Let US Make Man in OUR Image?!?  🔗 **Source:** [Let US Make Man in OUR Image?!?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38hJgc4mPrU) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: [divine-council, biblical-hebrew, genesis, ancient-near-east, hebrew-bible-scholarship, trinity-doctrine] > author: Dan McClellan > source: Dan McClellan (YouTube) > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38hJgc4mPrU > date created: {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} {{time:HH:mm}} > --- > # 🏷️ Title: Let US make man in OUR image?!? > ## 🧭 Table of Contents > - [📝 Summary](#-summary) > - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) > - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) > - [📚 References](#-references) > - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) > - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) > - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) > - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) > - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) > - [❓ Questions](#-questions) > - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) > - [💡 Implications](#-implications) > - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) > - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) > - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) > - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) > - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) > - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) > ### 🔗 References > - [Video: Let US make man in OUR image?!?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38hJgc4mPrU) > - Genesis 1:26–27; Genesis 3:5, 22; Genesis 6:1–4; Genesis 11:7 > - Psalm 82; Isaiah 6:8; Jeremiah 23:18; Deuteronomy 32:8–9; Deuteronomy 4:19; Judges 5:20; Daniel 10:13, 20–21 > ## 📝 Summary > - What happened: Dan McClellan (scholar of Bible and religion; PhD, University of Exeter) explains the first-person plural in Genesis 1:26 ("Let us make humanity in our image"). He rules out the plural of majesty, the grammatical plurality of Elohim, and the Trinity, and argues the mainstream critical position: God addresses the divine council — the other gods of the ancient Israelite/Northwest Semitic pantheon. > - Why it matters: Genesis 1:26 is one of the most frequently proof-texted verses in Christian theology. The video models a data-over-dogma method — dating the text (late 6th/5th c. BCE), reading the Hebrew grammar (singular verb + cohortative), and situating the verse in its Ugaritic-adjacent conceptual world rather than in later doctrinal frameworks. > - Key stakeholders: Bible students and teachers who inherit the "Trinity in Genesis 1" reading; scholars of Israelite religion; anyone tracing how patron deities became guardian angels. > - Risks and tradeoffs: The divine council reading is genuinely the majority critical view, but two sub-claims McClellan builds on it (Yahweh originally second-tier under Elyon in Deut 32:8–9; the redactional "jealousy" motive in Gen 1:27) are contested, and he flags the first himself. A confessional reader can accept the historical-grammatical argument while still holding a canonical/theological reading of divine plurality — those are different interpretive registers. > - Bottom line: In its original context, "us" in Genesis 1:26 most plausibly means the gods of the divine council, with the God of Israel presiding; the Trinity reading is anachronistic as an account of authorial meaning, whatever its standing as later theological interpretation. > ## 📖 Main Content > - The question: who is the "us" when God says "Let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness"? > - Negative case first. McClellan eliminates three popular answers: > - Not the plural of majesty / royal we. He treats this as a category error for biblical Hebrew verbs of this type (most Hebraists agree the royal-we is unattested for first-person verbs in the Hebrew Bible, though a minority still defends a plural of self-deliberation). > - Not Elohim's grammatical plurality. The clause opens with a singular verb (vayyomer Elohim, "God said" — the auto-caption garbles this as "va Elohim"), so the noun's grammatically plural form is doing no work here. The plural sits in the following cohortative — a first-person plural volitional form ("let us make"). > - Not the Trinity. Trinitarian doctrine develops as a conceptual framework from the late 2nd century CE onward; the text was composed in the late 6th or 5th century BCE. Author and audience could not have intended or heard it. He also notes God self-refers in the singular repeatedly in the primeval history, so the plural here marks address to a group, not internal plurality. > - 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 it: Psalm 82 (the council of El / the gods, with text-critical variation between MT and Septuagint); Isaiah 6 ("who will go for us"); Jeremiah 23:18 ("who has stood in the council of the LORD"); Genesis 3:5 and 3:22 (plural "gods"/"one of us knowing good and evil"); Genesis 6 (the bene elohim, "sons/children of God"); Genesis 11:7 ("let us go down" — another cohortative). > - Grammar note: a first-person plural command is unremarkable — "all right, let's go" among friends. It simply means the speaker is part of, and addressing, a group. > - Ugaritic background: the Northwest Semitic pantheon has El as paterfamilias, his consort Athirat (the captions mangle her name), and their 70 sons comprising the active deities — the council. Hence the later Jewish tradition of 70 nations, 70 patron deities, and eventually 70 angelic princes. > - Deuteronomy 32:8–9: McClellan (with many scholars) takes this as among the earliest strata of the Hebrew Bible. Elyon ("the Most High") divides the nations according to the number of the "children of God" (so 4QDeut-j and the Septuagint; the Masoretic Text's "children of Israel" is a later alteration — this text-critical judgment is very widely accepted), and Yahweh's allotted portion is Jacob/Israel. On one reading, Yahweh here is a second-tier member of the council under a distinct high god Elyon, only later conflated with El and promoted to head. McClellan explicitly says this second-tier reading "is still being debated by scholars" — e.g., the late Michael Heiser argued Yahweh and Elyon are already identical in the poem, while Mark S. Smith and others defend the two-deity reading. McClellan thinks the data favor the earlier-stratum reading but marks it as his judgment, not consensus. > - Trajectory of the council: Deuteronomy 4:19 assigns the host of heaven to the nations for worship while Israel worships Yahweh alone. Earlier texts treat celestial bodies as sentient divine warriors (Judges 5:20, stars fighting Sisera); in Persian and Greco-Roman periods the other gods are astralized or demoted into angels, yielding the guardian-angels-of-nations idea in Daniel 10 (princes of Persia and Greece vs. Michael). > - Back to Genesis 1: God announces creation to the council ("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 — "God is jealous of their creative power." That authorial-motive claim is interpretive; the singular-verb observation itself is uncontroversial. > - Contested-claims ledger for study purposes: (1) divine council as referent of "us" — majority critical view, though some evangelical scholars prefer a heavenly-host/angelic-court reading that keeps the addressees non-divine in the strong sense, and others (e.g., Clines's older "self-deliberation" line) dissent; (2) Yahweh-as-second-tier in Deut 32:8–9 — live debate, McClellan flags it; (3) "children of God" as the earlier reading of Deut 32:8 — near-consensus on text-critical grounds; (4) Trinity not the authorial meaning — consensus in historical-critical scholarship; canonical rereading remains a separate theological move the video does not adjudicate beyond authorial intent. > ## 🗒️ Notes > #### ⏱️ [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38hJgc4mPrU?t=0) The question: who is "us" in Genesis 1:26 > - Opens with the verse: "Let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness." > - Introduces himself as a scholar of the Bible and religion; frames the video as ruling out bad answers before giving the best-supported one. > #### ⏱️ [00:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38hJgc4mPrU?t=14) Not the plural of majesty, not Elohim's grammar > - "This has nothing to do with the plural of majesty or the royal we." > - Elohim is grammatically Who is us in Genesis 1:26 when God says, "Let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness." Hey everybody, I'm Dan Mlelen. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion. Couple things that are not going on here. One, this has nothing to do with the plural of majesty or the royal we or anything like that. This is completely unrelated to the fact that the Hebrew word Elohim is grammatically plural but can be semantically singular or plural. The sentence actually begins va Elohim which is a singular verb. So Elohim said and then we have what's called a cohortative verb, a first person plural command or imperative. Let us make humanity. So it's one deity speaking to other members of a group of which they are a part. So it's unrelated to the fact that Elohim can be grammatically plural but semantically singular or plural. That has nothing to do with what's going on here. It's also definitely not the trinity. That's a conceptual framework that wouldn't be developed until the late 2nd century CE, which is several centuries after this text was written in the late 6th century B.C.E. or the late fifth century BCE. So the author and the audiences did not have that as an interpretive option. So it's definitely not referring to that. Additionally, you have in the primeval history God referring to themselves in the singular multiple times. And here we have again a single deity speaking to a group, not to themselves. That's not what's going on in the Hebrew. There's no case to make that the Trinity is even a plausible interpretation of what's going on here, much less the most likely. The majority of scholars agree that what's going on here is that God is speaking to the other gods of the divine council, which was a very common conceptual framework that was in circulation in and around ancient Israel in this time period and even in later time periods. Although the divine council would be renegotiated once we get into the Persian and then the Grecoman periods and there are a variety of different ways that this happened that we can talk about. But first off we have a few different references to the other gods in the primeval history. We have it here in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. The serpent tells Eve, "You plural will become like the gods knowing in the plural good and evil." And that's verse 5. And then in verse 22, God says, "Look, the human has become as one of us, knowing," and that participle is in the plural, good and evil. Or actually, it might be I think that might be an infinitive construct. I don't recall. Uh, but we have plural gods in reference there. And also in Genesis 6, the Ben Elohim, that's the children of God, which is a common way to refer to the gods of the divine council. Because according to the ancient northwest Semitic pantheon, you had a divine pair, the high god and the high god's consort partner or wife and their children comprised the active deities of the pantheon who were in charge of the running of the cosmos. And we see this in the yugaritic literature and we see it playing out in a variety of different places and in a variety of different ways in the Hebrew Bible as well. And then even as late as Genesis 11, you have God saying, "Let us go down and see what the humans are doing." And this is another cohortative, another first person plural command. And there's nothing peculiar about a first person plural command. It is just like you're getting together with some friends to do something and you say, "All right, let's go." It's a first person plural command. There's nothing unusual about this. It just means that the speaker is part of a group and the speaker is addressing the group. So the majority of scholars agree this is the divine council. And you can find the divine council elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, probably most explicitly in Psalm 82 where there is an explicit reference to the council of L or the divine council or even the council of the gods depending on what manuscript you're going with and how you interpret it because in the Septuagent uh it is in the plural. So the council of gods or you can interpret L adjectyally, divine council. Well, there are a bunch of different ways to interpret it, but basically you have a council of gods. It's a deliberative body of gods that assists in decision-making regarding the running of the cosmos. And in the Hebrew Bible, Adoni, the God of Israel, is represented as the head of this council. So, cosmically, God rules over the other gods. And then geopolitically it's a different story as we see in Psalm 82 where you have the patron deities of the many different nations comprising the gods of the divine council. And in Psalm 82, they're going to be deposed. They're going to be condemned to mortality so that God can, as the psalmist says at the very end of the psalm, rise up and inherit all nations and rule over all of the earth. So take over geopolitical rule of all the earth. That's the universalization of Adonai. But you have other references to the divine council where human prophets are either listening in to what's going on in the divine council or actively participating in the divine council. So for instance in Isaiah 6, Isaiah offers to help because the divine counsel asks who will go for us and Isaiah says here am I send me. And then we have Isaiah participating in the council. We have Jeremiah uh asking sarcastically who has stood in the council of Adoni. And the ways that the divine council is represented in the Hebrew Bible show dependence on or at least descent from a conceptualization of the divine council that we find in the yugaritic literature where L is the potter familius of the divine family. And then aat is the partner consort or wife of L. And then they have the 70 sons that comprise the circle or the council of the gods. And in Deuteronomy 32:8 and9, we have this very fascinating preservation of what I and other scholars think is one of the earliest parts of the entire Hebrew Bible where the narrator of the song of Moses says to ask your elders and they will say your fathers and they will tell you. And then we get verse 8 and nine which I think are reported speech. So the narrator of the song of Moses is reporting on speech that they're saying will be handed down by the elders. Uh where it talks about the most high dividing up the nations according to the number of the ben Elohim, the children of God. Now in many English translations today it says the children of Israel. That's how the Maseretic text reads. But we know that that is an alteration that originally or at least more originally it referred to the children of L or Elohim. And it then goes on to say and Adonai's portion is Jacob Israel is his share of the inheritance or his inherited share or his allotted share. And what many scholars suggest is that this seems to be preserving a reference to this divying up of the nations to the different patron deities of the earth. And Adonia, the God of Israel, was given from a separate deity, Elon, the most high rule over Israel. That's their inheritance. And Israel as the inheritance of Adoni is something that we see referred to in a few different places uh in the Hebrew Bible. So the idea there is that Adoniah is one of the members of the Ben Elohim, one of the divine council. And this is a very early idea that's probably still fresh from its transmission from the broader northwest Semitic pantheon framework into Israel. And Adonai probably came into that pantheon on the second tier. And only later when Adonai was conflated with L did Adonai take over rule become the leading deity of the divine council. But Deuteronomy 328 and9 may preserve an even earlier reference to the initial position of Adonai, the God of Israel in the second tier among the Benet Elohim. That's still being debated by scholars. There are an awful lot of folks who are just allergic to the notion that the God of Israel was ever anything other than the head of the gods. But I think the data make that the most likely reading of what's going on in Deuteronomy 328 and 9. But whether or not Adonai is distinct from Elon, that is a reference to the divine council. And we even see it in a much later text, Deuteronomy 4:19, where you have God talking about the sun, the moon, the stars, all the hosts of heaven, telling the Israelites not to worship those deities because they are given to all of the nations of the earth to worship. Uh, and this is a reference to the notion that there is a patron deity over every nation of the earth and they are for the worship of the people of those nations. But Adonai is the god over Israel. Israel must only worship Adonai. Now, when we do get to the universalization of Adonai and then we get down into the Grecoman period, the other gods of the nations are they're either astralized, they're treated as inanimate celestial bodies like the sun, the moon, the stars. U in earlier periods, those are representative of deities. So for instance in the song of Deborah in judges 5, the stars fight in their courses against Cicora. So they are God's army. They are sensient beings. They are warriors. This is still a vestigial uh remnant of the earlier notion of the divine council. But in later periods they get turned into angels. They get kind of squished down lower and lower in the pantheon until they become angels. And then in view of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 where every nation has its own patron deity but now they're just angels. We have this later developed idea that every nation has a guardian angel over it. And this is reflected in the book of Daniel where you have the idea of the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece doing battle with Michael, the the archangel, the chief prince or I forget exactly what Daniel 10 refers to Michael as, but this is the idea that instead of patron deities, it's just an angel that's been assigned to every nation. And the author of Daniel is referring to them as princes, but these are the guardian angels. So the notion of guardian angels originates in kind of a later alteration of the notion of patron deities over every nation of the earth. So this is where we get the idea that there are 70 nations uh on earth and so 70 patron deities and so 70 members of the divine council uh in the yugaritic literature. You have the 70 sons of Aiatz who is the consort wife or partner of the divine potterious l. So these are all different ways to refer to the divine council, but that's what's going on in Genesis 1:26 and 27. God is speaking to the other gods of the divine council. However, the author does not want those other gods participating in the actual creation of humanity. And so while God says, "Let us create humanity," the narrative goes on to have only a singular deity actually engaged in the process of creating humanity. And that is the God of Israel. God is jealous of their creative power and their creation of humanity. And so you only have the one God doing the actual creating. But when it comes to who the us is, it's just the other gods of the divine council. This text was written in a period when we had not yet fully transitioned from patron deities to just angels assigned over each nation of the earth. that would happen in the centuries that followed shortly after the composition of Genesis 1:26 and 27. But once again, has nothing to do with the plural of majesty, has nothing to do with the notion of a royal we. Has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the trinity, which is not a concept that existed when the text was written. God is just speaking to the other gods of the divine council. And here are some texts you can check out if you would like to learn more about what's going on in the divine council and how it is connected to other literature that we have from close to this time period. And the fit for this video is still Hellboy., Let US Make Man in OUR Image?!?, Dan McClellan, 01kxsdj4tgnyn5cbgd670h5c12.