The physical,
spiritual, and political senses often coalesce in the ancient Near Eastern
usage of the term “image of god,” which usually refers to the king. This term
is a royal epithet in Mesopotamian texts, describing the king as the image (ṣalmu)
of a god: for example, ṣalmu ša šamaš
(“the image of Shamash”), ṣalam Enlil (“the image of Enlik”), ṣalam
Marduk (“the image of Marduk”), and ṣalim Bêl (“the image of the
Lord”) (see Bird 1997: 135-38; Garr 2003: 145-49; Machinist 2006; Schellenberg
2011: 106-13). The epithet describes the king as the chosen instrument of the
god to rule the earth, the earthly representation of the gods’ greatness and perfection.
In all respects, according to an Old Babylonian letter, “the king is the mirror
(muššulí) of the god” (Lambert 1960: 282). Mesopotamian statues of the
king often depict him as the physical mirror image of the high god, and these
royal statues were sometimes treated as objects of worship (Winter 2010:
2.167-87). In his person, as Machinst (2006: 162) writes, “[the king’s] body
serves as the statue of the god.” The king’s perfect body expresses the
political sense of the “image of god.” As Pongratz-Leisten (2015: 222)
comments, “This virtual image of royal perfection . . . served to advance the
notion of homogeneity in action between the gods and the king.”
In Egypt, the pharaoh
is sometimes described as the “image” of a high god (Hornung 1982: 135-42;
Schellenberg 2011: 98-106). This suits the royal ideology in which the king was
a god, an earthly incarnation of Horus. The wisdom text “Instruction to Merikare”
(ca. 2011 BCE) expands this royal connotation, describing humans collectively
as made in the creator god’s image: “They are his images, who came from his
body” (Lichtheim 1976: 106). (Ronald Hendel, Genesis 1-11: A New Translation
with Introduction and Commentary [AYB 1A; New Haven: Yale University Press,
2024], 132)
On Gen 5:3:
The sequence “he
fathered a son in his likeness, according to his image” strikingly reformulates
its source text (1:26) and applies it to human procreation. God had said, “Let
us make a human in our image, according to our likeness” (1:26). The last two
words are bəṣalmēnû kidmûtēnû (“in our image, according to our
likeness”). Genesis 5:3 reformulates this sequence (reversing the words and
prepositions) to bidmûtô kəṣalmô (“in his likeness, according to his
image”). The result is an extension of the concept of God’s creation of humans
in his image to the father’ procreation of sons in his image. (Ronald Hendel, Genesis
1-11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [AYB 1A; New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2024], 246)
The Image of God
The P myths have a
different orientation on the interrelationships of sex, honor, and
civilization. The P work is theocentric and architectonic, in contrast to J’s
focus on the messy complexity of the lived world. In P, sex, honor, sin, and
civilization are related in varying ways to the larger order of the cosmos. God
creates the human world as a harmonious part of the larger cosmic order, but
because of creaturely imperfection it devolves into disharmony. To solve this
problem, God issues new commands, setting into motion a sequence of covenants,
which provides a structure of moral and ritual laws that protects this fragile
harmony.
Human sexuality in P
is oriented by the dual position of humans in the created order: they are
living creatures created by God, and they are representatives of God on earth.
When humans are created on the sixth day. God gives them the blessing to “be
fruitful and multiply” (1:28), entailing sexuality, as it does for the animals
created on the fifth day (1:22). Since it is a blessing, sexuality is consonant
with the goodness of creation. Procreation, in a sense, continues God’s work of
creation through all time, following his command to “fill the earth” with life.
The increase of
civilization in P seems to be a natural consequence of God’s command to “be
fruitful and multiply” (1:28; similarly 9:1, 7). The refrain of the P Table of
Notions lists the descendants of Noah’s sons “according to their families,
languages, lands, and nations” (10:20, 31). Here the diversity of human
languages and peoples is a positive good, serving to fill the earth. Sexual
fruitfulness entails the growth of civilization.
Moral evil surfaces
in the flood story. God says to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before me,
for the earth is filled with violence because of them” (6:13). Unlike the J
flood story, the moral corruption in the P story comes from all the kinds of living
creatures, for “all flesh had corrupted its way on earth” (6:12). The content
of the creatures’ violent ways becomes visible only in the covenant after the
flood, when God gives laws to regulate killing and murder. Humans and other
animals are allowed to kill for food, but humans must not eat the blood, since,
as later explained, “the life of flesh is in the blood” (Lev 17:11). The
violent bloodshed of humans is prohibited, in terms that invoke their creation
in the image of God:
Whoever sheds the
blood of a human,
for a human will his blood be shed,
for in God’s image he made humans. (Gen 9:6)
The final poetic
line, which comes after a circular inclusion, serves as the motive for
the prohibition. The law against bloodshed is rooted in the principle of
humankind as God’s image. This law, a central part of the Noachian covenant,
limits the problem of violence that caused the flood. Human bloodshed and murder
are departures from the moral code implicit in the order of creation.
The P primeval
narrative links together the domains of sexuality, honor, sin, and civilization
but in a configuration different from that in the J stories. The organizing
concept is the original harmonious order of creation, whose capstone is the
creation of humans in the image of God. The code of morality stems from this
central core. (Ronald Hendel, Genesis 1-11: A New Translation with
Introduction and Commentary [AYB 1A; New Haven: Yale University Press,
2024], 40-41)
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