Question about the OT...

[varkam]

No, not "The OC". But the Old Testament might make for a good TV show...

So anyway, I'm brushing up on my Old Testament and I ran into a couple interesting passages...

Genesis 1:26 "And then God said 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...'".

Genesis 3:22 "'See! The man has become like one of us, knowing what is good and what is bad!'"

What gives with the us and our?

[NMMNG]

1. Hey, I guessed right!

It's the Trinity thingie.

Question: "Why does God refer to Himself in the plural in Genesis 1:26 and 3:22?"



Answer: Genesis 1:26 says, “Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.'” Genesis 3:22 states, "And the LORD God said, 'The man has now become like one of us...'" There are other Scriptures in the Old Testament that refer to God using the plural. It is also interesting to note that "Elohim," one of the primary titles of God in the Old Testament (occurring over 2500 times), is in the plural.



What does this mean? Does this mean that there are multiple Gods? Who is God talking to in these Scriptures? First, we can rule out polytheism (belief in multiple gods), because that would contradict countless other Scriptures that tell us that God is one and that there is only one God. A second possible explanation is that God was referring to the angels by saying "us" and "our." We do not believe this is correct as the Bible nowhere states that angels have the same "image" or "likeness" as God (see Genesis 1:26). That description is given to humanity alone.



Since the Bible, and the New Testament especially, presents God as a Trinity (three Persons but only one God), Genesis 1:26 and 3:22 likely represent a conversation within the Trinity. God the Father is having a "conversation" with God the Son and/or God the Holy Spirit. The Old Testament "hints" at the "plurality" of God, and the New Testament clarifies this "plurality" with the doctrine of the Trinity. Obviously, there is no way we can fully understand how this works – but a finite human being should not expect to be able to understand an infinite God (Romans 11:34-36).

http://www.gotquestions.org/God-plural.html


I'm surprised that I, a finite human (and atheist no less) was able to figure that out.


Edit to add link

[varkam]

3. But...but....but....

Moses, who wrote the first five books, had no concept of the "Holy Trinity". The "Holy Trinity" was a concept that was first introduced at the council of Nicea...so what gives?

[NMMNG]

7. Didn't you read what I posted?

Obviously, there is no way we can fully understand how this works – but a finite human being should not expect to be able to understand an infinite God (Romans 11:34-36).


Who are you to question how Moses knew about the Holy Trinity before it was introduced at the council of Nicea? He just did!

[varkam]

9. Oh right.

Who am I to question? I'll just remove my frontal lobe right now.

[charlie]

2. Angels

Or speaking as the Trinity.

[Kutjara]

4. It's likely that the 'our' in the bible is the same as the royal 'we'.

Monarchs refer to themselves in the first person plural, because they are supposed to be the embodiment of the nation. The King James version of the Bible applied this practice to the ultimate king: God. We've carried on the tradition ever since.

[varkam]

8. Not using the King James version...

Using the Catholic Parish edition - which is directly from the Greek Pntateuch, which is seperate from the Protestant bibles which are from the Hebrew text.

[Kutjara]

10. Interesting...

...so the 'We' and 'Us' might well be from two different sources in the two Bible traditions.

Or maybe the Monarchical 'we' may simply be an extention of the Divine 'we' (the king being God's representative on earth and therefore, presumably, part of the 'godhead').

[varkam]

11. Could very well be...

I think the "royalty" explanation is the best I've heard thus far - it certainly beats out the Holy Trinity and polytheism (at least insofar as the rest of J-C scripture kind of rules out polytheism)

[greekspeak]

12. STOP!!!! You are making my head hurt

The Hebrew is plural. I repeat..the HEBREW IS PLURAL! The royal we thing is one possiblity. ANother possibility is that he is talking with the "heavenly host," all those wacky beings in Heaven who come down and do whatever whenever God wants them to. Or, it could be poor editing when the story was lifted from one of the more polytheistic cultures, and the "we" are other gods.

Speculation and confusion has helped bolster things like the concept of the trinity, or the fact that Jesus always existed.

And the Trinity was made official doctrine at Nicea, but it did not just jump full form out of Constantine's head like some sort of tri-partite Athena. It was there, had been developing, but was officially adopted at Nicea. Almost zero chance that any writer in the bible, even "John" the Gospel writer, whose Christology was highest, had any idea what a trinity was.

[TechBear_Seattle]

23. Hebrew doesn't have a "royal we"

In Hebrew, the plural means "more than two." (There is also a dual, indicating "twoness.") And those passages use the plural.

The traditional Christian interpretation is that God is speaking about Himself as the Trinity. Jewish tradition holds that God is speaking to include Himself and the angels who aided Him with creation.

[bananas]

5. Alien Overlords

[Dogmudgeon]

6. Plurals as status markers

In many languages, even in English, use the the plural is a way of distinguishing people from royalty, nobility, or other hauteur. Its pronoun is sometimes called "The Royal 'We'".

It was that way in ancient Hebrew, a.k.a. Aramaic.

The word in question was Elohim, which translates directly to "Gods", but in the Torachic context means "God Almighty". A calque -- an inelegent translation -- could also lead to "His Majesty, God".

Remember when Queen What's-'er-name (Victoria?) said "We are not amused" -- ?

Same thing.

--p!

[Meshuga]

13. You have to take into consideration the fact...

...that you are asking about a translation from Hebrew. There are several translations from the original Hebrew and translations often change the context. The original text states that ALL HUMAN BEINGS (men and women) are made "b’tzelem Elohim" – in the Divine image. There is no "us" or "our".

Someone mention that this translation you posted speaks of the holy trinity and that goes to show how you can translate and change the context of the original scripture to explain a new religion - in this case, Christianity.

[Igel]

21. b'tsalmenu

-enu ... ~ "our". Certainly plural. But then again, it's exactly what we'd expect, since the subject of the clause is plural.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

14. The translation

royalty uses the plural form when talking of itself. Since God was considered the Supreme Royalty at the time of the KJV of the Bible, the royal form was used. Check out the same verse in Hebrew, and I bet it doesn't translate that way.

[Schema Thing]

15. The writer of Genesis believed in many gods

I don't believe the oldest text really says "God" does it, but rather "el" or somesuch, speaking of a specific god, or possibly the collective group of gods?

[Schema Thing]

16. Oops, make that "writers" (plural)

There were 2 different writers whose stories were cut and pasted together to form Genesis and other early books.

[okasha]

17. There are four different sources in Genesis

There is the southern "J" source, so called because he uses "Yahweh" ("Jehovah") as the divine name; the northern "E" source that uses "Elohim" (pl.); "P," the "Priestly" source, who has affinities with the Deuteronomist writer(s); and "R," the "Redactor," who stitched it all together.

[Schema Thing]

19. Thanks for the further knowledge

I am an ex-Jehovah's Witness, and I'm curious if you believe that "Jehovah" is a very good attempt at translating the tetragrameton? Now that I'm out, I'm doubtful of it's legitimacy. At best it seems to be on far too shaky ground to be the cornerstone (actually more like a talisman) of a religion.

[okasha]

20. RE "Jehovah"

No, it's really not the best way to deal with the tetragrammaton. It was a good first try for 19th. century German scholars, though. They would have pronounced the J as Y and the W sound in the current transliteration as V. They also apparently followed the then-current Egyptological model of inserting a vowel between any two consonants and so wound up with an extra syllable. In light of better and more recent evidence, though, there's no good linguistic or orthographical reason to cling to the form.

[Ready4Change]

18. There's not much in the Bible that denies that other gods exist.

It just says they are "false" and that you should only worship the one "true" God.

[Igel]

22. There's the ahistorical idea of the Trinity

(believe it or not, there are Xian groups that do not accept the idea of the Trinity).

There's the idea it was mindlessly parroted from whatever (older) sources the final editor had, and some of them might not have been monotheistic. A lot of assumptions in the "Bible must be late" were based on the lack of writing in and around Palestine in and before 1000 BC. State of the art, 1840, but not now; there are much older inscriptions and texts in related languages.

There's the 'plural of majesty' view: a lot of languages have plurality indicating distance from the speaker. But IIRC there's no other good example of this in the OT, so no improvement, really, over the ahistorical trinitarian view.

There's the truly minority view (these days) that Jesus was picking up on this when he said said no man had seen the father, and he had come to reveal him. The Xianity-based Gnostics made much of this comment and strain of thought, and decided that the OT god was a demiurge, an inferior kind of being, maybe malicious or maybe not. Lots of Gnosticisms out there. Mainstream views have this as being allegory or poetic language.

A few groups have decided that John wasn't engaging in flights of metaphorical fancy when he wrote that the Word was with God in the beginning, was the actual creator, and later became flesh and walked among them. And they point back to this: at the beginning, there was a plurality (they'd argue 'duality'), and then the second person strictly vanished. Until, of course, the NT, when suddenly there was an unknown Father being revealed by Jesus--plausibly not Yahweh. (I think I once saw an argument that the Massoretes had mispointed a dual as a plural, or some such claim. Perhaps somebody who actually knows Biblical Hebrew could say if this is reasonable, given the consonantism of the text.)