In Our Image

The Treehouse: Conversations About God

Cueva de las Manos, The Cave of the Hands, Argentine Patagonia

So, here we are, with light and the firmament dividing what’s above from what’s below, with the sun, moon, and stars and all the growing, leafy things and the feathered and furry and creeping things, and Elohim says, “Hey, I ain’t done just yet.” (Or maybe not exactly that, but, you know, something along those lines. Elohim wouldn’t have said, “Hold my beer, because there wasn’t anyone else to do that, unless…but now we’re getting into angelology, and that is way outside my wheelhouse.)

Anyway, that brings us to the final act of Elohim in this first version of the Creation story. “Let us make man/humankind in our image, according to our likeness (similitude, pattern), so Elohim created man/humankind (ha’adam) in Elohim’s own image, male and female.”

The Old Testament is famous for its plays on words and its puns. There are clever little bombs of truth and amusement hidden from us English speakers and readers, literally lost in translation. Ha’adam is one such example. In Hebrew, the word for man/humankind is adam, pronounced aw-dawm, and it’s connected to the word for ground or earth, adamah. I know you’re leaping to the name, Adam, and we’ll get there when we consider the second Creation story, but for these verses, just think “earth creature.”

So, “Let us create Earth Creature in our image, so Elohim created them, male and female.”

Now Elohim gives Earth Creature the responsibility for oversight and caretaking of the Earth — the birds and the fish and “every living thing that moves upon the earth” and all the plants and trees. Also, Elohim makes a point of saying, “I’m giving you all this for sustenance and enjoyment.”

We’ve had in succession:

• 1st day, light

• 2nd day, firmament¹

• 3rd day, dry ground

• 4th day, sun, moon, and stars (also the Oxford comma)

• 5th day, fish and birds

• 6th day, creatures on land and the finale, Earth Creature²

• 7th day, Elohim rests

I’ll have a few more things to say next week about this first chapter, and then we’ll move on to the second Creation story in Genesis. Again, all this introduction of “there is a God, and here’s what kind” lays the groundwork for all that is to come. Hang in there.

1. Okay, the firmament. The Hebrew word for it, “raqia,” means “extended surface or expanse” from the root “raqa” meaning to “beat, stamp, or stretch out.” So, ancient cosmology imagined a hammered-out surface, some kind of metal, that served as an enormous dome. The people would have believed that the world was divided by a barrier separating the oceans and waters above (because where do you think rain comes from, duh) from the oceans and waters below. As an organizing principle, you’d have to have a firmament before you could bring forth dry land. (Remember, it was just chaos and confusion before.) Also, the sun, moon, and stars were believed to have been embedded in the firmament (ancient Egyptians thought the stars were hung from the firmament on cables), which is a concept I for some reason feel tenderly toward. Maybe it’s the childlike poetry of it.

2. I’m noticing there is a sort of evolutionary progression in this first version of the story that actually kind of fits with evolutionary theory. (Except for the firmament, of course. Don’t suppose Darwin had that in his sketchbook.)

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