Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26-27
This passage uses a plural for God and refers to the image of God as male and female (likely a remnant of when it was a divine couple before the reforms, but still).
True, but Genesis also says that humans were made to tend the Garden of Eden, so others argue, based on that and a few other passages, that humans are supposed to care for the Earth.
As usual, the Bible can be interpreted any way you want it to. You can use it to defend murder and use it to condemn murder. The same book.
The royal ‘we’ develops later on, likely in part because of the Bible.
And yes, there are references to ‘he’ or ‘Father’ but it’s important to keep in mind (a) Hebrew is a binary gendered language with no neutral ‘Parent’ as an option, and (b) there’s extensive evidence of revisionist misogyny in the Old Testament where you go from a woman prophet leading the Israelites to a “Queen Mother” being deposed and major religious reforms that include banning the worship of the women for their goddess who was evidenced as married to Yahweh before those reforms.
This is pretty academic in my opinion. Modern Jews and Christians view their god as a ‘he’ regardless of what it says in an archaic version of Hebrew.
It reminds me of the ‘was there a real Jesus’ debate. It doesn’t matter beyond an academic discussion. The Jesus Christians worship was a literal god who performed miracles and came back from the dead. He was a fiction.
Yes, it’s true that many, many people believe very strongly in the fictions that arose around the realities that the academic cuts closer to.
But reality matters.
I’m sure we might agree that it would be absurd to say that the stories of Homer, because of how they are treasured by audiences in their own right, should invalidate the importance of better learning the historical realities on which they drew.
There was a history. That history is not what was canonized in the Torah. It was not what was canonized in the New Testament.
And at least to me, that history is much, much more interesting than the fantasies and propaganda which eroded it.
It will not change anyone’s beliefs. Faith is belief in the face of evidence, not because of it. Telling believers that “actually, in Genesis, God is referred to as both male and female” will not matter one bit to them because that’s not the god they believe in and it will never be the god they believe in.
It’s not necessarily for them. They aren’t the center of the universe, even if they believe it to be so.
Other people who care about evidence and history and reality might be interested in the fact that originally there was a claimed prophet and leader of the Israelites who was a woman named ‘bee’ around the time there was an apiary in Tel Rehov importing queen bees from Anatolia as the only honey production in “the land of milk and honey” where inside the apiary was one of the earliest four horned altars (later appearing as an Israelite altar feature) dedicated to a goddess for example.
I could care less if an Orthodox conservative religious person believes that’s true or not. Archeology tells us unequivocally that the apiary and altar were true, and that’s valuable context for untangling the folk history that was being reshaped by later hands.
I mean, no update needed:
This passage uses a plural for God and refers to the image of God as male and female (likely a remnant of when it was a divine couple before the reforms, but still).
This “dominition over other living beings” thing is an antique mindset that caused so much damage to the environment.
True, but Genesis also says that humans were made to tend the Garden of Eden, so others argue, based on that and a few other passages, that humans are supposed to care for the Earth.
As usual, the Bible can be interpreted any way you want it to. You can use it to defend murder and use it to condemn murder. The same book.
Or it can be interpreted as the royal “we.” Regardless, he’s called “he” pretty much everywhere else afterwards.
The royal ‘we’ develops later on, likely in part because of the Bible.
And yes, there are references to ‘he’ or ‘Father’ but it’s important to keep in mind (a) Hebrew is a binary gendered language with no neutral ‘Parent’ as an option, and (b) there’s extensive evidence of revisionist misogyny in the Old Testament where you go from a woman prophet leading the Israelites to a “Queen Mother” being deposed and major religious reforms that include banning the worship of the women for their goddess who was evidenced as married to Yahweh before those reforms.
This is pretty academic in my opinion. Modern Jews and Christians view their god as a ‘he’ regardless of what it says in an archaic version of Hebrew.
It reminds me of the ‘was there a real Jesus’ debate. It doesn’t matter beyond an academic discussion. The Jesus Christians worship was a literal god who performed miracles and came back from the dead. He was a fiction.
The academic matters.
Arguably more than the fiction.
Yes, it’s true that many, many people believe very strongly in the fictions that arose around the realities that the academic cuts closer to.
But reality matters.
I’m sure we might agree that it would be absurd to say that the stories of Homer, because of how they are treasured by audiences in their own right, should invalidate the importance of better learning the historical realities on which they drew.
There was a history. That history is not what was canonized in the Torah. It was not what was canonized in the New Testament.
And at least to me, that history is much, much more interesting than the fantasies and propaganda which eroded it.
It will not change anyone’s beliefs. Faith is belief in the face of evidence, not because of it. Telling believers that “actually, in Genesis, God is referred to as both male and female” will not matter one bit to them because that’s not the god they believe in and it will never be the god they believe in.
It’s not necessarily for them. They aren’t the center of the universe, even if they believe it to be so.
Other people who care about evidence and history and reality might be interested in the fact that originally there was a claimed prophet and leader of the Israelites who was a woman named ‘bee’ around the time there was an apiary in Tel Rehov importing queen bees from Anatolia as the only honey production in “the land of milk and honey” where inside the apiary was one of the earliest four horned altars (later appearing as an Israelite altar feature) dedicated to a goddess for example.
I could care less if an Orthodox conservative religious person believes that’s true or not. Archeology tells us unequivocally that the apiary and altar were true, and that’s valuable context for untangling the folk history that was being reshaped by later hands.
Yes, that’s what I was saying, it’s academic.
And as I said, the academic matters.