Coming from a Quaker college as I do, and thus immersed in a Quaker sense of equality-that is, an understanding that we all share a spark of God or the Holy Spirit in each of us, it is eye opening to me, a scholar of early Jewish texts, to find that the early rabbis did not make great use of this notion of human universality that seems so natural to us today. How easy to start any conversation about shared humanity with the idea that we all share in the Image of God. But the early rabbis lived in a very different world than ours; their spiritual, economic, national, cultural, and political world had recently been destroyed—by other humans. So they understood their primary job as rebuilding their decimated community and creating new means of survival in this new world order where as a minority, they were occasionally oppressed and lacked a coherent center upon which to focus their spirituality and communal needs. In this situation, it is not surprising that the rabbis did not focus on the Universal within humanity, but rather felt the need to rebuild a new working paradigm inwardly focused on the people of Israel, on their survival, and particularly on placing the newly emerging rabbinic community at its center.

Torah, as the symbol for, as well as the contents of, their special covenant with God, proved more essential for that purpose than a universalizing human trait such as the “image of God” in all of us. Thus we find relatively little discussion of this concept in the early rabbinic material. Moreover, as a biblical concept tzelem elohim (image of God) is also a rarity, for it can only be found in Genesis; it is not a concept the rest of the Torah or the bible develops. Thus the rabbis had little to go by, as well as little incentive to find precedence. It should not be surprising then that what appears is random and disconnected. One cannot say that these rabbis created any one theory of what the “image of God” meant to them. Rather, as is true for many rabbinic concepts, a multiplicity of discussions, discourses, and ideas float throughout the rabbinic corpus. There is at least one trajectory of rabbinic thought that links God’s image to the body, sexuality, and the creative process of human reproduction.

The concept of the Image and Likeness of God appears several times in Genesis. In the creation story, chapter one: “Let us make Adam in our image and likeness…and God created the Adam in God’s image, in God’s image God created it, male and female God created them;” in chapter 5: “When God created Adam, God made it in the likeness of God, male and female God created them,” and finally in chapter 9, where we are reminded again, that human blood should not be spilled because: “in God’s image did God make humankind.” The question always arises to readers of these passages, what is that image? What part of the Adam is in the image of God, and what part of God reflects through God’s human creation?

One strand of rabbinic thought claims the human body is in the image of a divine body; in Leviticus Rabbah, for instance, we find this story:

In this story the famous first century rabbi Hillel the Elder claims that going to the bath house to wash his body is the equivalent of taking care of God’s body, since his human body is made in the image of God’s body, as the statue is in the image of the king’s body. Therefore, it is something in the human body that humans share with God. Other texts go on to discuss this anthropomorphic understanding and suggest that while the image is indeed embodied, the form of the bodies are not the same: God does not have a body that looks like the human body, but a divine body surely exists, in some other form—perhaps unknowable to humans.[2]

Other rabbinic stories note that rabbis avoided the public (Roman) bath house because of the statues of Roman gods that stood about them. But at base we learn from at least one rabbi that it is religiously incumbent on the human to care for his body because it is in the image of God’s body. I hesitate to universalize the human body from this story, as by and large the rabbis write of an exclusively male community. Yet, the maleness of God’s body is seen in another midrash. This rabbinic passage makes a parallel between the specifically male, circumcised rabbinic body and the first Adam’s body—which was created already circumcised. In the tannaitic midrash, Avot de Rabbi Natan, we read: “Adam too was born circumcised, for it is written, God created man in His own image (Gen 1.27)”.[3] With no other proof (but the list of other biblical worthies who were born without foreskins) these rabbis make an association between circumcision and being created in God’s image—obviously if Adam’s circumcised body is in the image of God’s body, then God’s body is also circumcised, thus making the male, Jewish body the most like God’s body among all other humans. This cuts out the female, and the non- Jew as well.

Yet bodily imagery is not the only way to think through this divine resemblance. Another rabbinic trajectory utilized the image as a means of social and environmental control. One way to read the issue of divine image is to think of the placement of the declaration within the narrative. God creates animals, God commands them to be fertile and increase. As creatures they are beholden to their creator, but with this creation, the creator must tend to this new creation. At this point in the narrative we are told of God’s thought process for the first time.[4] Here the narration pauses, and God thinks out loud: maybe it would be better to create another type of creature, one more God-like, but still of the animal world, to tend to the rest of the animals. For that seems to be the textual import of “Let us make Adam in our image, and they will rule over the animals!” Humanity’s purpose in creation is to tend to the other parts of creation as God’s managers. In this role male and female are both created—the image they share with God is hierarchical—they are higher than the animals, but God is higher still. They are to the animals (overlords) as God is to humans (Lord). To share in God’s image is to be deputized to share in God’s earthly work.

This reading provides an access to some rabbis to use the two creation stories as one—to uphold a patriarchal system of male predominance. The second creation story in Genesis 2 is a corrective on the first, that is to say it is not that male and female were created as equal partners in managing God’s world, but rather as the man (Adam) was created to be a helper to God, the female was created to be a “help mate” to the male. This reading we find in Genesis Rabbah:

Anyone reading the first few chapters of Genesis comes upon a glaring contradiction concerning the creation of men and women and the issue of divine image. In the first (and third retelling in chap. 5) male and female humans appear to have been created simultaneously in God’s image, and put on earth to tend to it and the animal inhabitants. The second story, however, suggests that the female’s creation is secondary or derivative from the male’s. So what to do? Judith Baskin argues that although the biblical text provides proof-texts two to one in favor of a male and female creation in God’s image, the rabbis purposefully read these passages through the lens of Gen 2:22 where the woman is separated out of the man in a subsidiary or derivative creation.[6] Thus they can claim (in order to eliminate contradictions in the narratives), that Adam Rishon, the Adam of Gen 1:27, was one being, with both male and female characteristics (an androgyne or hermaphrodite). Only in the second story is the female taken out of the male.

Nonetheless, the rabbis, Baskin argues, perceive the first creature as essentially male, and only this creature was created in God’s image. Thus the rabbis understand their God-given dominance over women. Moreover, the image of God is not a shared human characteristic, but rather a scale with a hierarchy of access and obligation. While I think Baskin would like to accuse the rabbis of arguing that women are essentially less human than men, I think it would be better to argue that they felt a need to confirm apparent hierarchies of dominance among God’s creation, without going the philosophical distance to measures of humanness as we might today.

If, in the first analogy, we have God is to humans (lord) as humans are to animals (overlords), the rabbis add in another subdivision, men are to women (husband and helpmate).Yet even within this midrashic trajectory we can detect an ambivalence to the whole idea of hierarchy. In the Babylonian Talmud we find the following passage: "It is written, “And God created man in his own image,” and it is written, “Male and female created He them.” How is this [to be understood]? [In this way:] In the beginning it was the intention [of God] to create two [human beings], and in the end [only] one [human being] was created."[7]

There is a problem of grammar here. The text reads: God created the Adam in God’s image, in God’s image God created HIM; male and female God created THEM. How many beings did God create? One male, ADAM, or two Adamim, one male one female? Rather than reading “adam” as a classification (“humans”, like "sheep") as we might, they read it as a singular male being. Yet they clearly realize that it still takes two reproduce—so what to do with that female mentioned in the same verse? They decide that God at first intended to make two adamim—male and female—but at the last minute changed course.

Nevertheless, in another midrash the rabbis do acknowledge each human being’s uniqueness and direct relationship to God (even as this passage is also written in gendered language, it can be read inclusively rather than exclusively; Hebrew is a gendered language). For the human stamps many coins with the one seal, and they are all like one another; but the King of kings, the Holy blessed one, has stamped every Adam with the seal of the Adam Rishon, yet not one of them is like his fellow. Therefore, everyone must say, “For my sake was the world created.”[8]

This midrash comes in a series of statements about ADAM’s singleness, not as a single male human, but that the first Adam/human was created as a single unit (male and female in one), as we read above, but for other didactic purposes: First, because the world was created as a single unit, so too the first Adam. Thus if one should kill another adam/human, one has killed a whole world, and if one should preserve the life of another adam/human, a whole world has been preserved. Second, if God created more than one family of Adam—then people would fight over the primacy of their own family clan. Nevertheless, despite the fact that all humans are descended from the same first Adam, each one is unique—and that is the magic of the tzelem of God. Even though here it is the hotem/stamp (or seal) of the first human on all the rest, it is that stamp that he bequeaths to his descendants. For if we read all of Genesis chapter five together we will see that the first Adam, male and female, was created in God’s likeness, and then Adam begets Seth “in his likeness after his image.” If Adam is created in God’s image, Seth is created in the image of his father. The stamp that the first Adam passes on to all his descendants is the divine stamp pressed into him by God. Moreover, the midrash ends with the statement: "Therefore everyone must say, “For my sake was the world created.”" If we understand that the reverse is really true, that humans were created for taking care of the world, then each human individually must understand the divine image as his or her God-given obligation to the world, because the world was created for humans to take care of.

Yet another way of reading these creation stories is to focus on the purposes for having male and female humans: reproduction. Sexuality becomes intricately involved in what it means to be in God’s image in these rabbinic texts. For sexual reproduction and the image of God are written or spoken of in connecting passages: male and female, in God’s image, be fruitful and multiply. Order and placement of words mattered to rabbinic interpretation. Again in the Babylonian Talmud we read:

In Genesis 9 we learn: “Whoever sheds the blood of an Adam, by an Adam shall his blood be shed; for in God’s image did God make Adam.” In this biblical text there is a linkage between murder, human life, and God’s image. The act of murder should be repaid with retributive murder for the life of a human is God’s image (Life is God). In this minimalist case, to preserve life, e.g. to refrain from murder, is to preserve life and God’s image. The rabbis take this passage one step further (by reading the next passage commanding fertility among humans): to create new life is to perpetuate the image of God and even further, to refrain from creating new life equates to murder—diminishing the image of God. In this sense the image of God is truly shared across humanity—one cannot tap into it alone—but only in association with other humans. This passage ends curiously with Rabbi Ben Azzai’s colleagues both complementing him for his spirited interpretation, but criticizing him for not following through on his own dictum (Ben Azzai was a bachelor). Ben Azzai’s answer suggests two things: one, that he is the exception that proves the rule (most rabbis married and had children, as this very dictum dictates), but also that Azzai’s true love, Torah, that which is the basis for the above dicta, is a wily lover. Ben Azzai clearly found it impossible for him, at least, to be fully engaged with the study of Torah, and to be in a procreative marriage. While this tension remains alive to the rabbis throughout their writings, most rabbis firmly come down on the side of obligatory marriage—particularly for men. That is, they make marriage a religious obligation for men (their patriarchal assumption being that women want to get married anyways, but some men, to wit Ben Azzai, might doubt its necessity). Moreover it is to this opening passage of Genesis: “be fertile and increase” that these rabbis turn again and again for support and directive. Another way the rabbis read “in our image and after our likeness” as related to sexuality and reproduction is through the following statement: "Rather “Et Adonai” [with the Lord] [Gen 4.1] [teaches thus]: In the past Adam was created from dust and Eve was created from Adam; but henceforth it shall be In our image, after our likeness (1. 26); neither man without woman nor woman without man, and neither of them without the Shechinah."[10]

Playing on the language Eve uses to describe the birth of Cain in Ch. 4.1: kaniti ish et adonai, “I acquired a man through/with the Lord”, the rabbis ask what does the “et” refer to and then decide that Eve must be saying in essence, “with the help of God, and my husband, I have given birth to a son.” But the proof text brought to support this argument is from Gen 1.26 : “in our image and after our likeness” thus suggesting that the very act of fruitful sexual congress between a man and a woman is the moment when humans can share in the image of God.

This indeed is a hefty legacy to carry into the modern age, the direct link between heterosexual and fruitful marriage and living in God’s image. For those engaged in fruitful relationships it can be uplifting to know that all that seems burdensome now (diapers, carpools, doctors bills) is all part of the package of living a life in God’s image—bringing new life into the world and parenting it from childhood to adulthood. But the reality of our world is that not all humans live in companionship, and/or chose not to be parents (or are prevented from so doing). Can they not be included in this rabbinic community of God?

Both Rachel Adler and Aviva Zornberg give us ways to read these stories, and their rabbinic interpretive legacy, in more expansive modes. On the one hand, God’s “presence” in the bedroom at the moment of human conception points to humanity’s participation in the ongoing creation process that God began in Genesis (and now hands over to his final creation, humans), but the emphasis is on creative process. I am an adoptive parent; my third child was not born of my flesh, but that does not mean I am any less involved in the process of creating a “mensch” out of my son. On the other hand, as Rachel Adler suggests, we should also read the sexual creative process as an allegory, not just about creating life. If the narrative teaches us that it is our sexuality, our ability to create life in an intentional way, that differentiates us from the animals, that we have desire, that we experience joy in the process, then that delight, intention and creativity is how we are similar to God, who also delighted in the creative process (“it was good”); all creative processes, art, writing, building, etc. are also in the image of God.[11]

Aviva Zornberg also emphasizes that our very human understanding of sexuality is what differentiates us from the animals, and connects us to God. We have sexual desire and we know what that means—it comes with all sorts of baggage and limitations—but it is the ultimate understanding that the desire to connect with another human being in a meaningful, deeper than just physical, way is what connects us to God. This is our image of God—the part of us that makes us human and not just animal. Thus for Zornberg, to live in singleness in isolation from human companionship/community is not to live in God’s image. Only the angels can be individually whole as individuals—they do not need companionship—nor are they commanded to have companionship—even as they tend to hang out in myriads.[12] Even God, Zornberg argues, compromises the divine unity, or singleness, by creating humans. The King of kings, ruler of the universe, cannot be king without subjects. Therefore the modern rabbinic Jew understands God’s image to be that creative and connective process that brings us together as vital and productive human communities.

Notes

About the author

Naomi Koltun-Fromm wrote one article for this publication.

Naomi Koltun-Fromm was born and raised in Rochester NY. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford in history and Jewish Studies in 1993. Several of her graduate and post-graduate years were spent in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University. Dr. Koltun-Fromm was Director of Jewish Studies at Tulane University for two years before joining the Haverford College faculty with her husband in a joint position in the Department of Religion. Professor Koltun-Fromm specializes in Late Ancient Jewish history, Jewish and Christian relations, religious polemics, comparative biblical exegesis, rabbinic culture and the Syriac speaking churches. She recently published a book, Hermeneutics of Holiness: Ancient Jewish and Christian Notions of Sexuality and Religious Community which traces the nexus of sexuality and holiness from the biblical texts into the fourth century rabbinic and patristic writings. Her present research focuses on the representation of Jerusalem in early Jewish, Christian and Muslim writings.

• Blog