Person

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.”  Genesis 1:26  NASB

Image/ likeness – How many times have we examined the implications of this verse?  And yet it seems that we still have not exhausted its depths.  In this particular case, we need to think about the comments of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.  His analysis leads us to one more deeper level.

Often the precise meaning is given by context.  There is however no exact equivalent of ‘person,’ with its senses of having a certain status within society, a bearer of legal rights (so that a rightless individual can be called a non-person), a body (‘weapons concealed on his person’) and so on.  So, for example, the phrase ‘a personal God,’ which in English is a description of the God of Abraham, is almost impossible to translate into Hebrew without changing the meaning entirely. . . . the word ‘person’ entered English via the Latin ‘persona’ meaning ‘mask.’  It originally signalled the part played by an actor on the stage, in a culture—Hellenism—in which the theatre played a central part in the portrayal of the human condition.  It then became a role played by the individual within society, because of the metaphor of society-as-theatre.  It was then generalized to mean any individual within society. . . It therefore becomes deeply problematic in Western philosophy, especially Existentialism, as to what remains of ‘the self’ once all the social roles have been subtracted.  

            Biblical Hebrew has no word for ‘person’ precisely because it rejects the metaphors of society-as-theatre and self-as-part-played-upon-the-stage.  This is no mere rejection: it goes to the very heart of Genesis’s conception of the individual and the human condition.  We are not the masks we wear; we are the individuals whose innermost thoughts are known to God.  We are what lies behind the mask.  This is one reason why the Torah systematically devalues sight in favour of sound, the voice and listening.  We are not what others perceive us to be; we are what God knows us to be.[1]

    Think about the impact of Shakespeare’s famous line, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; . .”[2]  How that piece of literature reflected and influenced the Western view of Man!

But that’s not the end of the story.  Aristotle is also in the mix, even in Judaism.  Maimonides was greatly influenced by Aristotle.  Consequently, Aristotle’s thought enters Judaism through him.  For example, “Maimonides held that we can only know what God is not; not what He is.”[3]  If this sounds like Thomas Aquinas’ via negativa, you shouldn’t be surprised.  Maimonides accepted the Aristotelian idea that Man is defined as essentially rational, cognitive, and communicative.  This is what sets him apart from the animals.  But the Genesis text doesn’t speak in these terms.  It speaks of Man in terms of relationships and obligations.  It treats Man as a verb, not a noun (by the way, it treats God in the same way).  The concept of “person” flows along the lines of what we do, not how we are constituted.  Maimonides, Aristotle, and Aquinas are concerned with ontology.  Genesis is concerned with kinesiology.

Sacks is right.  There is no exact Hebrew equivalent for “person.”  Nor is there for the very common English translation “soul.”  These terms are located in a different cultural milieu, and we must keep this in mind whenever we read “person” or “soul” or something like that in an English translation.  What Sacks points out is that we are what God knows of us.  It is His design, intention, and execution that makes us who we are—and consequently . . .

“Now, with the help of God I shall become myself.”[4]

Topical Index: person, soul, Maimonides, Aristotle, Genesis 1:26