact, these
terms have a substantial area of overlap: Both can refer to physical representations
of a physical object. The noun צלם on its own may refer to a representation
that, on a visual level, does not clearly resemble what it represents, and the
term דמות may refer to a likeness without as strongly implying the substance of
the representation of what is represented; however, both terms often include
both physicality and similarity within their semantic fields. By using both
terms (both in Genesis 1.26-7 as well as in 5.3), the priestly authors strongly
suggest that they intend a meaning located in the substantial overlap of the
two semantic fields. Hence the verse graphically points to a conception of God,
angels, and humans as physical beings whose physical forms resemble each other.
It has also
been suggested on the basis of Psalm 39.7 and Psalm 73.20 that צלם can have a
nonconcrete or abstract meaning; see, e.g., Garr, 124. This suggestion, however,
is specious. In both psalms, the word צלם is in all likelihood a word unrelated
to the more common צלם in Hebrew. This less common word means “shadow, dim,
apparition” and goes back to the proto-Semitic root tlm. The root
(= צלם 11 in Hebrew) is cognate with Arabic ẓalama and the Ugaritic
ẓlmt and glmt as well as the roto known in the common Akkadian
phrase ṣalmat qaqqadi. It seems to mean “darkness, obscurity.” The more common
Hebrew noun (צלם 1) meaning “image, physical representation,” goes
back to the proto-Semitic ṣlm (cognate to the Arabic ṣalama),
which apparently meant “chop off, hew.” See HALOT, the roots צלם 1 and צלם 11.
The noun form the root צלם 11 is much less common in biblical
Hebrew. It occurs only in Psalm 39.7 (which is to be rendered, “Indeed, man
goes about in obscurity; he mutters sounds devoid of meaning; he collects
things without knowing who gathers them”) and perhaps in Psalm 73.20 (where,
however, the term may in fact retain its basic meaning of model or form; both
possible meanings fit the context). The less common noun does not make sense in
Genesis 1.26-7. (Ibid., 224-25 n. 69)
Further Reading:
Lynn Wilder vs. Latter-day Saint (and Biblical) Theology on Divine Embodiment
