What Is the 'Image of God'? Reading Genesis 1:26–27 Through Ancient Near Eastern Kingship

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27, ESV). When theologians ask what “image of God” means, two answers have dominated Christian tradition: a substantive answer (the image lies in human attributes like reason, free will, or moral capacity that resemble God’s) and a relational answer (the image is constituted by the human being’s relationship to God, following Karl Barth). Both answers have deep roots in the tradition.

Over the last several decades, however, research in ancient Near Eastern languages and literature has pointed toward a third reading — one grounded not in systematic theology but in what the word tselem actually meant in the world where Genesis was written.

Mbzt · Top register of the Code of Hammurabi stele, c. 1754 BCE · CC BY 3.0 · Louvre Museum, Paris. King Hammurabi receives the law from the sun-god Shamash — a visual expression of the ancient Near Eastern ideology that the king was the god’s representative and image on earth.

What Tselem Meant in the Ancient Near East

The Hebrew word rendered “image” in Genesis 1:26–27 is tselem (צֶלֶם). Its Akkadian cognate is salmu, which means “statue” or “likeness.” In Mesopotamia and Egypt, the term was used in a specific and important way: the king was called the “image” (tselem/salmu) of the deity. This was not primarily a statement about physical resemblance. It was a claim about function and representation.

The king was the deity’s representative on earth — the one through whom the god governed his realm. To reinforce this, kings throughout the ancient Near East would install their own statues (tselem/salmu) in the territories they controlled, as far away as their campaigns reached. The king’s statue in a region meant the king’s authority was present there. The statue functioned as a stand-in for the absent sovereign.

J. Richard Middleton assembled this evidence systematically in his 2005 monograph The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1, drawing on Assyrian royal inscriptions, Egyptian texts about the pharaoh as image of the gods, and the comparative Semitic linguistics of the relevant vocabulary. Middleton argues that the author of Genesis 1 deliberately employed this royal ideology vocabulary, and that the phrase tselem elohim (image of God) would have carried those associations for its earliest readers.

The Radical Move Genesis Makes

Here is where Genesis does something the ancient world had not seen: it applies this royal language not to a single king but to all human beings.

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth’” (Gen 1:26, ESV). The “man” here is adam (אָדָם) in its collective sense — humanity as a whole, as the next verse confirms by specifying “male and female he created them.”

In every ancient Near Eastern society, the king was the image of the deity; everyone else was not. Power flowed downward from the divine-royal apex through a rigid hierarchy. Genesis collapses that hierarchy in a single declaration: every human being, not just the king, bears the image of the God who rules the cosmos. Every person is appointed as God’s representative, authorized to exercise dominion over the rest of creation on God’s behalf.

Middleton calls this the “democratization of royal ideology.” The vocabulary of divine kingship is taken from the palace and given to the common human being. A farmer, a slave, a woman — each of them bears the image that the kings of Mesopotamia and Egypt reserved for themselves alone.

Why This Reading Matters

The practical implications of this move are considerable. If all humans are image-bearers of God, then no human being can be treated as a mere object, a possession, or a means to another person’s ends. The ancient world built its economic and social order on precisely such arrangements. Genesis 1 does not abolish those arrangements directly, but it establishes a theological foundation from which the abolition of slavery, the equal dignity of women, and the illegitimacy of exploitation can eventually be derived.

This is also why the image-of-God language in Genesis 9:6 grounds the prohibition against murder — human blood must not be shed because the human being is God’s image. An attack on a human being is an attack on the divine representative, and by extension, on the divine sovereign.

The Three Readings Revisited

Recognizing the ANE royal background of tselem does not require abandoning the substantive or relational readings wholesale. The functional-representative interpretation now dominates academic Old Testament scholarship, and there are good reasons for it — the linguistic and cultural evidence is strong. But Middleton himself, and most scholars who follow the functional reading, acknowledge that the three interpretive streams are not mutually exclusive. A king who functions as the god’s representative typically also resembles the god in certain ways (substantive dimension) and exists in a defined relationship to the god (relational dimension).

The historical point about tselem and ANE royal language is the one that has most consistently been missing from popular and pastoral treatments of Genesis 1. Reading the verse with this background in view opens a different set of questions — not just what humans are but what humans are appointed to do, and what it means that God chose to govern creation through representatives who bear his image.

References

• J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Brazos Press, 2005)
• Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Commentary (Augsburg Publishing House, 1984), pp. 147–158
• John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (IVP Academic, 2009)
• Genesis 1:26–27, Masoretic Text; Hebrew tselem (צֶלֶם) and Akkadian salmu comparative lexicography

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