You Are a Divine Image

One day, it was just a statue. The next, it was a god.

In ancient Babylon, a two-day ritual called the mīs pî (the “Washing of the Mouth”) was conducted to transform a carved block of wood or stone into a living deity. The statue’s mouth was opened so it could eat, drink, and breathe. Incantations were recited. A divine womb was constructed. And when it was over, the image was installed in its temple and given its first meal. Because gods need to eat.

Christians tend to dismiss this as superstition. Primitive people who didn’t know better. But there’s a possibility that should unsettle them: the authors of Genesis may have been doing the same thing.

Ask a Christian what it means to be made in the image of God and you’ll likely get a confident answer delivered with surprising vagueness. You’ll hear that humans are uniquely valuable, that we have dignity, that we’re different from animals in some important way. Press further — but what is the image, exactly? — and the conversation tends to soften into abstraction.

This is the failure of inheriting ideas from a tradition without understanding them.

Across centuries of theological debate, three main attempts have emerged to define the imago Dei. None of them have settled the question. And they fall short because the answer has been hiding somewhere else entirely.

In a 1971 article, John Piper observed that the common way theologians approach defining the content of the imago Dei is as follows:

First, determine from Scripture as many attributes of God as you can; second, determine all the attributes of man that distinguish him from the rest of the animals; third, determine which of these attributes are found in both lists, and in just these ways is man to be considered the image of God.1

We see this approach in the oldest and most influential perspective that scholars call the Substantial View. Augustine and Aquinas, two giants of Christian thought, argued that the image consists of inherent qualities humans share with God: rationality, morality, free will, an immortal soul. For Aquinas, it was humanity’s cognitive capacity above the animals that most clearly bore God’s likeness. “Man excels all animals by his reason and intelligence,” he wrote, “hence it is according to his intelligence and reason, which are incorporeal, that man is said to be according to the image of God.” The body, notably, had little to do with it.

This view has an intuitive appeal. It gives the image content, something you can point to and defend. But it runs into an immediate problem: Genesis doesn’t say any of this. The text doesn’t mention rationality, morality, or the soul. Aquinas is reading Greek philosophy into a Hebrew text and calling it exegesis.

This view asserts that because we can think like God, we must be His image. But this turns the imago Dei into an IQ test, and it misses the point entirely.

The 20th century pushed back with the Relational View, championed by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. On this account, the image isn’t a set of qualities you possess but a capacity for relationship with God and other humans. Humans reflect God’s relational nature as expressed in the Trinity, and that reflection is realized through community. Barth went further, arguing that the male-female partnership is essential to the imago. But Piper disagreed, finding nothing in the text to compel such a reading.

That last exchange is telling. Two of the most rigorous theological minds of the modern era, working from the same text, arriving at irreconcilable conclusion about something as fundamental as whether gender is constitutive of the image of God.

The Relational View has a deeper problem too: it still doesn’t explain the rhetorical work Christians ask the imago Dei to do. If the image consists of a capacity for relationship with God (something potential), it isn’t obvious why that means humans should be treated with dignity, or why violating a person violates something divine (something actual). The connection is assumed rather than argued.

Closer to the mark is what Old Testament scholars tend to prefer: the Functional View. Here the image is neither a quality nor a capacity, but a vocation: the role of steward and representative, exercising dominion over creation as God’s ambassador on earth. Helmut Thielicke, in his 1966 Theological Ethics, put it directly: the divine likeness “consists in this manifestation, in this exercise of dominion and lordship.” This view at least has the advantage of being textually grounded, unlike the previous two. Genesis does, immediately after introducing the imago, speak of dominion.

But even the Functional View, as typically construed, undersells what the text is doing. It frames humans as representatives, ambassadors who act on behalf of a God who is somewhere else. What it doesn’t tap into enough is the possibility that the image means something more radical than representation. That when Genesis says humans are made in the image of God, it means something closer to what the ancient world meant when it said the same thing about a statue — like an idol.

Three views, centuries of debate, and the concept remains frustratingly slippery in popular discourse. Worse, this is true even in churches, where substantive teaching on a doctrine as central as this ought to be expected. Invoked constantly, defined rarely, understood almost never. Which suggests that the people trying to define it may have been asking the question in the wrong language entirely.

To understand what the authors of Genesis meant by the image of God, you first have to understand what an image meant to the ancient world — and it meant something far stranger and more radical than we assume.

In ancient Babylon, images weren’t mere symbols, nor were they artistic representations pointing toward an absent deity the way a photograph points toward a person who isn’t in the room. They were thought to be something closer to extensions of the deity itself, vessels through which a god became genuinely, materially present in the world.

And to make that happen, you needed a ritual.

The mīs pî, or “Washing of the Mouth,” was a two-day ritual process for animating a cultic image (usually a statue or stele) with divine presence.

The process consisted of two main parts:

• the ceremonial washing of the mouth, which purified the image for contact with the deity, and

• the ceremonial opening of the mouth, which enabled the image to breathe, smell, eat, and drink.

On the first day, the image was placed in a garden or orchard beside a tamarisk (salt cedar) trough representing a “divine womb.” The trough was filled with gold, silver, oil, carnelian, and lapis lazuli — materials associated with the divine. The trough was also filled with water, representing “divine semen.”

The image then underwent a series of mouth washings with holy water, and was left with the trough to “gestate” overnight. The ritual texts aren’t being metaphorical here. The language is explicitly that of pregnancy and birth, suggesting that the people performing this believed something was being conceived.

On the second day, the “womb” trough was placed on a birthstone. A group of creator gods were petitioned to enable the image to the eat, hear, and breathe. Incantations were recited. The deity was made to enter the image and was considered born. After these rituals, the image was then carried to its temple and given its first meal.

At this point, something had fundamentally changed. What had been inert matter was now, in the eyes of everyone present, a self-propelled divine agent.2

But here’s where it gets philosophically interesting. The ritual had a problem: if humans made the statue, then the god inside it had human origins. But a real god can’t have human creators, right?

So to deny human craftsmanship, another ritual was included that was as elegant as it was strange: the artisan’s hands were symbolically amputated, often by binding them with a scarf, and he was made to declare before witnesses: “I swear I did not make the statue.”

Thus, the god couldn’t be accused of having human origins.

Think about what that means. An entire civilization developed an elaborate fiction, not to deceive anyone, but to protect the integrity of a theological idea. The divine cannot originate from the human. So the human’s role in creation had to be ceremonially erased. These people weren’t confused about reality. This is rigorous theology expressed in ritual rather than propositions.

Here is the problem the ancient mind had to solve: if a deity is infinite, omnipresent, and beyond material form, how do you actually interact with one?

You can’t bring offerings to an abstraction. You can’t petition something with no address. An invisible, disembodied god is theologically sound but practically useless. To act in the physical world, such a god needs a body.

So a solution was developed. The divine could be made present in a physical medium without being diminished or displaced. The god could be both everywhere and somewhere.

To a modern Western mind, this sounds like a contradiction. Either the deity is in the statue or it isn’t. Either the god is there or it’s somewhere else. We think of the self as a singular unit, contained and bounded. You are here, and not there.

But this was not the intuition of the ancient mind.

Many ancient and indigenous societies understood personhood as fundamentally dividual: a self composed of separable parts that can exist, be presented, or be genuinely present in multiple locations simultaneously. Your name, your shadow, your breath, your spirit. These weren’t symbolic representations of you. They were you, in a real and transferable sense.

A lock of hair given to someone, for instance, is a piece of your actual self, capable of carrying your presence into another context entirely. Or take the example of a king’s name carried by an ambassador, commanding respect and obedience as though the king were actually there.

The concept of communicable personhood may sound foreign, but consider how naturally we still think this way when we’re not being philosophical about it. A mother keeps her dead child’s blanket not because it reminds her of them, but because it still feels like them. Like their presence is somehow in it. We speak of someone’s spirit living on in a place, or in a person who carries their influence forward. We know rationally that these are metaphors. But we don’t entirely feel like they are. That gap between what we reflectively believe and what we intuitively experience is precisely the space the ancient world took seriously and built its theology inside of.

This is the framework Bible scholar Dan McClellan provides in his book YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach. Once inhabited by the deity through ritual, the image wasn’t a symbol pointing toward a god who was elsewhere. It was an extension of the deity’s self. A genuine outpost of divine presence in the material world. McClellan puts it this way: the ancient Mesopotamians were not primarily concerned with resolving the metaphysical mechanics of “how much” of the deity was in the statue vs. somewhere else. What mattered was the intuitive perception that divine agency was partible: capable of being divided and imparted into physical media without the original being diminished.

When something was a divine image, in the ancient mind, it was not merely a symbol representing a deity who was someplace else. It was thought to possess the deity’s agency, speaking and acting on their behalf, and bearing their presence in a real way.

The image was both the manifestation of the god and the representative agent of the god. When you looked at it, you were looking at the god. You were also looking at something that was not the same as the god. The ancient mind didn’t experience this as a contradiction requiring resolution. It experienced it as the nature of divinity — that the sacred could be simultaneously transcendent and concretely present, whole and distributed, itself and its extension.

A Hittite ritual text makes this explicit. Before a deity was transferred into a new temple, the incantation prescribed was: “Honored deity! Preserve your being, but divide your divinity! Come to that new house, too, and take yourself the honored place!”3 This suggests that the deity’s being can be maintained while divinity is imparted.

Which leads to McClellan’s most destabilizing insight: “deity” is a relational designation, not an ontological one. It doesn’t describe what something fundamentally is. It describes what power something possesses, what authority it holds, what agency it exercises over others. A ghost, a statue, a king, a human — if they perform the right functions, bear the right presence, exercise the right dominion, they can be classified as ‘ĕlōhîm. Gods, in the ancient world, were more of a status than a species.

This reframes everything. The question isn’t whether humans are God or merely made to resemble God. Rather, the question is whether humans bear divine presence, exercise divine agency, and manifest divine authority in the world. And that is precisely the question the authors of Genesis were answering.

If the mīs pî ritual tells us what a divine image does, the book of Genesis tells us what a divine image is. And to find that answer, Old Testament professor Catherine McDowell argues we need to start not with Genesis 1, but with Genesis 5.4

This is the list of the descendants of Adam. When God created humans, he made them in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and called them humans when they were created. When Adam had lived one hundred thirty years, he became the father of a son in his likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth.

— Genesis 5:1-3, NRSVue

As McDowell puts forth, the passage sets two relationships side by side: God creates humans in the likeness of God, and Adam fathers Seth in his own likeness. The parallel is deliberate. It’s telling you that the relationship between God and humanity is the same kind of relationship as the one between a father and his child. Not metaphorically. Humans are not merely modeled after God the way a sculpture is modeled after a subject. They are begotten of God. They are, in the most literal sense, of the “divine species”.

Not God, but gods.

Additionally, this has a direct implication that tends to make people uncomfortable: if humans are begotten of God, then the imago Dei is partly a claim about the human body. Not just the soul, not just the rational mind, not just the capacity for relationship — the body. McDowell points to P. Humbert’s close study of the Hebrew words for “image” and “likeness,” which argues that human likeness to God lies not in intellectual or moral capacities (contra Aquinas) but in physical resemblance.5 The early authors of the Hebrew Bible appear to have believed that God had some form of corporeality. That when they wrote about seeing God’s face, or God’s hand, or God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, they were not speaking entirely in metaphor.

This is where I would disagree with Aquinas. He dismissed the body as essentially irrelevant to the imago. He thought the image was located in the incorporeal intellect, the part of humanity that most resembled a disembodied divine mind. But that reading smuggles in a Platonic assumption the Hebrew text doesn’t share. The God of Genesis is not Plato’s unmoved mover. He is a God who breathes, walks, speaks, and gets his hands in the dust. And the creature he makes from that dust is made as his image — which means the dust matters.

So we have two pillars already: kinship and physical resemblance. But McDowell’s most compelling argument is what happens when you place the Genesis 1 & 2 directly beside the mīs pî ritual and look at them together.

These are structural, sequential, material parallels between a specific Babylonian ritual and a specific Hebrew creation narrative. The authors of Genesis were not writing in a vacuum. They were writing in a world saturated with the ideology of divine images, and they were making a claim within that world, using its language and logic, about what humanity is.

Apply that logic consistently and the implications are radical. Humanity doesn’t merely represent God the way an ambassador represents a foreign government. Humanity manifests God, bears his real presence, and exercises his actual authority. When you look at a human being, you are — in the same sense that an ancient Babylonian looked at an animated cult statue — looking at a genuine instantiation of the divine in the material world.

Humans are not merely made in the image of God. In some real sense, humanity is the image of God. It means humans are divine. We aren’t merely God’s portraits. We are his avatars.

And yet, just as the cult statue was not the deity itself, humans are not God. But when you look upon an ‘āḏām, you see both the human and God manifest in them, simultaneously. The human and the divine, present in the same body, inseparable and distinct. It’s a “mutual indwelling,” to use a theological term.

Genesis 1 frames this as kingship: made in God’s image to rule. Genesis 2 enacts it as animation: formed from dust, filled with divine breath, installed in a garden. Genesis 5 grounds it as kinship: begotten, not merely made, in the likeness of the one who made them.

Humans are God’s kin, God’s vice-regents, and the true cult statues meant to house His spirit.

Three angles on the same staggering claim. Not that humans are valuable because God made them. But that humans are, in some literal sense, the living presence of God in the world.

It’s also good to remember that while Genesis drew inspiration from its surrounding cultures, it was also a response to them. Understanding the real people, in real circumstances, with real stakes, illuminates the text and makes it more remarkable.

Scholars generally agree that Genesis is not a single document but a composite of sources written across several centuries. Genesis 2, likely the older of the two creation accounts, is attributed to what scholars call the “J” source, and is thought to have been written in the pre-exilic period, before the Babylonian conquest. It’s concerns are earthy and immediate. Why do we labor? Why is there suffering and shame? Why do humans pair bond?

Unlike the distant God of Genesis 1, the author of Genesis 2 portrays God as anthropomorphic. He walks in the garden, breathes directly into the nostrils of the human, and gets involved in the details of human life. The goal was to provide a sacred foundation for Israel’s cultural existence. A folk history that answered the questions a people ask about themselves when they want to understand who they are and where they came from.

Genesis 1 was written in an entirely different world.

By the 6th century BCE, the Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem, dismantled the Temple, and deported much Israel’s population. The people who had built their identity around a land, a king, and a sacrificial system suddenly had none of those things. Into that circumstance, the “Priestly” author (or authors) wrote the opening chapter of what we now call the Bible.

The message was subversive. Where the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, described the world as born from the body of a slain chaos monster, Genesis 1 describes creation as effortless, ordered, and serene. God speaks, and things come into being. There is no violence, no struggle. There is only a sovereign voice imposing structure on a formless void. For a people whose entire world had just collapsed into chaos, this was a psychological lifeline.

But the more radical move in Genesis 1 is the one we’ve been building toward this entire essay.

In Babylonian culture (as well as in Egyptian), only one person bore the image of God: the king. He alone was the divine representative on earth, the singular point where heavenly and human authority converged.

The Priestly author decided to democratize that concept completely.

Not the king, but every human. All of them made in the image of God. All of them royal. All of them bearing divine presence and authority in the world.

Some scholars, including McDowell, have argued that this universalism is evidence the text was written pre-Exile. An Exilic author surrounded by Babylonians would never have extended divine-image status to their oppressors. But I think this misreads the subversive logic of the claim. They were trying to dismantle the Babylonian ideology of the king’s unique divine status. Common laborers were as royal in God’s eyes as Nebuchadnezzar on his throne. No king held a monopoly on the divine.

And there was a deeper comfort embedded in the claim. If Israel’s God was the creator and sovereign of the entire world, even over Babylon, then the Exile wasn’t evidence that the pagan gods had won.

This is the context in which the imago Dei was written. Not as a piece of systematic theology to be debated by future theologians, but as an act of defiance by a displaced people who needed to believe.

So that’s how I’ve come to understand the imago Dei on its own terms.

The authors of Genesis were writing inside an ideological tradition of divine images. A tradition that stretched across Babylon, Egypt, and the Hittite world, and that had developed a sophisticated theology of how the divine could be genuinely present in a physical medium. When they wrote that God formed the ‘āḏām from dust, breathed life into its nostrils, installed it in a garden, and gave it dominion over creation, they were deploying the logic of that tradition deliberately. A human is the only legitimate statue of God, created by God Himself and not human hands, animated by His breath, and installed in His temple. We don’t need to make statues to manifest God. We are the manifestation.

The implications are more radical than the Christian tradition has generally been willing to admit.

The Functional View — humanity’s role in dominion and stewardship — gets closest to what the text actually says. But even it undersells the claim. Representatives act on behalf of someone elsewhere. On the other hand, divine images manifest the one they bear. Rather than pointing toward God, they presence him. More than an ambassador, the ‘āḏām is an extension of God in the material world. The ‘āḏām bears the divine presence, acts in God’s name, and constitutes the image itself, not just being made in it.

The Substantial and Relational view, for all their sophistication, are not grounded in the text. They are Greco-Roman ideas applied to a Hebrew text by theologians who didn’t have access to the world that produced it. Rationality, morality, the immortal soul, the capacity for relationship — these are Platonic and Aristotelian categories imposed on a text that was asking an entirely different kind of question. If you hold these views, you’re welcome to. But you should know that you’re doing so on the authority of the church, not on the authority of the text itself.

The corporeality of God is a related casualty of the same process. The Hebrew authors appear to have believed that God had some form of bodily presence. The breath, the hands, the walking in the garden, the face that Moses couldn’t see without dying. The idea of God as a purely incorporeal, invisible spirit is a later development, shaped by Platonic thought.

But here is what I find most worth sitting with.

If you think this Ancient Near Eastern perspective can’t be taken seriously because it’s too reliant on nebulous intuitions and lacks grounding in systematic theology (and it does), you must realize that many today do the same as well.

The concept of the imago Dei has become one of the most rhetorically productive ideas in Western moral discourse. It’s invoked to argue against murder, abortion, the death penalty, for human dignity, for universal rights. It does enormous work in Christian ethical reasoning. And almost none of the people invoking it can tell you what it actually means.

Ask why humans shouldn’t be killed, and you’ll hear: because they’re made in the image of God. Ask what that means, and the answer softens: they’re valuable, they’re unique, they have inherent dignity. Ask why the image of God confers dignity, and the conversation fizzles into speculation.

This isn’t a criticism unique to Christianity. It’s a description of how moral intuitions actually work. We feel the wrongness of killing a person with an immediacy and force that precedes any argument we could construct to justify it. The imago Dei functions as a theological container for that intuition, a way of giving it reflective grounding and rhetorical authority. Of course, that’s not nothing. Intuitions that have survived millennia of human experience are not to be dismissed simply because they resist systematic justification.

But we should be honest about what we’re doing. We are, in this respect, not so different from the ancient Babylonian priests who developed an elaborate ritual to handle the uncomfortable fact that a god’s statue had been made by human hands. They knew the problem. They built a ceremony around it. They bound the artisan’s hands and had him swear he hadn’t made what everyone had watched him make. The ideological intuition that the divine cannot originate from the merely human was too important to abandon. So they protected it with symbolism and called it resolved.

We do the same. We invoke the image of God with the confidence of people who know what it means, build ethical systems on top of it, and defend those systems with sophisticated philosophical apparatuses — all while the foundational concept remains, under examination, misunderstood.

The difference is that the Babylonians acknowledged the constructed nature of religious meaning. They just didn’t think that made it less true. Meanwhile, we’ve developed complex theoretical systems of thought to cover it up and convince ourselves otherwise.

In this way, perhaps the Babylonians actually had a more honest relationship with their beliefs than we do.