Meaning Makers

Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.  Genesis 1:26-27 NASB

Make/create – Did you realize that the two crucial verbs in these verses are different?  Oh, maybe you thought that the difference between “make” and “create” was only English stylistic accommodation, but that isn’t the case.  The two verbs are ʿāśâ (“make”) and bārāʾ (“create”).  There’s an important difference between them; a difference that is hidden in the English text.

First, let’s look at ʿāśâ.  “When used in the sense of ‘make,’ the emphasis is on the fashioning of the object. . . When used of God, the word frequently emphasizes God’s acts in the sphere of history. These contexts stress one of the most basic concepts of ot theology, i.e., that God is not only transcendent, but he is also immanent in history, effecting his sovereign purpose.”^[1]

So, we see that the verb doesn’t necessarily imply that God brought Man into being from nothing.  It could mean that God fashioned Man from other material (as the story suggests in the next chapter).  The emphasis is on God’s sovereignty, not Man’s existence.  Furthermore, ʿāśâ has ethical overtones.  Man is fashioned as a moral agent like God.

On the other hand, “bārāʾ emphasizes the initiation of the object . . .The word is used in the Qal only of God’s activity and is thus a purely theological term. . . The root bārāʾ denotes the concept of ‘initiating something new’ in a number of passages.”^[2]

Now we see why both verbs are needed.  God fashions Man (as a moral agent) and in so doing brings into existence a new kind of being.  With this in mind, we can look a little deeper into the difference between these two verbs.  Note the comment by Zornberg:

“Whenever . . . the Torah speaks of the imperative la’asot, usually translated ‘to fulfill, to obey,’ the words of the Torah, the Netziv of Volozhin, author of He’amek Davar, consistently translates ‘to construct the meaning of the words of the Torah.’  La’asot indicates the ‘making,’ the creation of Torah in the mind of the reader.”[3]

“ . . to call out for response to a text that itself calls out, summons, and addresses the reader.  Essentially, to read is to invite the text to yield up its meanings.”[4]

bārāʾ initiates the project called “Man,” but it doesn’t complete the job.  The completion requires fashioning Man as a meaning maker.  That’s ʿāśâ, a continual process.  Man starts, but he is not finished until he fills the world with the meaning built into him by his Creator.  Perhaps this also hints about why ʿāśâ comes first in the story.  Design isn’t enough.  Function before form.

Topical Index:  ʿāśâ, to fashion, to build, bārāʾ, to create, to initiate, Man, meaning, Genesis 1:26-27

^[1] Mccomiskey, T. E. (1999). 1708 עָשָׂה. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 701). Chicago: Moody Press.

^[2] Ibid.

[3] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. xvi.

[4] Ibid., p. xvii.