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I thought I had a brilliant insight, but it turned out that it was nothing new. Still, it may be worth sharing.
I was attending a lecture by Peter Machinist, the Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard, when the idea occurred to me. Peter was giving a paper on “Kingship and Divinity in Imperial Assyria” at a scholarly colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Judaic Studies, to which I had been graciously invited. A handout contained 13 cuneiform inscriptions that reflected the nature of the king’s relationship to the divine.
In several of the examples, the ruler was described as divine and as the son of divine parents. Here is Ashurbanipal proclaiming his divinity: “I Ashurbanipal…Great seed of Baltil, [bo]rn at Nineveh, formed in the [Emashmash]…I knew neither human father nor mother.”
Here is a divine being describing the earthly ruler Esarhaddon:
“I am your mother and father. I raised you between my wings; I will see your success. Have no fear, Esarhaddon! I will place you between my arm and my forearm.”
Another text proclaims the ruler is of “the flesh of the gods,” having come from “the womb of the gods…Enlil raised him like a natural father, after his firstborn son.”
In a number of cases, the Mesopotamian ruler is described as being in the “image” of the god. I looked at the Akkadian, helpfully transcribed from the cuneiform: The word for image was sa-lam. In one case, the ruler was declared to be in the “image of Enlil”; in another, in the “image of Bel”; in still another, in the “image of Marduk.” Each of these examples used the word sa-lam.
Suddenly, despite my limited Hebrew, I recalled the Hebrew b’tselem Elohim. Mankind was made “in the image of God,” b’tselem Elohim (Genesis 9:6; see also Genesis 1:26–28). The Hebrew tselem and the Akkadian sa-lam were cognates, the same word in different languages.
Here was the same word in the Hebrew Bible that was used in Mesopotamian texts—except that in the Hebrew Bible it was applied not just to the king but to all mankind. Here was the democratization of that most powerful of metaphors, expressing all peoples’ relationship to the divine, not just royalty’s. Whatever it meant to be made in the image of God (a subject on which books could easily be written), it was a characteristic that was shared by all humanity. The ancient Israelites may have gotten the idea from elsewhere, but they applied it to everyone, making every human soul a participant in the godly.
Well, I came back to write it up and did a little research. I was right, but my “discovery” was by no means new. Here is Nahum Sarna in his magisterial commentary on Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), stating it better than I could: “Without doubt, the terminology employed in Genesis 1:26 is derived from regal vocabulary [in other cultures], which serves to elevate the king above the ordinary run of men. In the Bible this idea has become democratized. All human beings are created ‘in the image of God’; each person bears the stamp of royalty.”
Indeed, in Egypt, too, this metaphor was employed—but again, only with respect to royalty. For example, the name Tutankhamun means “the living image of (the god) Amun.” As Edward Curtis expressed it in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (under “Image of God”), “The Israelites would have taken great delight in affirming that the pharaoh, as magnificent and impressive as he may have been, was not the one who rightly deserved the title ‘image of god’; rather, all persons as the special creatures of God are made in/as His image…The image of God terminology clearly affirms the pre-eminent position of humanity in the created order and declares the dignity and worth of man and woman as the special creations of God.”1
I thought I had a brilliant insight, but it turned out that it was nothing new. Still, it may be worth sharing.
