Adam and Elohim

Paul Niskanen has an insightful analysis of Genesis 1:27 in the latest JBL .  He starts with the question of whether Barth’s view that the image of God is found in relationality and specifically in sexual difference has any exegetical support.  He reviews the current discussion, and notes that there is a “virtual consensus” that views dominion as the content of the image of God, with the corollary that relationality and sexual difference are not essential to the image.  Niskanen differs on a number of grounds.

1) Phyllis Bird, Richard Middleton and others have disputed the idea that Genesis 1:27 (“male and female He created them”) is part of the description of the image of God begun in 1:27a (” elohim created ha’adam in his image”).   In most Hebrew poetry, Middleton argues, a third line isn’t parallel but introduces a new thought.  Niskanen disputes this for several reasons.

Genesis 1:27 has common elements in each of the three lines, unlike the examples that Middleton gives where a third line introduces a new idea.  1:27 is closer to the triple parallelism of Psalm 1:1 than to the examples Middleton gives (eg, Psalm 39:1-3).  He sketches the structure this way:

a) elohim created    b) ha-adam c) in his image

c) in the image of elohim   a ) he created    b) him

c) male and female a) he created b) them

Several things stand out here.  First, “created” is repeated in every line; the lines are clearly connected.  Second, the second line restates the first but with a chiastic reversal.   Third, line 3, in turn, repeats the structure of line two, but places “male and female” in the slot where we expect another statement about “image.”  Clearly, 27c is not a new thought; it’s still talking about the creation of ha-adam in the image, and this structure gives striking support to the idea that the male-and-femaleness of adam is part of the content of the image.

2) Niskanen repeats the common observation about the anomaly of the plural elohim , but adds the very uncommon observation about the grammatical behavior of adam .  Many commentators and translations today take the word as a collective, but this misses the complexity of the grammar of the passage.  In 1:27b, the pronomial suffix is singular (“created him “) while 27c uses a plural.  Thus, “there is an ambiguity in number with regard to both terms.”   Adam is both individual and collective, as elohim is somehow both singular and plural.  Again, this gives textual support to the notion that individuality-in-collectivity is part of the image.

3) Niskanen argues that 27c does not explicate 27b, but rather that both 27b-c are developments of 27a.  That is, the “use of both singular and plural pronounces for adam . . . is a deliberate two-pronged development of the assertion in Gen 1:27a.”  The development from singular to plural matches the two aspects of the human vocation – dominion and filling. Dominion is linked to the image of God in adam , but male-female, and the procreation implied, is part of the image of God.  Divine creativity is imaged in human procreativity.