Significance

Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness;”  Genesis 1:26a  NASB

Our likeness – First, let’s look at the Hebrew:

וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים, נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ

Now the transliteration:

Va•yo•mer Elohim na•a•se a•dam be•tzal•me•noo kid•moo•te•noo

And lastly, the translation:

And said God let us make man in representation (copy) ours and in appearance ours.

Note the comment of Victor Hamilton:

Nowhere else in the ot do these two nouns appear in parallelism or in connection with each other. The following suggestions have been made. (1) Roman Catholic theology has maintained that “image” refers to man’s structural likeness to God, a natural image which survived the Fall and “likeness” refers to man’s moral image with which he is supernaturally endowed; and it is this likeness that was destroyed in the Fall. (2) The more important word of the two is “image” but to avoid the implication that man is a precise copy of God, albeit in miniature, the less specific and more abstract dĕmût was added. dĕmût then defines and limits the meaning of ṣelem (Humbert, Barr). (3) No distinction is to be sought between these two words. They are totally interchangeable. . . . The word “likeness” rather than diminishing the word “image” actually amplifies it and specifies its meaning. Man is not just an image but a likeness-image. He is not simply representative but representational. Man is the visible, corporeal representative of the invisible, bodiless God. dĕmût guarantees that man is an adequate and faithful representative of God on earth (Clines).^[1]

Why do we bother with all this detail?  There are two reasons.  The first is Akiva’s insight:

“For Hillel, the doctrine of man’s divine image clarifies the nature of human greatness; for Rabbi Akiva it teaches us about the Holy and Blessed One and the extent to which human deeds affect what happens above (‘diminishing the Image’). Moreover, the expression itself, et ha-demut, ‘the Image,’ makes it evident that its purpose is not to indicate the nature of humanity but to point to the existence of the Divine.”[2]

Ha-demut (translated here as “the Image,” note the capital I) is the root of kid•moo•te•noo, translated in the NASB and others as “likeness.”  But if Akiva is right, contrary to Hamilton, this is a statement about God, not about us.  Why does this matter?

Reason number 2:  If kid•moo•te•noo is about the nature of God, and we are somehow inherently connected to that nature because we are created in relation to it, then we matter!  Even if all we know now is the temporal limits of our being.  If we matter to God because He created us, then in whatever way we matter, we are part of His overall purpose—and that gives us hope because even if we pass from existence, what we have done or haven’t done affects God and He does not pass from existence.  It is as if whatever way we interact with kid•moo•te•noo, it changes not only the cosmos but also the Creator of the cosmos.

Could we really ask for more?

Of course, we want to believe (and we have some grounds for this) that we will continue after death—that we will continue to matter in some kind of living form, but that bit of wishful thinking might not be enough to get you through the night.  What will get you through the night is knowing that you change everything!  Just being alive, even if briefly, means that the entire cosmos was altered because of you.

That really is enough, isn’t it?

Topical Index:  death, likeness, image, kid•moo•te•noo, Genesis 1:26a

^[1] Hamilton, V. P. (1999). 437 דָּמָה. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 192). Chicago: Moody Press.

[2] Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, p. 261.