The Great Awakening

Last week, Pope Francis announced that Fr. Robert Barron would be appointed auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Fr. Barron, Catholic evangelist and founder of the Word on Fire website, uses modern social media, blogs and videos to promote the gospel. I thought I would check out some scripture commentaries of this “modern-day Fulton Sheen,” and since I’ve been commenting lately on Genesis 2-3, I chose his homily on the first reading for the First Sunday of Lent in Year A (Gen 2:7-9; 3:1-7).


Fr. Robert Barron [courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Fr. Barron starts off making some very positive comments about our physicality: “It is of singular importance to realize that sin is not a function of matter, not the consequence of our embodied nature. God exults in our physicality, and so should we.” He rightfully summarizes that intellectual and sensual pleasures are not inherently sinful.

After this promising start, Fr. Barron lays out a traditional understanding of the tree of knowledge of good and evil:

The tree in question is identified as the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil,” which is to say, a form of knowing that is the unique prerogative of God. Since God is himself the unconditioned good, he alone is the criterion of what is morally right and wrong. According to the semeiotics of this story, therefore, the eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree is the act of arrogating to oneself what belongs in a privileged way to God. It is to make of the human will itself the criterion of good and evil, and from this subtle move, on the Biblical reading, misery has followed as surely as night follows the day.

This traditional interpretation – which Fr. Barron is merely relating – understands “the knowledge of good and evil” as divine knowledge that is proper only to God. To acquire such divine knowledge, therefore, is to attempt to make one’s self like God. This understanding further confines “the knowledge of good and evil” to the moral sphere; humans will now decide for themselves what is morally right and wrong.

There are problems with the moral interpretation. For one, why would God have denied them an understanding of right and wrong? Without an understanding of right and wrong, Adam and Eve were morally ignorant before they ate from the tree. How then could God hold them at fault for disobeying his command when they would not have known the difference between right and wrong?

The moral interpretation also doesn’t fit other uses of the term in the rest of the Bible. For example, Deut 1:39, referring to the generation that will live to enter the promised land, says: “And your children, who as yet do not know good from evil – they shall enter there.” According the parallel passage in Num 14:29f, the children who “do not know good from evil” are those under 20 years of age. Being able to discern the good from bad requires wisdom that only comes with age and experience. Once acquired, it makes a person responsible for his or her own decisions. That person is then counted as an adult.

At the other end of the spectrum is 2 Sam 19:36. In this passage, Barzillai explains to King David why he cannot go with him to live in Jerusalem: “I am now eighty years old. Can I distinguish between good and evil? Can your servant taste what he eats and drinks, or still hear the voices of men and women singers?” Barzillai is obviously a mature adult and has experienced life, but he no longer experiences life to its fullness. His senses of taste and hearing are diminished so he lacks the capacity to discern between good and bad food, wine or song. Distinguishing between good and bad does not only mean making moral judgments.

Other ancient texts offer parallels. In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu was naked and hairy and lived in the wild with the beasts. Trappers, upset that Enkidu was ruining their livelihood by letting the animals escape, hire a temple prostitute to tame him. Shamhat presents herself to Enkidu and they make love for six days and seven nights. Satisfied at last, Enkidu finds that the wild beasts now run away from him. Returning to Shamhat, she explains, “You are wise, Enkidu, and now you have become like a god.” She clothes him, introduces him to bread and wine, and brings him to the city of Uruk where he becomes friends with its king, Gilgamesh, and they have many adventures. There are similar themes at work in both tales. Knowledge makes a human like a god. And, once they become wise, humans can no longer live naked with wild animals, but must clothe themselves and live a civilized life.


“God Confronts Adam and Eve” by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872) [Courtesy of the Digital Image Archive, Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University]

Before eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were, like children, oblivious to their nudity. But after eating the forbidden fruit, they acquired the wisdom of experience that told them that something was not right with their nakedness. Identifying a problem, they sought a solution using their newly-acquired knowledge: “and they sewed fig-leaves together and made themselves aprons” (3:7b). In a similar way, earlier in the story, God identified that it was not good for man to be alone and provided a solution by making woman as a suitable companion for man. Under the fruit’s influence, Adam and Eve begin taking the first steps towards civilization. They have become like God, recognizing a problem and seeking a solution for it.

It is important to keep in mind that Genesis 2-3 is describing a primeval event, not a historical episode. The author is trying to explain why it is that our lives on earth are full of suffering, toil and sin, ending in death. If God had intended things differently, the author reasons, then something must have happened that caused human beings to be alienated from God and suffering, toil and sin were the result. Death will claim us in the end, but in the meantime there’s no limit to what we can accomplish if we put our minds to it. We have no choice but to live and learn.

Double Tree

In the fashion world, a doublet is a man’s close-fitting jacket that was worn in Europe during the Renaissance. In biblical studies, a doublet refers to a duplicate version of a saying or narrative. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is so familiar to most people that we don’t notice little inconsistencies and oddities like doublets. There are at least 3 in Genesis 2-3:

1. 2:8a (“And YHWH God planted a garden in Eden, in the east”) and 2:9 (“And YHWH God made grow from the ground all kinds of trees, pleasant to look at and good to eat, and the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”)
2. 2:8b (“and there he put the human whom he had formed”) and 2:15a (“And YHWH God took the human and put him in the garden of Eden, to till and watch over it.”)
3. 3:23 (“So YHWH God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken”) and 3:24 (“And God expelled the human and he placed at the east of the garden Eden the cherubim and the flickering flaming sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.”) 

Sometimes lines are repeated for stylistic effect, as may be the case with 2:8b and 2:15a. In between these two verses lies a passage (2:10-14) describing a river passing through Eden that branches out to become four great rivers. Even the casual reader notices that these verses interrupt the narrative flow. The literary style is more enumerative than narrative. Either the author is trying to situate Eden geographically or making a theological point about how the life-giving waters of the great rivers derive from the mighty river that watered Eden. Resuming v. 8b in 15a could be the author’s way of picking up the narrative where he left off.

But the other two doublets occur back-to-back, so this is a likely indication of two different sources. In 2:9, the emphasis is on the trees of the garden, specifically the “tree of life” and the “tree of knowledge,” although mention of the tree of knowledge seems like an afterthought. The tree of life is identified as the tree “in the middle of the garden,” but after this verse it disappears from the story until it re-appears at the end (at 3:22, 24). It is the tree of knowledge that is the forbidden tree in 2:17, but by 3:3 the tree in the middle of the garden is the forbidden tree. Something odd is going on here.

The composite nature of Gen 2-3 has led biblical scholars to hypothesize that there were two primeval stories that were carefully stitched together. Narrative A (2:4b-8, 18-24) describes the creation of humanity. Narrative B (2:9a, 15-17; 3:1-13, 23) recounts the expulsion from the garden. To these core tales, the author added additional material, such as the rivers interlude (2:10-14), the penalties for disobedience (3:14-19), and the naming of Eve (3:20).

In the original form of narrative B, the tree in the middle of the garden was not named. The text only says that humans were forbidden to eat of it, yet the humans deemed it pleasant-looking and desirable for the acquisition of wisdom (3:6). The name for the tree was created by the author in the introduction (2:9, 17) based on the effect that its fruit had on the human couple once they ate it. (BTW, in Latin, the word for evil is malum and the word for apple is malus. The Bible does not say the forbidden fruit was an apple, but the similarity of names in Latin led to that connection.)



"Fall of Man" (1628-29), painting by Rubens

The “tree of life” mentioned in 2:9 is a well-known symbol in both the Bible (for example, Prov 11:30) and other cultures in the ANE. The tree of life was something that humankind struggled for but could never attain. The vv. 3:22, 24 that were tacked on to the end of narrative B comes from a parallel story explaining how YHWH had to expel humans from the garden and set a sentinel at the entrance to prevent humans from eating from the tree of life. The author is telling us that a similar event was associated with the tree of life as was with the tree of knowledge.

The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” is a symbol that only appears in Gen 2-3. The term “good and evil” is a figure of speech called a merism that uses extreme opposites to refer to the whole (for example, saying “heaven and earth” to mean the entire cosmos). It is another way of saying “the tree of all knowledge.” It should not be understood as moral awareness, that is, learning to distinguish good from evil. “Knowledge” in the Bible refers not to the learning of facts but to knowledge gained through experience.

By linking two stories of two different trees, one of life and one of knowledge, the author is trying to express how humans are built in such a way that they crave to advance their life and also to advance their knowledge. The barrier of death prevents them from achieving the goal of living forever, but there is no real barrier to our ability to advance in knowledge or wisdom. Our ability to think and grow in knowledge separates us from the animals. In our ability to strive for all knowledge, humans have the potential “to become like God.” That is what the author is trying to tell us.

Clash of the Creationists

When you hear the word “creationist” do you think of a person who believes the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago in six 24-hour days? Properly speaking, that person would be a Young Earth Creationist (YEC). There are actually Old Earth Creationists (OEC) who believe the earth was created millions – if not billions – of years ago. OECs can be further sub-divided based on belief in a global flood or whether humans were directly created by God. A handy chart can be found here.

Until 50 years ago, most Bible-believing Christians were OECs. The YEC movement is a fairly recent phenomenon. The father of the movement was a Seventh-Day Adventist named George McCready Price (1870-1963), but it is only since the 1960s that YEC views became the dominant doctrine among evangelicals. (A brief history of how that came to be can be found here.) Many Christians still hold one of the many variations of OEC, but they are nowhere near as vocal or visible as the YEC adherents.

So it’s not at all surprising that creationists of all stripes hold conflicting views on how to interpret the first two chapters of Genesis. In a previous article I discussed how inconsistencies between the two creation accounts in Gen 1 and Gen 2 revealed the work as coming from different authors. Those among the creationists who assert that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible deny this. The YECs assert that the second chapter is simply a more-detailed explanation of what happened on Day 6 of creation week. The OECs hold different opinions on how to interpret Gen 1 and its relation to Gen 2.

The inconsistencies between the two chapters have to do with when plants and animals were created. According to Gen 1, vegetation was created on Day 3 after dry land was made to appear, and the birds of the air and the fishes of the seas were created on Day 5. Yet, when the second creation account begins (Gen 2:5-7), we are told that there were no “plants of the field” (wild plants) or “herb of the field” (cultivated plants) because there had been neither rain (which is all the wild plants need) nor humans to work the earth (what the cultivated plants need).

Why does the second creation account say there are no plants if they were created on Day 3? The YEC explanation is that in Gen 1:11 all grasses and herbs and trees were created except for the “wild plants” and “cultivated grains.” Those types of plants couldn’t exist before the creation of humans because wild plants have thorns (and thorns were a product of God’s curse in Gen 3:18) and cultivated grains require irrigation.

There are problems with this explanation. The plain sense of the text says there were no plants at all, wild or cultivated, in the beginning. And part of the reason for that was YHWH God had not yet sent rain. This itself raises another question because the land was covered with water just three days before and now it is so dry that plants can’t grow? Anyhow, in this barren wasteland, YHWH God plants a garden with fruit trees as an oasis for his newly created human to live. But if, according to Gen 1:11, the earth was covered with green plants and fruit trees since Day 3, why create a garden at all when the human could have simply been moved to a more verdant site?

How do YECs explain the birds? Although Gen 1:20-21 recounts God creating the birds on Day 5, Gen 2:19 says that “YHWH God formed from the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the heaven” as possible companions for Adam. YECs resolve the contradiction by translating “formed” as “had formed”. That is, God had already formed the birds on Day 5 and the land animals earlier on Day 6 but he’s just presenting them now to Adam to be named and considered as possible companions.


"Adam Naming the Animals" by Jan Saenredam (c. 1565-1607)

There’s a bit of special pleading in the assertion that the Hebrew word for “formed” should be interpreted in this instance as “had formed.” Every major translation (KJV, RSV, NRSV, NAB, NEB, JPSV, NJB) translates the word as “formed” because the context doesn’t meet the criteria for translating it as “had formed.” Only the NIV translates “had formed” because the translators wanted the second creation story to harmonize with the first.

This quibbling on the obvious meaning of the words or their translations is a typical ploy by biblical literalists. They insist the Bible is inerrant and must be interpreted literally, but when two passages contradict each other, they will read them in such a way that they don’t contradict, even when it requires that you have to ignore the plain meaning of the text, read something into the text that isn’t there, or re-translate the text to mean what they need it to say.

The OECs, on the other hand, don’t have to resort to such contortions. Although asserting Mosaic authorship of all of Genesis, they can allow that Moses is using an analogy of six creation days to teach the theological basis of the Sabbath day rest and, therefore, would not view Gen 1 as a literal account of how creation happened. Interpreting the six days of creation as topical, instead of chronological, they can more easily harmonize the scriptures with the findings of science.

In the final analysis, an OEC interpretation of the meaning and intention of Gen 1-2 may not be all that different from that of a biblical scholar who attributes the chapters to different authors, but it will be wildly different from the YEC interpretation. And the YEC apologists will attack the OEC proponents with the same vigor they would use against a proponent of atheism such as Richard Dawkins. OECs try to reconcile conflicts between scripture and the sciences of astronomy, physics and geology (if maybe not biology), but when confronted with a conflict between the Bible and science, YECs will always choose the Bible and will twist their understanding of science “facts” to fit their biblical interpretation.

If nothing else, OECs prove that it is possible to believe that the scriptures are inspired, yet do not need to be taken literally. Cardinal Baronius – not Galileo – once said, “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Allow me to make a slight modification of that: Genesis 1 and 2 teach us why God created, but not how God created. The “how” is answered by science.

Lost in Translation

There’s an old Italian expression “traduttore, traditore” (“translator, traitor”), meaning that a bad translator can ruin a great piece of literature. When we look at the very familiar story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a lot of what we think we know about this story is wrong because of how the story has been traditionally translated.

For example, “everybody” knows that man was created first. When God saw that it wasn’t good for the man to be alone, he sought to create a helpmate for the man. God created animals and brought them to the man, but they would not do. So God removed a rib from the man and created a woman from it.

For centuries, many – mostly men – have used the story that “everybody” knows as evidence to support the conclusion that women were subordinate to men. First place is superior; last place is inferior. Women were an afterthought of God, created only as a “helper” to men. Because the woman was formed from a piece of the man, she was dependent on man for her existence.

Well, it turns out “everybody” is wrong. And misleading translations are partly to blame. Let’s look at the three translated terms I mentioned above in my synopsis: “the man”, “helpmate”, and “rib”.

Let’s start with the word translated as “man”. In Hebrew, the word ’adam is used to refer to a human being or collectively to humankind. The traditional King James translation of Gen 1:26 is “And God said, Let us make man (‘adam) in our image.” In English, the word “man” stands for the collective “mankind”. Someone reading or hearing the word “man” might think it is referring to a male human being, but the rest of the sentence “and let them have dominion…over all the earth” makes it clear “man” is referring to “mankind” or “humanity”, and that’s how recent translations handle it.

What happens when we get to Gen 2:7? The traditional translation is “And the Lord God formed man (ha’adam) of the dust of the ground (ha’adamah)” (KJV). We have two translation issues: 1) using “man” to translate ha’adam (ha is the definite article in Hebrew, “the”) and 2) losing the pun between ha’adam and ha’adamah. It gets even worse when the KJV (following the LXX and Vulgate) begins translating ha’adam as a proper name, “Adam”, in 2:19 and onwards. Modern translations will use “the man” throughout because, until the creation of woman, the text is obviously talking about one individual and not a collective. If we want to preserve a gender-neutral translation (like the original Hebrew) and retain the pun, we could translate this verse as “YHWH God formed the human from the humus” or, my favorite, “the earthling from the earth”.

The next problematic translation is “helpmate”. Actually, KVJ translates Gen 2:18: “I will make him an help meet for him.” The odd word combination “help meet” became corrupted into “helpmate”. “Meet” is an old way of saying suitable, fitting, or proper: “make him a help suitable for him”. Translating the word as “helper” in modern translations isn’t much better. “Helper” implies a subordinate or apprentice, but the Hebrew word refers to a companion of equal ability, a partner. The animals could certainly be “helpers”, but not “partners”.


Bartolo di Fredi's "Creation of Eve"

This brings us to the word translated “rib” in Gen 2:21: “and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh” (KJV). Almost every version translates the word as “rib” but every other use of the word in the OT refers to the “side” of something (like the side of the Ark of the Covenant). If translated as “took one of its sides and closed up its place with flesh”, it implies considerably more surgery than the simple removal of a bone; something big is removed from the original human/earthling that leaves it utterly transformed.

Departing from the traditional translations allow us to see the story in a different way. YHWH God forms the first human – not the first man – from the dust of the ground. YHWH God also formed birds and animals and brought them to the human, but none of them were a suitable companion. So YHWH God removed one of the sides from the creature and fashioned a woman and presented it to the man. Only after the woman is created does the Hebrew text use words exclusively referring to “woman” and “man”: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman (’ishshah), because she was taken out of Man (’ish)” (Gen 2:23, KJV). In a real sense, “man” and “woman” were created simultaneously when YHWH God performed his surgery.

The following interpretation is consistent with the Hebrew text: The earthling was created as a sexually undifferentiated creature. Corresponding to Gen 1 where God differentiated light from dark, upper from lower waters, and so on, here YHWH God is differentiating male and female from the original unsexed earth creature. The earthling was the prototype human; the man and woman are human version 2.0. When the man and woman are together, the original unity is restored and they can function as one; the two become “one flesh”. And, keep in mind, that “one flesh” is referring to the Hebrew idea of the undivided whole of a living being, not just the material aspect of a body/spirit duality as in Greek philosophy and contemporary thinking.


Could this be what pre-Eve Adam looked like?

While doing research on this, I discovered that this is not a crazy modern conjecture. Jewish midrash (rabbinic commentary on the Torah) considers the possibility that the first human was created with male and female sexual organs on each side of its body. Called the androgyne in scholarly literature, this creature was split in half to create the first man and the first woman. This was a way to reconcile Gen 1:27 that said “male and female God created them” with the account in Gen 2:21 of how YHWH God fashioned a woman from one of the man’s “sides”.

Whether this interpretation is close to what the author intended or wishful thinking, I can certainly agree with what Matthew Henry (1662-1714) wrote in his commentary on the Bible:

“The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.” 

A.D.: The Bible Will Not be Continued

The Bible, a 10-part mini-series was a big ratings success on The History Channel a couple of years ago. Produced by Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice, Shark Tank) and his wife, Roma Downey (Touched by an Angel), it led to a major motion picture, Son of Man, and now a 12-part series on NBC called A.D.: The Bible Continues. The series premiered on Easter Sunday to a respectable audience of 10 million viewers, but the audience declined each week and, by the season finale two weeks ago on Father's Day, the audience had dropped to less than half that of the premiere.

Mark Burnett -- who nowadays looks like an OT character with his Duck Dynasty beard -- had hoped that the new series would be like Game of Thrones and air for several seasons, premiering on Easter Sunday each year. But that was not to be. A couple of days ago, NBC announced that the program would not be renewed for a second season. Undaunted, Burnett and Downey say that they will continue the program on their new faith channel. But, if so, it will be with a different cast because the main actors were released from their contracts following NBC's cancellation of the series.

Roma Downey, Mark Burnett (and his beard)

I did not watch The History Channel's The Bible  mini-series, so I can't really compare A.D. to that. The Bible certainly sounds like something I would have been interested in, but the promos made it look like it would be all cheesy sets, fake beards and bad acting. The History Channel simply does not have the budget that one of the main networks does. There were lots of Bible movies that hit the high points like Noah and the Flood, Abraham, the Exodus, and so on. I've been down that road before and had no desire to waste my time on it unless it offered something new, or a different take on the material.

I decided to watch A.D.: The Bible Continues because the post-gospel material covered in Acts of the Apostles doesn't often get movie treatment. The only thing similar that I can recall was a 5-part mini-series, also called A.D., that aired 30 years ago. It was supposed to be the continuation of Franco Zeffirelli's 2-part Jesus of Nazareth (1977), but paled in comparison. While Jesus of Nazareth balanced reverence with believability, good production values and acting, the 1985 version of A.D. was rather amateurish by comparison. 1981's made-for-TV movie Peter and Paul was a similar misfire.

Actually, I thought A.D.: The Bible Continues would be a mini-series like The Bible was. I was expecting, therefore, that my time investment would be limited but, after two or three episodes, I realized that the pacing of the plot was going too slow to allow it to cover the entire Acts of the Apostles within the scope of a half-dozen or so episodes. And, apparently not finding the storylines in Acts compelling enough, the producers saw fit to introduce extraneous elements to provide dramatic conflict, such as the troubles Caiaphas and Pilate have with their wives or a Zealot attempt on Pilate's life that led to mass crucifixions.


Peter (Adam Levy) and Mary Magdalene (Chipo Chung). No Paul.

My wife's interest was a fairly good barometer of the show's flagging ratings. She watched the first few episodes with me and, I think, found them interesting. She's not as familiar with the contents of Acts as I am and seemed to be a member of the audience this program was trying to target. She would ask me if something that just happened was in the Bible. For the first couple of episodes, I was able to tell her it was. Then it was, "That wasn't in the Bible, but it could have been." At some point, she said, "You can watch it without me. If it is just making up stuff, I don't see any point in watching."

And there you have the problem with A.D.: The Bible Continues. The producers of the show don't understand who their intended audience is. True-blue Bible believers want a program that will portray the Bible as it was written. A.D.: The Bible Continues attempts to do that...sort of. If Acts says that an angel rolled the stone away from Jesus' tomb, then they will show an angel drop down from heaven like a meteor and roll away the stone. But then the producers start elaborating on what the Bible says by putting the Ethiopian eunuch (from Acts 8:27-39) in cahoots with the Zealots and, as a result, they lose the Christians who want to see fidelity to the Bible story. When creationist Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis finds your program unbelievable, you've really accomplished something.

I don't have a problem with a faith-based program deviating from the scriptures, just like I don't expect a movie to be exactly like the book. What plays on the written page doesn't necessarily translate to the screen, and vice versa. The program could have gone in a different direction by having a more character-driven narrative and downplaying the miracles. For example, it would have been interesting to show the interior journey that Saul took from being a persecutor of the early Church to its greatest evangelist. You could portray Saul being struck by lightning and, when he comes to, he relates his experience of encountering the resurrected Jesus. You don't have to literally show a glorified Jesus talking to him to get the point across. Such a program might not attract fundamentalists, but it might have appeal to people like my wife who aren't familiar with the post-gospel stories of the apostles.

What the producers chose to do instead was play it both ways. Re-enact the miracles as described in the Bible with cheesy special effects to get the Bible crowd while amping up the dramatic tension with over-the-top acting and a jaw-dropping nonchalance towards historical accuracy to appeal to those who are just looking for entertainment. The jump-the-shark moment for me was when the Emperor Tiberius decided to make a house call on Pilate in Jerusalem with his nephew Caligula in his entourage. Historically, Tiberius spent the last years of his life on his island of Capri. Even if he hadn't, the idea of an emperor of Rome personally making a journey all the way to Jerusalem to do a performance review on one of his governors is just ludicrous.

It continued to get worse once Caligula killed Tiberius and, upon becoming emperor, ordered his statue placed in the Jewish Temple. Caligula may have toyed with the idea according to Roman historians, but it never happened. So the final episode (appropriately titled "The Abomination") builds to a climactic confrontation between the Romans trying to place the statue in the Court of the Women and the Jewish Sanhedrin and Jesus' disciples, in a first-century act of civil disobedience, saying literally, "Over our dead bodies." If this were a fictional program like Game of Thrones, the episode might work as drama, but when you know the entire crisis never happened as part of history, it rings hollow.

On the positive side, I did appreciate the multi-ethnic cast. There were many black and brown faces to go along with the usual Caucasian actors you typically find in Bible movies. Probably due to Roma Downey's influence, female characters like Mary Magdalene, Pilate's wife Claudia, and Caiaphas' wife Leah had important roles throughout and weren't just background characters. The computer-generated views of the Temple really give you an idea of the grandeur of the structure and the sets and costumes looked well-done. There were a lot of fake beards and it was jarring to see actors like Richard Coyle (Jeff from BBC's Coupling) as Caiaphas and James Callis (Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica) as Herod Antipas, but overall, the "look" was right.

In conclusion, I'm not at all surprised that the series will not be renewed. Apparently, faith-based programming is popular in small doses, but there's not enough of an audience to pull in the kind of ratings that a major network like NBC expects. And if you depart too much from the Holy Scriptures to fill in narrative gaps or provide motivation for your characters, you lose a big chunk of the Bible-believing audience. Burnett and Downey get an "A" for effort but a "D" for execution.

"...in our image, after our likeness"

In my previous article, I discussed the use of the divine plural in Gen 1:26: “Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness…” Now I would like to examine what is meant by “in our image, after our likeness”.

As I discussed in the previous article, God is speaking to himself in this verse, so the image/likeness being discussed is God’s image/likeness. But the God of the OT is not supposed to have an image. In fact, there is a commandment expressly forbidding the creation of any images of God. How do we explain this seeming contradiction?

One theory that has been proposed is that humans resemble God in a way other than physical form: a spiritual quality (the soul), self-consciousness, intellect, or reason. This was a popular theory in early Christianity, operating under the Greek idea of a duality between body and spirit. Humans could not resemble God by virtue of our bodies – because God is pure spirit – but we are the image of God in terms of our spiritual nature. The problem with this theory is that the Hebrew understanding of human nature was unitary; body and spirit are one.

A clue to what the author intended can be found in the following verse, 1:27:

And God created the human in his image,
In the image of God he created it;
Male and female he created them.

Even in translation, there is a clear parallelism between “image of God” in line 2 and “male and female” in line 3. Are we supposed to interpret “male and female” as a metaphor for the image of God? Perhaps the relationship between men and women is analogous to the relationship between God and humanity. But if that is the case, then the image of God must be located in human interactions or in humanity as a whole and not in an individual man or woman.

Does a study of the words involved provide a clue? The word “image” (tselem) in the OT usually refers to a concrete, physical object, such as a statue or idol. “Likeness” (demut) has a more abstract meaning of “resemblance”. These words are used together (but in opposite order) in Gen 5:3: “[Adam] became the father of a son in his likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth.” The meaning here seems plain: as the son has a resemblance to the father, but is not identical to the father, humans have a resemblance to God but are not identical to God. There certainly does seem to be an implication that a physical resemblance is intended.

Taking this back to 1:26, we have already rejected the notion of a crude physical resemblance between God and human beings. We have also rejected the theory that humans resemble God in some spiritual fashion that does not involve our physical nature. Based on Gen 5:3, some have proposed that, just as Adam and Seth have a relationship, not just a physical resemblance, so do God and human beings. Following this interpretation, God creates a being with whom he can communicate, with whom he can have a relationship. But if this relationship is the “image of God” in which humans are created, that implies a relationship within the Godhead and we’re back to something like the Trinitarian interpretation. While that could be a valid interpretation for us today, it is certainly not what the ancient author intended.

Another proposal is simply translating the Hebrew differently. Instead of reading “let us make human beings in our image,” it should read “let us make human beings as our image.” In the ANE a king would set up a statue of himself and it was believed that statue had a spiritual link with the ruler it represents. Indeed, kings were sometimes referred to as “images” of the gods. Just as the gods ruled over heaven and earth, the king ruled over his kingdom. The king’s authority to rule came from the gods.


United Colors of Benetton ad (1998)

If this reading of the words is correct, it clears up a lot of the problems that we have struggled with in trying to understand the meaning behind being created "in the image of God”. The author of Genesis 1 is stating that God, the divine ruler, has created human beings – male and female – as his image, as his representatives on earth. In the next verse (1:28), God’s special blessing establishes human beings in a position of authority over the other creatures on the earth (“have dominion over” or “rule over”), much like a king’s relationship to his subjects. When Adam’s son Seth is born, his “image” is passed down to him just as the king’s royal authority is passed down to his son.


Benetton ad celebrating 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights

Specifying humans were created “male and female” has nothing to do with perpetuation of the species.  The other animals are given the charge to procreate, but are not designated as “male and female”. Humans are also given the charge to procreate, so the use of “male and female” is not related to their fertility but to the uniqueness of humankind and to how they image God. Men are images of God, sure, but so are women. Together, male and female are given dominion over nature, but not over each other. Male and female are created simultaneously, so there is no primacy of position, as there would be with a first-born. It is a very radical statement of equality between men and women.

In the Babylonian creation myths, humanity was created by the gods as slaves, to do the menial work the gods did not want to do. Just as with other aspects of Babylonian creation myths, the author of Genesis 1 is intentionally subverting those myths by asserting that humans were not created to be slaves, but were created by God to rule over the earth and the other creatures living on it. For the biblical author, it is not just the king who is created as God’s image, but all of humankind is created as God’s image.

In closing, I will leave you with a couple of verses (vv. 5-6) from Psalm 8. Psalm 8 is something of a biblical commentary on Genesis 1:1-2:3 and totally appropriate to wrap up our discussion:

Yet you have made them [human beings] a little lower than God,
And crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
You have put all things under their feet. (NRSV)