Introduction
The author(s) of the opening narratives of Genesis sought to contrast humankind from the rest of animal creation in two important ways:
1.) Humans are said to be created in the "image of God" (1.27)
2.) Humans are depicted as having acquired the "knowledge of good and evil" (3.22)
These two enigmatic phrases feature prominently in their respective narratives (the creation narrative of Gen. 1.1-2.4, and the garden narrative of Gen. 2.5-3.24). Despite this, what exactly the author meant by such phrases has been the subject of much debate. I am sure that I am not alone in wondering, with some pessimism, whether the original meaning of these phrases has been lost to history. Or worse: whether, in searching for an interpretation amenable to the modern, western mind, I am expecting too much from the ancient text.
A satisfying resolution to this issue can be found in two human capacities so obvious as to be overlooked: I propose, firstly, that the "image” and “likeness” of God is related to our remarkable capacity for language. Secondly, I argue that the "knowledge of good and evil" refers to humankind's heightened capacity for emotion. Understood in this way, these two phrases can be shown to contain two of the text's most discerning insights into the human condition.
The Image of God as the Capacity for Language
Gen. 1.26-27: "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. God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." (NASB, 1995)
The word translated as "image" in this passage is the Hebrew noun tsehlem1, a word used elsewhere in the Old Testament to refer to idols (cf. Num. 33.52; 2 Kings 11.18)2. Concerning the application of this word to humankind in Genesis 1.26, Christopher Stanley explains,
"These idols were considered to be visual representations of the presence and power of a god, and channels by which that deity can be accessed and its power channeled into the life of a worshipper. If we apply that meaning to humans, it means that we are visible, material representations of the invisible God, the supreme channels by which God works in the world and the central means by which others can access God."3
Just as an idol was created to be a physical, earthly representation of a transcendent deity, and a channel of that diety's power, so too humans were created to be the physical, earthly representatives of God, and channels of his power in the world.
The question which this essay seeks to answer, then, is what divine "powers" the human being is seen as "channeling," according to the author of Genesis. Put differently, how exactly are humans portrayed in Genesis 1-3 as being "like" God? I do not suppose that our "likeness" to God has much, if anything, to do with our physical appearance. Rather, it must concern certain unique capacities that we have as humans, which differentiate us from the rest of animal creation, and empower us alone to "fill the earth and subdue it" (Gen. 1.28).
One such capacity, highlighted by the author of Genesis, is the remarkable human capacity for language. The creation narrative portrays language as a God-like power. It is through language that God speaks things into existence (1.3, 6, 9, 11, 14-15, 20, 24, 26). God uses language to draw distinctions, create categories, and impose an order on material creation that renders it “good” for humankind.
Immediately following the creation narrative, the first man, Adam, is placed in a garden planted by God himself (Gen. 2.8, 15). One of the defining characteristics of a garden is its ordered nature: certain plants are deemed desirable and are actively cultivated, while others are deemed undesirable and are eradicated. Unlike the intermixed, vegetative free-for-all which characterizes nature—within gardens, clear boundaries are set and maintained. Man is created for the express purpose of tending to this garden (Gen. 2.15), that he may continue what God had started in Eden.
In this new capacity, one of the first tasks God calls the man to perform is the explicit naming of things. Firstly, Adam names the animals (Gen. 2:19-20). On two occasions afterwards, he bestows a name on his helpmate ("woman" in 2.23, and "Eve" in 3.20). In understanding “the image of God” as the capacity for language, the naming of the animals ceases to be a curious excursus within the narrative, and is seen instead as an act of profound significance: by having Adam name the animals, he is invited to participate in the God-like power of language, and its order-bringing potential.
In Genesis 11, we read about early humanity’s ambitious attempt to build a tower reaching into the heavens. In language perhaps reminiscent of God’s declaration in Gen. 1:26, the people announce, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name” (Gen. 11.4). The construction of such a tower is implied to be within the capability of humans, chiefly because, as the narrator points out, all people at that time “used the same language and the same words” (Gen. 11.1). Upon inspecting the in-progress tower, God himself is impressed, remarking, “nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them” (Gen. 11.6). God then proceeds to thwart the tower’s completion by confusing the people’s language (Gen. 11.7). In this narrative as well, we find language cast as a remarkable, even God-like, ability.
David Bentley Hart (2011) says concerning humans and language:
"Human beings are linguistic beings through and through, after all. Because of our miraculous, almost certainly extra-natural capacity for symbolic communication—uttered, written, or mimed—we are the only terrestrial species that possesses a history. Human personality, community, society, and culture are all informed, sustained, and determined by language; everything we are and can be, everything we think and know and believe, is woven from words; even our most immediate sensuous experiences are ultimately mediated to us through concepts shaped by signs."4
While it has been reported that some animals can, with intensive training, learn to participate in some of the more rudimentary aspects of speech, the human capacity for language is unrivaled among all the creatures of the earth5.
For humans, language comes naturally, as if an instinct. For this reason, it's difficult for us to appreciate the revolutionary nature of language. The true complexity of language, and the difficulties inherent to learning language, are regularly underestimated. Terrance Deacon (1997) writes:
“Linguistic communication requires us to learn and perform some remarkably complicated skills, both in the production of speech and in the analysis of speech sounds. In addition, there is a great deal to learn: thousands of vocabulary items and an intricate system of grammatical rules and syntactic operations. And it’s not enough to say that language is complicated. According to many linguists, we aren't even offered sufficient outside support to deal with it. We are forced to figure out the underlying implicit rules of grammar and syntax without good teaching and with vastly inadequate examples and counter examples…Languages are indeed complicated things. They are probably orders of magnitude more complicated than the next-most-complicated communications system outside of the human sphere.”6
According to Deacon (1997), the largest hurdle in language acquisition isn't its complexity, but rather, “the everyday miracle of word meaning and reference.” He continues, “Neither grammar, nor syntax, nor articulate sound production, nor huge vocabulary have kept other species from evolving language. Just the simple problem of figuring out how combinations of words refer to things.”7 Further compounding the mystery of language, no simple, “intermediary” language has ever been observed among humans or animals.8 The miracle of language is not lost on the author of Genesis, however, and this is the first of two ways in which he seeks to distinguish humankind from all other earthly creatures.
The Knowledge of Good and Bad as a Heightened Capacity for Emotion
The traditional rendering of the Hebrew phrase, ha'daath tov wa'ra9, as “the knowledge of good and evil” misconstrues the Hebrew as inherently moral in its scope. The problem is found primarily with the rendering of the Hebrew word ra10 by the English word “evil,” which is an exclusively moral term. The meaning of the Hebrew term, meanwhile, is more ambiguous. While ra can refer to moral evils, it is not infrequently used to mean “bad” in the sense of being “undesirable” (cf. Gen. 28.8; Gen. 41.3; Lev. 27.10; Deut. 17.1; 2 Kings 2.19), or as “disaster” (cf. Gen. 19.19). In one passage, God is said to be its author (Isa. 45.7).
The Hebrew word tov11, like the English word “good”, can likewise mean “good” in the sense of being morally commendable, but also “good” in the sense of being “desirable” or of “benefit” to humans (cf. Gen. 1.4; Gen. 2.9, 12; Exo. 3.8; 2 Kings 3.19).
For this reason, it is preferable to render the Hebrew as, “the knowledge of good and bad”, since the English words “good” and “bad” are not limited to describing the moral condition of a thing. They can refer, instead, to a thing’s desirable or undesirable quality.
Whatever “the knowledge of good and bad” is, the text states that it is something which God possesses. Both the serpent and God Himself point this out (3.5, 3.22). As such, this “knowledge” is not evil in itself. It does, however, pose some danger to humankind, and humankind's acquisition of this knowledge makes life more difficult than it otherwise would have been (see the curses God pronounces on Adam and Eve in Genesis 3). This knowledge is something which further elevates humankind above the animals (making us “like God,” Gen. 3.5, 22), but for which we are unequipped. Our heightened capacity for emotion fits these criteria well.
With limited exceptions,12 wild animals do not display signs of heightened emotional states, and certainly not to the same degree that humans do. While animals feel pain, they do not appear to “suffer” in the human sense. They regularly observe death, but do not dread, contemplate, or even conceive of its inevitability. Their behaviors are pragmatic and calculated—often dispassionate to the point of appearing disinterested. Humans, by contrast, are known to become overwhelmed by emotions of both the positive and negative variety. We sometimes act purely on the basis of our emotions. At times, emotions can even move us to act in ways that are directly at-odds with our survival: altruistic self-sacrifice and suicide being perhaps the most extreme examples. Our emotions are often opposed to, and overpower, our capacity to reason, and can incite us to sin. Emotions are the engine behind our greatest acts of good, as well as our worst acts of evil. Emotions both color, and complicate, our lives.
Animals, in contrast, know neither pessimism, nor optimism. They accept reality as it is, and do not conceive of reality as owing them anything. While animals are content with routine survival, humans seem perpetually dissatisfied with the status quo. More than we would like to admit, our experience of life is dictated less by our actual circumstances, and more by how we feel about them. Our experience of a situation is largely determined by our emotional posture towards it.
Love, hatred, hope, despair, cynicism, gratitude, sublime awe, existential angst, pessimism, optimism, pride, shame—emotions add a dimension to our inner lives that appears, as best we can tell, largely foreign to the animal mind. Emotions have the power to enrich our lives, or make them a living hell. In this way, emotions pose a very real danger to the human individual, and require a level of maturity and self-control that is uncommon to our species. This is likely the reason that "emotional knowledge" was initially withheld from humankind in the garden narrative.
In the Old Testament, God is portrayed as having an emotional nature (c.f. Gen. 6.6; Deut. 9.22; Judg. 2.18; Zeph. 3.17). In our heightened capacity for emotion, then, we become more like God (Gen. 3.22). Emotional knowledge is the second of two deifying capacities by which the ancient author seeks to distinguish man from animal creation.
Prior to eating the fruit, Adam and Eve are described as “naked,” which conveys the sense of being exposed and vulnerable. Despite this, the text states that they were “not ashamed” (Gen. 2.25). Immediately following eating the fruit, however, Adam and Eve are depicted as experiencing the emotions of fear and shame (Gen. 3.10). The curses which God pronounces on Adam and Eve appear to forewarn a heightened emotional capacity, particularly the capacity for suffering (as opposed to mere pain).
Man was originally placed in the Garden of Eden to “cultivate and keep it” (Gen. 2.15). As any gardener knows, this would have required a modicum of physical labor. That is to say, “work” would have existed prior to Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience. By eating the forbidden fruit, however, this “work” was transformed into sorrowful “toil” (Gen. 3:17, cf. Eccl. 2.22-23).
So to, childbirth would have been painful for Eve even had she not partaken of the forbidden fruit. The text says as much: when God says that He will “greatly multiply” Eve’s pain in Gen. 3.16, this implies that there was pain to be multiplied. After eating the forbidden fruit, the physical pain of childbirth is somehow magnified—not, I submit, by some change in Eve’s physiology, but rather due to her newfound emotional capacities. When God warns, “in pain you will bring forth children,” I do not think He is referring only to the physical pain of childbirth, but also to the emotional pain, stress, and hardship inherent to rearing children in this world, especially during times of high infant mortality.
With few exceptions, animals do not mourn the death of their young, and seem little affected by such occurrences. Weak or malformed offspring are often abandoned or withheld care. Some animals even cannibalize their own young in times of stress (including brown bears, some rodents, kangaroos, cats, pigs, and certain primates). For humans, however, the death of a child is psychologically devastating.
Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience also results in the appearance of “enmity” between the woman’s descendants and the snake’s descendants (Gen. 3.15). Additionally, the woman becomes subjugated to her husband, as the result of her strong “desire” for him (Gen. 3.16). Directly following the garden narrative, we read of the rivalry between Cain and Abel. When Cain's offering is disregarded, he becomes "very angry" (literally, "burned greatly"), which leads to him murdering his brother.13 In each of the above examples, the human experience of emotion seems to become heightened following Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience.
Emotions as a Kind of Knowledge
The noun, da’ath14 (used in Gen. 2.9), and its root verb, yada15 (used in Gen. 3.5 and 3.22), sometimes convey more than abstract intellectual knowledge or knowing, and instead signify an experiential knowledge or knowing. For example, yada is used as an euphemism for sexual relations in Gen. 4.1 and elsewhere (cf. Gen. 4.17, 25, 19.5). Understanding the “knowledge of good and bad” as a heightened capacity for emotion fits well with this observation, since our emotional capacities operate largely independent of our intellect.
Additionally, most emotions can be sorted into one of two categories: those having a positive phenomenology and those having a negative phenomenology. For example, “joy” and “laughter” are desirable and beneficial, and are a visceral, embodied response to that which is “good” for humans. In contrast, emotions such as “fear” and “anger” are undesirable and unpleasant, and are a visceral, embodied response to that which is “bad” for humans. Lacking a singular word for the concept of “emotion” as we have, the ancient author’s coining of the phrase “the knowledge of good and bad” seems a natural and straightforward way of getting at roughly the same idea. In a very real sense, our emotions are the primary means by which we know and discern the “good” from the “bad” in life.
The Emotionally Enhanced Death
Interestingly, this understanding of “the knowledge of good and bad,” may also help to resolve another question which emerges from the text. Concerning the forbidden fruit, God had warned Adam: "[I]n the day that you eat of it, you will surely die" (Gen. 2.17). However, the snake contends that this is not the case, telling the woman, “you will not surely die” (Gen. 3.4). According to the text, Adam lived to be over 900 years old, despite having eaten the fruit (Gen. 5.5). At face value, the snake appears to have been more right than wrong, and we are left wondering what God meant by such a statement. Various approaches have been suggested to resolve this tension, though the ancient author seems altogether unfazed by it.
In the Hebrew of Gen. 2.17, as well as Gen. 3.4, the Hebrew verb mooth16 (“die”) is repeated twice for emphasis. This particular pleonasm is used twelve other times in the Old Testament17, and the pattern can be observed with other verbs as well (cf. yada, “to know,” in 1 Kings 2.42). The doubling of a verb is intended to increase its intensity, and as such, is often signified by translators by the inclusion of the word “surely” or “certainly.” Literally, however, the text here reads, “dying you will die18.”
Although they had not been forbidden from doing so, and despite having access to it, neither Adam or Eve ate from the tree of life. As such, and according to the text (cf. Gen. 3.22), they were not yet immortal, yet they seemed little concerned or preoccupied by their own mortality. In this emotionally naive state, the aged Adam would merely have "died”—whereby “death” is understood to be the natural, albeit unceremonious, end to which all mortal life is subject. After eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, however, "death" becomes something that is experienced in the emotionally enhanced context of fear, suffering, and existential dread. Eating the fruit thus results in an intensified experience of “death”: no longer is death experienced as mere natural happenstance—that is, as a singular and sudden event among many. It is now seen as an unnatural, long-suffering, life-framing process building to an inevitable, dreaded climax.
But what are we to make of God's statement that this forewarned death would occur “in the day” that Adam ate the forbidden fruit? At face value, God seems to predict that Adam’s death would occur as the immediate consequent of his disobedience. I believe this impression is largely an artifact of translation, however. The phrase, “in the day” (Hebrew, be'yom19, literally "in-day") is a Hebrew idiom not limited to the literal meaning of its component words. This is demonstrated by its usage in Gen 2.4.
Gen. 2.4: “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day [be’yom] that the Lord God made earth and heaven.” (NASB, 1995)
According to the preceding narrative, the heavens and the earth were not made in a single day, but over the span of a week. The idiom, be’yom, is used to refer to a span of time, not a singular, twenty-four hour period. As modern readers, we tend to take our abstract conceptions of “time” for granted, yet notions of time were less developed, or at least less explicit, in the world of the ancient author as compared with today. For example, Biblical Hebrew does not have tenses (past, present, future) as does English. When speaking of temporal matters, the authors of the Old Testament tended to use metaphors grounded in everyday experience. The phrase, be’yom, thus amounts to a poetic way of saying “when” or “in the time of.” This is the reason the ancient author seems unfazed by what appears to us to be a jarring disconnect between God’s warning to Adam and how things actually played out. For the ancient author, there wasn't an issue, because the idiomatic expression, be-yom, needn’t refer to a literal twenty-four hour period.
This being the case, I propose that the subtle meaning of God's warning to Adam was this: when Adam ate from the forbidden fruit, he became subject to an intensified experience of death. With the heightened capacity for emotion, death and mortality took on new meaning, significance, and foreboding. While the emotional gravity of death may not have befallen Adam at the moment of eating, or on that very day, it is a realization that would soon have dawned on him, especially after being ejected from the garden.
Conclusion
While language is given to humankind as a gift, so as to enable us to fulfill God’s mandate to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1.28), emotional knowledge is initially withheld, due to the propensity of strong emotions to lead humans astray. While emotions are not inherently bad in and of themselves (to the contrary, God is depicted as having an emotional nature), they do pose a risk to humankind. Instead of ruling over our emotions, too often our emotions rule over us (cf. Gen 4.7).
Our capacity for language, and our heightened capacity for emotion, are so obvious and integral to our everyday experience of life that we tend to take them for granted. We cannot easily conceive of life without them, and so fail to notice or comprehend how truly transformative these capacities have been for the human species. To his credit, however, the ancient author rightly recognizes these two quintessential human attributes as profound, and portrays them as unique, deifying capacities by which humankind is set apart from the rest of animal creation.
Endnotes:
1. צֶלֶם, Strong’s #H6754
2. I would like to thank Dr. Christopher D. Stanley for bringing this important point to my attention.
3. Christopher D. Stanley, personal communication, January 17, 2025.
4. Hart, D.B. (2011) Le Mot Juste, First Things. Available at: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/07/le-mot-juste (Accessed: 13 January 2025).
5. For a thorough analysis of the miracle of language, in all its myriad complexities, including the difference between iconic reference, indexical reference, and the symbolic reference mastered only by the human species, see, “The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain,” by Terrance W. Deacon (1997).
6. Deacon, T.W. (1998) in The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., p. 40.
7. Deacon, T.W. (1998) in The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., p. 43.
8. Deacon, T.W. (1998) in The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., pp. 39-46.
9. הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע
10. רַע, Strong’s #H7451
11. טוֹב, Strong’s #H2896
12. Heightened emotional states have been observed in some animals, such as self-mutilation in parrots, or mourning in elephants, however it is unlikely that the ancient author was aware of such animals or behaviors. Additionally, it is important to remember that ancient peoples’ relationship with animals differed in important ways from modern peoples’ relationship with animals—at least for those of us living in developed, western countries. For the modern westerner, most animal contact is with trained, domesticated pets, which we have a strong tendency to anthropomorphize. These exceptions notwithstanding, the ancient author’s point remains valid and relevant. While some animals do show signs of possessing a more sophisticated emotional apparatus, the disparity between the emotional capacities of animals and humans remains large.
13. I think it likely that this rivalry is foreshadowed by God’s statement to Eve that, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain you will bring forth children…” (Gen. 3:16). The Hebrew here literally reads, “I will greatly multiply your pain and your pregnancy” (הַרְבָּה אַרְבֶּה עִצְּבוֹנֵךְ וְהֵרֹנֵךְ), suggesting, as with the language Gen. 4.1-2 (which describes one conception, and two births), that Cain and Abel were rival twins. Eve’s pregnancy was “multiplied,” and would become for her a source of great mourning (Abel is murdered, Cain is exiled). If this was indeed the author’s intention, Cain’s murder of Abel can be linked back to Eve’s act of disobedience, and the divine curse it engendered.
14. דַּעַת, Strong’s #H1847
15. יָדַע, Strong’s #H3045
16. מוּת, Strong’s #H4191
17. Hamilton, V.P. (1990) The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans (The New International Commentary on the Old Testament), pp. 173–174.
18. מוֹת תָּמוּת
19. בְּיוֹם
