# Dan McClellan — Let US Make Man in OUR Image?!? **Summary.** A dedicated [[Dan McClellan]] video (YouTube, published/saved 2026-07-17) on the first-person plural of Genesis 1:26 — "let us make humanity in our image." McClellan rules out three popular readings (plural of majesty, the grammatical plurality of *Elohim*, the Trinity) and argues the majority critical position: God addresses the **divine council**, the other gods of the ancient Israelite / Northwest Semitic pantheon. Where the [[2026-07-02-mcclellan-image-of-god-divine-council|Dan McClellan — What Does It Mean to Be Created \"In God's Image\"?]] source treated the council as one sub-point inside a broader *imago Dei* argument, this source is the **focused treatment of the "us" question** — the negative case, the Ugaritic background, and the council's later trajectory into guardian angels. (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/Let US Make Man in OUR Image!|Let US Make Man in OUR Image!]]) --- ## The negative case (three readings ruled out) 1. **Not the plural of majesty / royal "we."** McClellan treats this as a category error for biblical Hebrew verbs of this type; most Hebraists hold the royal-we is unattested for first-person verbs in the Hebrew Bible (a minority still defends a "plural of self-deliberation"). (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Let US Make Man in OUR Image!|Let US Make Man in OUR Image!]]) 2. **Not *Elohim*'s grammatical plurality.** The clause opens with a **singular verb** — *vayyomer Elohim*, "God said" — so the noun's plural form is doing no work. The plurality sits only in the following cohortative, a first-person-plural volitional form ("let us make"). 3. **Not the Trinity.** Trinitarian doctrine develops from the late 2nd century CE onward; the text was composed in the late 6th or 5th century BCE, so author and audience could not have intended or heard it. God also self-refers in the singular repeatedly across the primeval history, so the plural here marks address to a group, not internal plurality. --- ## The positive case (the divine council) - A deliberative body of gods assisting in running the cosmos was a common conceptual framework in and around ancient Israel. The Hebrew Bible retains the seams: **Psalm 82** (the council of El), **Isaiah 6:8** ("who will go for *us*"), **Jeremiah 23:18** ("who has stood in the council of the LORD"), **Genesis 3:5, 3:22** ("like one of *us*"), **Genesis 6** (the *bene elohim*), **Genesis 11:7** ("let *us* go down" — another cohortative). (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/Let US Make Man in OUR Image!|Let US Make Man in OUR Image!]]) - **Grammar note.** A first-person plural command is unremarkable — "all right, let's go" among friends. It means the speaker is part of, and addressing, a group. - **Ugaritic background.** The Northwest Semitic pantheon has El as paterfamilias, his consort Athirat, and their 70 sons comprising the active deities — the council. This seeds the later Jewish tradition of 70 nations, 70 patron deities, and eventually 70 angelic princes. - **The monotheizing pivot.** Creation is *announced* to the council in 1:26 ("let us make"), but the narrative then has only the singular deity actually create (1:27, singular verbs). McClellan glosses this as the author guarding the creative act for the God of Israel alone — "the author does not want those other gods participating in the actual creation of humanity." The singular-verb observation is uncontroversial; the authorial-jealousy *motive* is his interpretation. --- > [!contradiction] Genesis 1:26 plural — Trinity vs. divine council > **Devotional/evangelical reading:** the plural shows Father, Son, and Spirit present at creation — the Trinity. **Critical reading (McClellan):** the plural is a vestige of the divine council, read anachronistically as the Trinity, a doctrine that postdates the text by ~700+ years. Both are preached from the same verse; they cannot both be the author's intent. This is the **second** wiki source to file the contradiction from this exact angle — see the matched callout in [[2026-07-02-mcclellan-image-of-god-divine-council|Dan McClellan — What Does It Mean to Be Created \"In God's Image\"?]]. --- ## Contested sub-claims (flagged for study) McClellan is careful to mark where he leaves consensus. The wiki records the ledger rather than flattening it: - **Deut 32:8–9 and a "second-tier" Yahweh.** On one reading, Elyon ("the Most High") divides the nations by the number of the "children of God," and Yahweh receives Israel as his allotted portion — making Yahweh a council member under a distinct high god, only later conflated with El. **McClellan explicitly says this "is still being debated,"** naming the late **Michael Heiser** (Yahweh and Elyon already identical) against **Mark S. Smith** and others (two-deity reading). He judges the data favor the earlier-stratum reading but marks it as his judgment. - **"Children of God" as the earlier reading of Deut 32:8** (so 4QDeut-j and the Septuagint, against the Masoretic "children of Israel") — near-consensus on text-critical grounds. - **"Us" = divine council** — majority critical view, though some evangelical scholars prefer a heavenly-host/angelic-court reading that keeps the addressees non-divine in the strong sense. > [!note] Tradition / source-caution > Academic critical scholarship (ANE comparative religion, history of Israelite religion, priestly authorship of Genesis 1). The auto-captions garble the Hebrew throughout — "va Elohim" for *vayyomer Elohim*, Athirat's name mangled — so quotations are taken from the analytical note, not the raw transcript. The video is a short-form explainer, not a peer-reviewed argument; it gestures at scholarship (Heiser, Smith) without full citation. A confessional reader can accept the historical-grammatical argument while holding a canonical/theological reading of divine plurality — those are different interpretive registers, and the video adjudicates only authorial intent. --- ## Why this matters for the wiki - **The divine-council concept candidate crosses threshold.** The [[2026-07-02-mcclellan-image-of-god-divine-council|Dan McClellan — What Does It Mean to Be Created \"In God's Image\"?]] page held a `concepts/divine-council.md` node "below threshold... one more focused source (or a directed pass) would justify" it. This *is* that focused source. Two dedicated treatments now do real interpretive work against Trinity proof-texting. **Recommended for creation in the next directed session** (deferred here per the automated-cycle envelope). - **Extends the [[Dan McClellan]] "developing monotheism" position** with the fullest single-source account of the council's trajectory — from Ugaritic 70-sons, through Judges 5:20 (stars as divine warriors) and Deut 4:19, to the astralized/demoted guardian angels of Daniel 10. - **Deconstruction relevance.** A textbook case of a heavily proof-texted verse ([[Deconstruction]]) whose "obvious" doctrinal reading is shown to be a later framework retrojected onto the text. --- ## Coverage note Same-day companion to [[2026-07-13-data-over-dogma-lean-not-proverbs-3-5|Data Over Dogma — Lean Not on Your Own Understanding (and Other Conversation-Enders)]] — the two McClellan sources ingested this cycle interlock on the *epistemology* of interpretation: this one dismantles a doctrinal reading on historical grounds; the podcast names the "you need the Spirit to understand it" defense as special pleading. Named-but-uningested: Michael Heiser, Mark S. Smith, W. Randall Garr.