7. Image

Dear children

So what is this God like?

Who is like you? Many are like you with regard to your age. Many are of like skin colour or hair colour. No one has the same finger print or retinal image (the inside of your eye). Only one is like you as a brother. But you two are not identical and even if you were identical twins, you would not be the same. There are so many ways in which you each are unique, and like each human, your depths are unfathomable.

And there is no description available for any of us as to our thoughts and our history and our potential. In these ways you are like God, unknown, and always unknowable, each of you becoming who you already are more and more fully as you grow. You will become what you will become. What choices will you make? What disciplines will you pursue? To what end will you be called? 

You will be known, but always in part. You will be known among others also as part of a team, perhaps a soccer team or a track team or an orchestra or a choir. And so much is learned by everyone who is part of such a team that it too can only be known in part.

In that first chapter of Genesis, God says as much about you as he does about each of us and all of us together in teams.

And God said, Let us construct humanity in our image according to our likeness, and let them rule among the fish of the sea and among the fowl of the heavens and among the cattle and in all the earth and among every creeper that creeps upon the earth.

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

When I translate the Bible, I am stuck in English, just as Hebrew is stuck, with the third person pronouns that read him or her, or he or she, or his or hers. Hebrew uses prefixes and suffixes for person and number. When there is one form for both genders, the prefix or suffix may assume that the male stands for both male and female. 

It's very curious with God in this sentence, because the Hebrew verb is singular and does not agree with the plural form of god. The aleph in alohim carries an e vowel and sounds like Elohim. The suffix -im is a plural. The verb vibra (roughly pronounced vəyibəra) is singular.

vi/bra, and created singular
aloh\im God plural
at-h/adm the human singular
b/xlm\o in his image. singular
b/xlm In the image of singular
aloh\im God plural
bra he created singular
aot\o  it singular,
zcr male singular generic
u/nqb\h and female singular generic
bra he created singular
aot\m them plural.

God is both plural and singular, both many and one in this verse, much as a team of hockey players play as one, or a choir of singers sing as one. God's voice is sometimes heard as the voice of many waters, singular and plural, male and female, neither exclusively nor separately alone, but together. 

And each of us has what we culturally imagine as masculine and feminine characteristics, e.g. tenderness and strength, whether we are boys or girls. And this unknowable combination is in us, as it is in God. We are singular and plural, and male and female, and like God, both individual and a team. So the text uses both singular and plural for the act of our creation. God created both the unity, it, and the diversity, them. [Nothing is written here about how. And we are still in the process of being created.]

You will note that God says "in our image according to our likeness" but creates only "in the image". Is it perhaps part of our being to become like God in God's likeness? You can see here too our role is to rule. We do this. And sometimes we do it very well, but also we fail as I have noted before. What character should we develop that we may grow into the likeness of God? What is God really like? I'll start with this: God cares for others. And God cares for us.

My favorite bit of Shakespeare is from The Merchant of Venice. (We must get Shakespeare into the puzzle eventually). Our power, our rule, is to be compassionate, even as God is compassionate. To be merciful even as God is merciful.

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.

The first two chapters of Genesis are as far as many people ever get in the reading of the Bible. But if we even read this first chapter, we will know something of each of the seven days of creation in the first poetic story, and making all time present today, we can learn from each of the seven days. We learn in our own lives from emptiness and disorder (like your bedroom sometimes) to light, and we learn from examining the mysteries of the heavens with our telescopes, and in doing so we see further and further back in time, making the past present to our eyes, and we learn from the evolution of the life of the sea and the land, and even to ourselves. All seven days run concurrently and the final day of rest remains to be known in full. (We'll come back to this too).

You might want to try reading the puzzle I gave you in the third letter. It also tells you what God is like.

till the next letter ...