What Does Genesis 1:27 Mean?
And God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.THE KEY
God’s image is spoken over the one human whole, and that whole is explicitly male and female.
THE MEANING
You are included in the human whole called אָדָם (adam, humanity): the image is spoken over humanity, and that humanity is named male and female. Bodily difference belongs within one shared creation and one shared image.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that the divine image belongs only to the male: the verse names the human whole as male and female within the same act of creation.
THE ROOT
אָדָם
adam
GROWS FROM
אדם
Humanity, with a word-family connection to ground and soil.
“humankind” in this verse is adam. אָדָם (adam, humanity) is linked in Hebrew to אֲדָמָה (adamah, ground or soil) and אָדֹם (adom, red). The human is earth-connected, and the verse’s collective adam includes both male and female in the shared image.
ALSO GROWS
adamah: ground, soil
אֲדָמָה
The shared consonants connect humanity with the ground, keeping the image-bearing human embodied and earth-linked.
adom: red
אָדֹם
This related word keeps the color of soil in the human word-family.
THE PATTERN
The divine image belongs to humanity as a whole, across male and female.
Male and female he created them, and blessed them, and called their name the ground-being, Adam, in the day when they were created.Whoever pours out the blood of man, by man his blood shall be poured out, for in the shape of God he made man.With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who have been made according to the likeness of God.THE THREAD
Whoever pours out the blood of man, by man his blood shall be poured out, for in the shape of God he made man.Genesis 9:6 uses the same Hebrew noun צֶלֶם (tselem, image) as Genesis 1:27. Here the image stands beside human blood and its threatened taking, holding the shared image-bearing humanity in view even where violence enters the passage.
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