who is God talking to here? (user search)
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  who is God talking to here? (search mode)
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Author Topic: who is God talking to here?  (Read 4105 times)
anvi
anvikshiki
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« on: February 12, 2009, 10:57:19 PM »

One thing that might help answer this is to look at the next two verses after Genesis 1:26 while keeping something about the grammatical form of the the Hebrew word for God, elohim, in mind.  I think all these things indicate that, in this case, we are talking about a Hebrew Royal We.

"And God said: Let us make man in our image after our likeness...
So God created a man in his own image, in the image of God he created him."
from Gen 1:26-7 ff.

The generic Hebrew word used for God here is elohim, which is composed of the stem "el" and the singular "eloah" and a plural ending "im".  In a technical sense then, elohim is a noun in a plural form, and in some places in the Hebrew Bible it is used to refer to the false "gods" of non-Jews (for example, in Exodus 20:3 "you shall have no other gods (elohim) before me," Psalms 96:4-5 "he is to be feared beyond all gods (elohim), nothingness, all the gods (elohim) of the nation," Pslams 97:7 "Shame on them who...worship images, take pride in their idols, bow down as he passes, all you gods (elohim)" ).  But, when it is used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to the one true God, even though it is a grammatical plural noun, it takes singluar verbs, note the singular verb in the beginning of Genesis 1:26 above, "And God said (elohim amer).  Notice also that after God says in Gen 1:26, "let us make man in our image..." the next several verses, starting with 1:27 attribute the creation of man to God and no one else, as in "So God created man..."  These verses following 1:26 show that, despite the fact that God says in 1:26 "Let us...in our image," human beings were made by God and God alone, it was not a collaborative effort.  This usage follows the very first words of the Bible in Hebrew, bresh**t bara elohim "In the beginiing, created (bara as a singular verb, not the plural bar'u) God (elohim)...".  Now, grammatical plural nouns are often used in the Bible to express a superlative quality or an essence of the noun, as in the title of the book "Song of Songs" (shir ha-shirim) which does not mean "a song about other songs" but "the greatest song," the "song like no other song,"  I think that, grammatically at least, elohim, when it refers to the one true God in the Hebrew Bible, can be translated as "the Divinity" or "the Godhead," but not understood in a polytheistic or a trinitarian sense (ancient Jewish authors would not have conceived of God as a trinity) , but in a sense of consumate divinity or divine essence  All this, at least in terms of the Hebrew grammar of the verse, leads me to believe that the plural words "us" and "our" in 1:26 are used in what is called the voluntative mood, which is often used in both Hebrew and English expressions when a person talks to themself, saying "let's play some football" or "let's take a vacation" or when a person living alone, claiming ownership of his home says to himself "this is our house!"  This is the Hebrew version of the Royal We usage.  In Genisis 1:26, I think that God is talking to himself.
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anvi
anvikshiki
YaBB God
*****
Posts: 4,400
Netherlands


« Reply #1 on: February 13, 2009, 12:14:47 AM »

Yamor, I brought up these two issues because in Gen 1:26, it looks like God is addressing someone else when he says "let us make man in our image," but the next several verses claim that God did the creating by himself, and no one else is said by the text to be present in the scene, no angels are in the text during the creation narrative of the first six days and they make no appearance in this creation story, which, it looks to me, runs from 1:1 to 2:4.  So, one thing to look at, I thought, was the term elohim, which is a grammatical plural noun, and since the grammatical plural elohim is used as a plural in other passages in the Bible, I wanted to rule out any reading that would suggest that "gods" or "divine beings" were conducting the creation in a cooperative effort or as a result of conferring with one another, or that any different personages within God (as in for instance, Trinitarian theology) were speaking with one another.  So, with no angels mentioned in the narrative, and with no pluralistic conception of the divine being suggested by the term elohim, I was trying to eliminate possibilities.  If there is no one else present then, it seemed to me that God was speaking to himself. 

But after writing the post earlier, I looked at James Martin's "Davidson's Introductory Hebrew Grammar" and found that the mood of the words "us" and our" is not really voluntative but cohortative, and so it does suggest that God is giving a sort of imperative command to those present with him.  So, the verse does suggest that God is talking to someone else, but the text itself doesn't tell us whom he is talking to.

Sorry, my mistake.     
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