20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Imago Dei

Il11ago Dei Joseph Dan "AdGod said: 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ... )" (Gen. 1:26). This verse is one of the most perplexing in the Hebrew Bible; Jewish commentators, from ancient times to the present, did their best to resolve the theological problems it presented. At the same time, it is difficult to find in the Bible a verse more pregnant with profound meaning, serving philosophers , mystics, and theologians as an ancient authority and source for their ideas. The uniqueness of this verse is the result of the unusual way in which it defines the relationship between God and man. It does not deal with a certain group of men or with any religiOUS context dependent on man's deeds; its subject is man in the most general terms, referring to humanity more as a potential than as an actual existence. On the one hand it is vague, and the relationship described in it cannot be precisely defined; on the other hand it is sufficiently clear to denote an absolute intimacy between man and God, to a degree not usually expected in a religious context. Therefore , one is not surprised to find that this verse served as the basis for Jewish understanding of the nature of God and his relationship to man in a variety 474 IMAGO DEI of ways, reflecting the deepest spiritual drives and religious sensibility of countless generations of Jewish thinkers. This essay will deal primarily with one aspect of this verse, an aspect that has been central to the development of Jewish concepts of man and God: the transformation of the problem of anthropomorphic descriptions of God into the source of Jewish mystical symbolism concerning the nature of the godhead itself and the impact of this transformation on human religious behavior. In ancient Hebrew rabbinic texts the main problem discussed concerning Genesis 1:26 is the plural language that God used when referring to the creation of man. Most of the sayings that tradition has preserved for us from this period are intended to defend Jewish monotheism from any doubt that may spring from the plural usage of the passage, "Let us create man in our image.', Yet there are indications that the anthropomorphic consequences of the literal understanding of this verse were clear to the ancient rabbis, who apparently were not disturbed by them. It seems that ancient Judaism was able to accept an image of God that bore resemblance to the image of man without its basic theological monism being threatened. One may even suspect that this verse facilitated the development of anthropomorphic interpretations of other verses, even when the literal meaning of the biblical passages did not demand it. The most outstanding example of such a process can be found in a second -century phenomenon that first appeared, in all probability, in the school of Rabbi Akiva: the understanding of the descriptions of the Lover in the Song of Songs as a divine self-portrait. From this school we have the first observations that disclose that the author of this biblical book was not King Solomon (Shlomo) but rather "The King of Peace" (Shalom), God himself ; that the Song of Songs is the holiest book in the Bible; and that it was not "written" but "given" to the people of Israel in the same way that the Torah was "given," either when they miraculously crossed the Red Sea or as a part of the theophany on Mount Sinai. This attitude does not appear to be directly connected to the later allegorization of the Song of Songs as the story of the relationship between God and knesset Yisrael; rather, it should be understood as a stage in the development of the Shiur Komah, a mystical text of the talmudic period, and the central part of the ancient Heikhalot mysticism. The Shiur Komah (literally, the measurement of the Height of the Creator, although actually it means imago Dei) was regarded in the Middle Ages as the worst and most embarrassing example of ancient Jewish anthropomorphism . Jewish philosophers did everything they could to cast doubt on IMAGO DEI 475 its authenticity or to explain away its anthropomorphism. Yet if we examine this text in its historical background, it represents a denial of the literal meaning of imago Dei and the beginning of the process that turned this concept into a central one in the mystical structure of the relationship between...