Yep, it's always a balance. I held off on getting QV for a number of years because I couldn't get the NIV with it, as it was proprietary to Zondervan. However, QV and Zondervan got together and now it is available as an "add on" book(s) to the system. In fact, many books that don't come with the base package can be added on later if desired, so you can manage, sort of, the investment in resources.

The base package is so extensive that I only really wanted to add the NIV, and just did so a couple of months ago.

I have the 2008 version running. I also have the 2007 version and only upgraded for a little more user friendly dashboard. I'm still not convinced I like it much better than the 2007 interface.

BTW, QV is currently selling the 2007 version for 60% off! That's a very good deal. I use the Standard edition of the 4 and it handles just about everything I want to do. The normal price for the Standard is about $130.00 but the 2007 version is about $52.00 right now. If you are interested in researching it more you can go to www.quickverse.com and check out all their offerings.

Another resource that is FREE, and what I used before getting the full Quick Verse and still occasionally use for some of the free stuff I added like the MacArthur Commentary Library and the R.C. Sproul library, is from the E4 Group. A lot of good study stuff there and it also uses the basic platform of Quick Verse. The site if you want to check it out is www.FreeBibleSoftware.com

I've missed a few days but wanted you to know I'm here...lurking

May I ask a favor, could you update me on 'where' we are now? What we're observing?

I don't have much to add..many questions.

mvg - ask away! If you post the questions that are most important to you or uppermost in your mind, it would be easier to begin to talk directly about them.

"Side trips" are not uncommon when someone brings up something of interest to them, and Mark and I got off on a side trip into study software. So ask about what's on your mind to get it back "on track" or refocused on what is of curiosity or importance to you.

Hi MVG,

I think we were at chapters 1 and 2 in Genesis, or it is also called Bresheit (in the beginning).

Which also brings to mind something that I was learning about this weekend. Bresheit (in the beginning) language back then was predominately Hebrew and then Greek. At least I think it was, however, what I do understand is that Torah was written in Hebrew and so there is always going to be interpretation into what was really written, because some words have no literally translation.

Mark has often mentioned that Torah is the whole picture that we are looking at, not just each chapter and as I am coming to a place of more familiararity with Torah, the whole message will become more embraced and understood and each passage will build on how G-d meant the whole message.

So, Scripture 101 is in full speed ahead.

Queenie - I have to admit to getting highly confused as I can't seem to glean any specific areas of question yet. The closest I have seen so far is a potential discussion of what the word "us" refers to when God used it and whether or not Adam and Eve had a sin-nature that caused them to sin. The only other areas that seemed to be touched upon are why did Adam get to name everything and why did God choose to form Eve from a part of Adam and for what purpose was she made?

But this is too much like a "shotgun" approach to discuss cohesively, so it would be helpful (at least to me) if you picked ONE topic at a time, discussed it, and then moved on to the next topic. But I have troubled juggling too many balls at one time, so it might just be my own limitations, and as some Dirty Guy once said, "A man's got to know his limitations."

Do you want to talk about the "us" factor first? That seems like a logical starting point since the decision to create, and in what image, came first.

Hello to everyone!!!
I am sorry for sticking my nose here, but this topic is very insteresting to me.
I know that sometimes you guys do not trust people that you don't know or that haven't post his/her story. Well my story is somewhere in GQII (I think is page 5)
FH.
Does the "us" word refers to God and Jesus? If so, could you please elaborate on this?

Thank you,

A.

Hi Angie,

I'm glad you are here and welcome. Please join us, but please know that this board is an open dialgue about scripture. I am Jewish and very proud of that fact. Mark, has often given me words of wisdom that prompted me to start this thread and enter into dialogue of what we get out of it.

For obvious reasons, there will be times and situations that are completely different. This thread is not about right or wrong, but our own interpretations or understandings.

You are not alone in your thought about Jesus first coming into existence here. I think the "us" is very interesting because no where else as G-d creates the world is there mention of us, until you get to man.

One other possible explanation is G-d is speaking with the angels.

Please keep coming back.

I read what you are saying FH, and I will try to come up with questions that will not teeter from the topic. Thank you for you willingness to ask for what you need. I am still learning that for myself.

So, Mark touched briefly on it, but if this is where Jesus is first introduced, why would it be with respect to G-d forming Adam and breathing life into him? And not somewhere else?

Genesis 1:26 And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and they shall rule over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the sky, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

Simplest terms- God is using a royal-like 'we' when referring to himself as he adresses his court in heaven (his angelic creations). This is simply plurals of majesty.

I've heard several rabbis explain it like this:

Until there was man, there were only animals on the earth. Since these animals could not *choose* to worship God, Hashem had to wait until the creation of man, as that creation was special and had the capacity to choose God. Once man was created, God could then be appropriately called 'king' as this begins Hashem's reign over mankind.

He then addresses his court with the majestic 'we' because Creation is done, and Hashem is proud of it. Like saying 'mission accomplished.'

Hi Angie. Welcome to the discussion.

There are two prevailing thoughts regarding this. One is the Jewish thought that God is alone (one) and that the word usage here was either God speaking to the angels or to Himself in a "third person" sort of way. The second is the Christian thought that this is the first indication of the triunity nature of God and referred to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit relationship of God. (God exists as one God with three distinct persons, each equal in essence but different in the roles that they perform).

So the question would seem to be what "has" God revealed to us about Himself throughout Scripture?

There are undeniable truths about the nature of God and there are some things that are descriptive of Him and some things that we don't know (for example: HOW a being can have no beginning and no end and be eternally "present", essentially outside of our "space-time continuum" and who sustains our universe by His will and power, or HOW someone actually creates things out of "nothing" and creates life from "non-living" matter).

I have to go out of town today, so I'll pick up on this discussion more at a later time.

So for now, just touching on the "highlights," remember that the author of the book was Moses. This scene that Moses is writing about, under the inspiration of God, is about "I AM." This was the God who spoke to Moses from out of the burning bush and answered Moses' question of "who shall I say sent me when I am asked." Moses KNEW God. Moses did NOT have to use the plural form of the word for God (Elohim) in this passage, but did so to indicate the triune nature of God.

"I will make man in MY image..." versus "Let US make man in OUR image..." Something to consider at this point is that God WILL NOT share His glory with another, nor are we created in the image of angels. We are created in the image of God to have a relationship both with our spouse (two but "one flesh") and with God.

Now if this was the "only" time God appeared to Man, we might not be able to examine the words "us" and "our" in light of God's continuing revelation to us, in much the same manner that we would know little, if anything, about how things came into being apart from the direct revelation of God. But God chose to reveal truth to us through the Scripture, originally the 5 scrolls known as the Pentateuch (the Torah), and then continued His revelation through the remainder of the Old and New Testaments. The "old" being those writings leading up to Messiah and the "new" being those writings from HOW God provided the promised Messiah and our "new position" (relationship) with God as a result of what only Messiah could do for us.

So in answer to your question, yes, the "us" and "our" refers to the ONE God consisting eternally of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect relationship with each other, not 3 distinct "gods."

As FH just stated, the very first verse of Genesis uses the plural noun Elohim as the name for God. But is is used with singular pronouns and verb forms throughout the book of Genesis.

And keeping in mind that if Moses did indeed write all five books of Torah, he could have used the same name for God throughout the text, but he chose to begin his narrative of creation, as related to him by God, by using a word that is unlike any other used to describe God in any language. And I think it is a clue to God's nature...

Read totally within this context, any of the explanations given fit the text. He might be addressing the angels, but that would mean the angels were created in God's image as well, and this would specifically be the only indication of that being the case in all of scripture. And since God has a habit of repeating things He wants us to know, I think it is less likely than the other two.

Which leaves us with the option that God is using the "royal" or "rhetorical" we to refer to himself...

Or that God is in fact speaking to the other two "persons" (not meaning additional gods, since God is One God) of the trinity. Yeah, I know, it's hard to follow...And it gets harder as you try to explain it further. We rapidly begin using Latin and Greek words for which there is no true English equivalent.

At this point I think we could continue discussing the trinity, in which case we might never get to discussion of the fall of Adam or God's call to Abram to leave home and follow Him. We can continue down this road, though it will take us far from the story of creation before it ends, or we can continue as we have been going through the text, remembering this issue and discussing it when it comes up again.



The choice is really up to you, Queenie.

I fear the result of pursuing it further now will be that we will begin and end with this discussion and nothing else will come of it. If you want to hear the proof for the Trinity, it is something that can be laid out in all it's complexity, but if we follow that direction, we will be jumping from text to text and maybe never get back to the story that Moses wrote for our benefit.

Mark

How do you interpret the word 'image'? An actual physical image or something else (mental,emotional,???)?

I prefer to keep to the story and leave the jumping around for later.

I am way too new at this to do that.

Let me finish working with what I am doing and I will be back with more thoughts or questions.

MVG,

I would say it is not a physical image, since God does not have a physical body, if we discount the idea of the trinity here for the time being, which gets us back into the discussion direction we were headed down before.

Based solely on this text, we have very little to go on, however, if we assume that God created us for the purpose of having a relationship with Him, because He is about relationships, then part of His image applies to the desire and need to have relationships on our part, sometimes called "social cognition. "

But God also has other attributes that we might also share. Among these is having a spiritual side to our persona as well as a physical. He is creative, as He created all that there is and we share that attribute as well. We also have the ability to reason and have rational thoughts, which is unlike any other creature on Earth, so that points, I think, to that too being a part of being made in His image. We are self aware or have consciousness.

We can have abstract thinking. That is, we are capable of thinking something through from start to finish without actually experiencing it first. We can combine two things we know and derive a third thing with no other data. It was Aristotle that said that if I know A and I know B, I can know C. It is only Man that can invoke things that are unobservable or not in our experience.

We also have the ability to make moral judgments and though the right to make them based solely on our own right to do so is only the result of the fall and our rebellion against God, we have a free choice to decide to obey Him or not.

He also has attributes that we do not share. These include omniscience (God knows all there is to know), omnipresence (everything in the universe is directly before God which is not to say that He is everywhere, but that everywhere is before Him) and omnipotence (He is all powerful-that is, nothing is impossible for Him and there is nothing He cannot do, with the caveat that He cannot be or create evil since He is good and nothing in Him is evil).

That paragraph is clear as concrete, isn't it?

These are things we do not share with God, so these attributes cannot be what He was talking about when He used the word "image."

Queenie, do you know the Hebrew word used here? It eludes me right now and I will have to look it up when I get home...Might take me a while.


In the mean time, if we move on we can always come back to this issue since we will begin to see some of what God means by this as we get into other portions of scripture.

Mark

OK. I looked it up. The word translated as image is the Hebrew word "tselem." Another word in the passage, the one used as "likeness" is the word "demuth." So the passage reads "Let us make Man(kind) in our image (tselem), according to our likeness (demuth).

Especially the word "demuth" is significant in this case as it implies similitude beyond just similarity. It pretty much says "just like." So while we have no further light to shed on what specifically God meant when He said "in our image" we do know that He meant it to mean Man would in some way(s) be just like Him.

I think that by examining the attributes of God and comparing them to Man we are on the right track in that we can eliminate some things that we know are dissimilar and at the same time we can identify those things that Man has in common with God.

FH, you want to add to that?

MVG, does that help at all?

Queenie, where ya at?

Mark

I can't read Hebrew, not always translate it into English, but in my Torah it is v'tzalmo v'tzelem. That's what I am reading, not sure it's correct.

Mark, how do you know that G-d was all about having relationships and not just creating things?

My WH thinks he has a great relationship with G-d. Can someone be living in that kind of sin and have a good relationship with G-d? I understand that they can believe it, but can they actually have a good relationship with G-d?

Can we come back to this when we get to Noah?

Yes, let's move on. Chapters 3 & 4?

[/quote] The word translated as image is the Hebrew word "tselem." [/quote] I got it to and I did it by reading it in Hebrew and translating it. I wasn't too far off. YEAHHHHH

I don't know if this really makes a huge difference, but I found it interesting in figuring out tzelem, when it says man the word is et-adam (hebrew version :)). I don't know why, but I find that interesting.

As I read further into the commentaries and take it for what it's worth, in section 26 - it says Mankind is described as in a special sense created by G-d himself. To me that implies he was having help with the other things that were created.

I was at my son's lacrosse game. He won 13 - 6. Had a very fun game.

Queenie,



The Hebrew word for man is adam. The accusative "et" modifies adam making it collective rather than singular meaning that it refers to all mankind rather than simply to the first Man, Adam.



I don't think it implies that at all. I think the meaning is simply that Man was created by God as opposed to coming about in some other way or having any other creator.

The same words for "image" and "likeness" are used again to describe Seth. It says says that Adam begot a son in his image and likeness... The special sense in which Man was(is) created refers to this, that we are created in God's own image. Thus we are a special creation of God Himself, not that He didn't create everything else, but that we are unique.

Am I getting clearer or making it even more difficult here?

As far as God being all about relationships...God made woman so that Adam didn't have to be alone. So woman too is unique in that her purpose was ordained specifically by God in order to be a helper for man.

He refers to us repeatedly as His children. Israel, the nation, is referred to variously as His children or His wife. All throughout the scriptures, God says that He loves us, specific individuals, families of people, the nation Israel... I think this points clearly to God desiring a relationship with each one of us.

I'm treading softly here because I am trying to not bring New Testament theology into the discussion right now. But for me the Bible as a whole is the story of God, who created the universe from nothing, made all that is on the earth and then made man and woman. When the man and woman chose to disobey Him and follow their own prideful ways, the special relationship they had with God was broken, since God cannot allow sin to be present before Him. Anything sinful would be consumed by His mere presence. From the story of the fall throughout the rest of the Bible, I believe is the story of God providing a way to restore that special relationship between Himself and Man. So to me, the Bible isn't just a collection of stories, but one complete story, that of the relationship between God and the Man He created for that purpose, whom He loves.

That make sense?

Mark

I am following you totally.

And as you write further, I would totally agree that Torah is written as a book of life. A way to prosper and have a relationship with G-d.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Thanks Mark & Queenie!