Passage

Genesis 1.27

Book: Genesis · NASB95

Verse

"God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." (Genesis 1:27, NASB95)

Immediate context (±2 verses)

NASB95 (NASB95)

"25. God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good. 26. Then God said, 'Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.'"

"27. God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."

"28. God blessed them; and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.' 29. Then God said, 'Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;'" (Genesis 1:25-29, NASB95)

Setting

Speaker: Moses, traditionally; functionally inspired narrator. Reporting God's creative act and self-deliberation ("Let Us make…").
Audience: Israel; counter-cosmologically against ANE creation stories where humans are slaves of the gods or cosmic accidents.
Location: Sinai / wilderness composition.
Time period: the verse narrates the sixth day of creation; written 14th-13th c. BC.

Theological reading

The verse is the foundation of biblical anthropology. Three claims that shape every doctrine of humanity:

Imago Dei, humans are made in the image of God (Hebrew b'tzelem elohim). Whatever else humans are biologically, sociologically, or psychologically, they bear the image of the Creator. This grounds:

Inherent human dignity, every human, regardless of age, ability, race, or status, possesses worth grounded in God's image.
Pro-life ethics, destroying an image-bearer is never trivial; murder is forbidden specifically because of the imago Dei (Genesis 9:6).
Anti-slavery, anti-racism, every ethnicity equally bears the image (cf. Acts 17:26 "from one made every nation").
Human reason and moral capacity, humans share, by analogy, in God's rationality and moral nature.

Sexual binarity grounded in creation, "male and female He created them." The sexual binary is not a social construction but a creational structure. This grounds the marriage of male-and-female (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4-5 where Jesus cites this verse to establish marriage); and complicates contemporary gender ideology that detaches gender from biological sex.
The plural of God, the Let Us of v. 26 with the singular He created of v. 27. The early Christian tradition (Justin, Tertullian, Athanasius) reads this as a foreshadowing of Trinitarian distinction-within-unity. Jewish exegesis typically reads it as plural of majesty or divine-council deliberation. The Christian reading does not claim the OT demonstrates the Trinity but that the OT is consistent with, and actually anticipates, the fuller NT revelation.

Patristic. Irenaeus (Against Heresies IV.16, c. AD 180) reads imago Dei as the primal endowment lost (or marred) at the Fall and restored in Christ, the "image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15). Athanasius (On the Incarnation 11-13, c. AD 318) develops the same theme: Christ became human to restore the imago Dei in fallen humans. Augustine (De Trinitate 12-14, c. AD 415) locates the imago specifically in the rational soul, the human capacity for memory, intellect, will mirrors the Trinitarian structure.

Reformation. Calvin (Institutes I.15.3-4) distinguishes between the "image" (the original endowment, marred by the Fall but not destroyed) and the "likeness" (the moral conformity to God, lost at the Fall and restored by grace). This distinction has influenced Reformed anthropology since.

Contemporary apologetic use. The verse anchors:

Pro-life apologetics, every human at every stage bears the image; the unborn are no exception.
Anti-evolution arguments, humans are categorically distinct from animals, not merely a higher rung on the evolutionary ladder. The imago Dei is a kind-claim, not a degree-claim.
Civil rights / abolition history, the Hebrew Israelite slavery rebuttals (in ris3n's Africa and the Bible/ cluster) lean on imago Dei as the basis for human dignity transcending ethnicity.
Marriage / sexuality, the binary "male and female" grounds the male-female structure of marriage as creational.

Key words

H6754 - tselem, tselem (image), physical-resemblance term, used here for ontological image
H1823 - demuth, demuth (likeness), the parallel term in v. 26
H0430 - elohim, elohim (God), the plural of v. 26 ("Let Us make")
H1254 - bara, bara (created), verb used three times in this single verse, emphasizing the divine-action-only nature