The idea fundamentally
laid down in Gen 1:26f., that humans—and only humans, in contradistinction to
the animals—are in the image of God must go back to Egyptian influence where
especially the ruler appears as the “image of god.” The throne names and
epithets of Egyptian kings perpetuate their “image of god-ness.” Tutankhamun (twt-‘nḫ-Ymn)
means ‘living likeness of Amun’. New Kingdom seal amulets (scarabs) have been
found in Palestine/Israel as well; on them, the name of Thutmoses III and other
pharaohs are provided with the annotation tyt R’, tyt Ymn, or tyt Tmn
R’ ‘image of Amun/Re’. But being in the image of God could also refer to
human creatures in general. According to the Instruction of Merikare,
which says of humanity that “They are his images, who came from his body” (snnw.f
pw prn m ḥ’w.f), the relationship rests on the fact that humanity came from
the body of the god. The connection is clear, and it is clearly suggested in
the Egyptian language. The Egyptian numeral snw ‘two’ (Heb. šanah,
šenim) is at the core of a broad semantic field to which among others,
the following concepts belong: snwy ‘the two’ (dual); šnnw ‘second,
companion, associate, colleague’; šn ‘brother’, šnt ‘sister’; šny
‘resemble, copy, imitate’, šnn ‘statue, image, icon’, šnnt ‘similarity’.
“Similarity” is accordingly based on physical relationship and actually refers
to a sort of “second edition” or “duplicate.”
Additional background
for “being in the likeness of God” in Gen 1:26f. is the belief, throughout the
Orient, in the potent corporealization that an image repreents. The statue or stela
of an Egyptian, Assyrian, or Babylonian king, set up in a distant province of
the empire, represents the king’s power on the spot. The image of the god in
the temple represents the presence of the god. The Hebrew word ‘image’ (ṣelem)
points linguistically to the Mesopotamian cultural area. It can designate
sculptures, statues, or reliefs, but primarily emphasizes their representative
function. The Akkadian word ṣalmu has a similar semantic spectrum. Like
the Egyptian rulers, the Assyrian kings of the ninth to seventh centuries B.C.
were often designated “image” (ṣalmu) of a god: it is clear that the
notion of “being in the image of God” clearly developed from the conception of
a representative image and was then probably abstracted. The word “likeness/form”
(demut), which supplements ṣelem in 1:26f., designates the
similar connection of the copy with the model. It alludes to the content of the
image, and inner similarity in nature between human and God. (Othmar Keel and
Silvia Schroer, Creation: Biblical Theologies in the Context of the Ancient
Near East [trans. Peter D. Daniels; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2015], 142-43)
Lynn Wilder vs. Latter-day Saint (and Biblical) Theology on Divine Embodiment
