We ARE the image of God, in His cosmic temple – that’s what the point is in Genesis 1: YHWH-Elohim built His own temple, and placed us in it as His image.
Basing a point on a preposition in a translation is poor theology.
Not in the OT they aren’t – they are elohim, and “elohim” never refers to humans (well, at least living ones – there’s one exception in the case of a dead one).
Only after the final resurrection will we be Yahweh’s heavenly council – Paul says we “will” judge angels, not that we already do.
Not quite, or not in a strict sense. The problem is that there is no way to translate from the Hebrew to any western language without suffering an unwitting category shift; elohim gets rendered as god(s), but unless you go back to Homeric times in Greece the concepts just don’t line up (old Greek mythology aligns astoundingly with ANE views). To illustrate, all angels are elohim, but not all elohim are angels, and that’s true of first century BC/CE as well as today (it was in those centuries espeially that “angel” went from denoting a function [to which some elohim were assigned, but not all] to denoting a type of being).
But elohim other than Yahweh were considered to be entities that He created at least as far back as the united monarchy, and not all elohim were part of the divine council per se.
This is something I wish I’d tackled in grad school, but if I’d tried to delve into everything of interest I’d still be there . . . .
Well duh.
Ancient Hebrew had no “royal we” – it wasn’t part of their linguistic conceptualization. To put it another way, they had no “plural of majesty” – it just isn’t there. “Let us” as it is in the text is one entity addressing other entities.
They belong to the category “heavens” in “heavens and earth”. That would make them probably as old as the universe.
Excellent reference.
Hardly – the “host of heaven”, an ANE term for the stars, are in the OT worldview part of the ranks of elohim. If we go with the literal identification of every star with an elohim, then the location ID of elohim here extends at least 38 billion light years.
FCOL don’t you get anything other than your certitude?
Lighten up for God’s sake!
I think that is the whole point.
people here sem to take me more serious than I do myself. so that their derision backfires.
In truth you should have remembered your little psychoanalysis.
However,
Playing Devil’s advocate is a two edged sword, as can be humour.
Ad hominum is still not a valid argument, whether I am being deadly serious or flippant. The argument still stand on its merit, not on who, or how it is presented. I can laugh of the insults, but that does not mean they were not intended to hurt or discredit.
And by the time we get to Jesus, the divine council is gone.
Not older? So they’re created per universe? From forever?
So our archangels, Lucifer, Gabriel, Michael, and all the lesser angels cover all the billions of inhabited worlds, past and present? They are demiurgical? There’s only one Satan?
Ah, so each inhabited star system gets its own elohim angelic host? And at least one always goes to the bad and corrupts a large minority?
Although I don’t personally hold to the day-age interpretation or concordism in general, since the Hebrew word used for day in Genesis 1 can also just mean a longer, indefinite period of time, wouldn’t it be simpler to just say that the days of creation were really ages of varying duration without trying to make them the same length?
