What Is the Difference Between ‘Image’ and ‘Likeness’ in Genesis 1:26?

Question 5017.

The words image and likeness in Genesis 1:26 have generated more theology per syllable than almost any pair in the Bible, and one of the first questions people ask is whether they mean two different things. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, God says. Is image one gift and likeness another? A famous strand of church history said yes, and built a two-storey doctrine of humanity on the distinction. I am going to argue the Hebrew says no, and that the no matters.

This is one of those questions where a little attention to the original language clears away centuries of confusion, so let me take you into the text.

Two Words, One Reality

The Hebrew terms are tselem, image, and demuth, likeness. Tselem is the word used elsewhere for a statue or carved representation; demuth speaks of resemblance or similarity. Put together in Genesis 1:26, they reinforce one another in typical Hebrew fashion: mankind is God’s representative likeness in the world, a living statement of what the King is like.

Watch how Scripture itself uses the pair. Genesis 1:27 drops likeness and speaks of image alone; Genesis 5:1 drops image and says likeness alone; Genesis 5:3 reverses the order, Adam fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image; and Genesis 9:6 grounds the death penalty for murder in image alone. If image and likeness were two distinct endowments, the writer could not swap, drop, and reorder them so freely. They are two brushstrokes painting one reality, a common feature of Hebrew parallelism, as I explained when writing on how to read Hebrew poetry.

The Wrong Turn in Church History

Early in church history, Irenaeus of Lyons suggested a distinction: image referred to our natural endowments, reason and will, which survived the fall, while likeness referred to a supernatural righteousness that was lost in Eden and restored by grace. Medieval theology developed this into a full system: nature on the ground floor, grace as the lost upper storey. It is an attractive scheme, and Irenaeus served the church well in other battles, but this particular distinction cannot be found in the Hebrew text. It was built on the Greek and Latin translations, read through later questions the text was not asking.

The Reformers pulled the doctrine back to Scripture, insisting that image and likeness together describe the whole person as created for God. Why does this matter beyond the seminar room? Because the two-storey view implies the fall knocked off the religious top floor while leaving the natural ground floor more or less intact. Scripture’s picture is both better and worse: the whole image-bearer survived, and the whole image-bearer is corrupted. Sin is not a missing storey; it is subsidence through the entire building.

What Image and Likeness Actually Mean

So what do image and likeness together mean? In the ancient world, kings set up images of themselves in distant provinces to declare their rule. Genesis takes that royal idea and democratises it gloriously: not one statue of the king in one temple, but every man, woman, and child a living image of the living God, commissioned in Genesis 1:26-28 to have dominion, to fill the earth and subdue it as His representatives. The image is not one faculty we possess but the whole of what we are and are for: made like God, to represent God, in relationship with God.

That is why theologians speak of structural, functional, and relational aspects of the image, and I have set these out more fully in my article on what it means to be made in God’s image. The aspects are all true together; the mistake is choosing one and discarding the rest, which is essentially what the image-versus-likeness split did.

Marred but Not Erased

Did the fall destroy the image and likeness of God in us? Marred, defaced, corrupted: yes. Erased: no. After the flood, God still grounds the sanctity of human life in the image, Genesis 9:6, and James 3:9 rebukes cursing people who are made in the likeness of God, present tense. Fallen humanity is a ruined temple, but a ruined temple is still recognisably a temple, and you may not vandalise it further.

Every doctrine of human dignity the church has ever defended, from the unborn to the elderly to the enemy, hangs on this. The image survives in every person you will meet today, which is precisely what makes sin against them so serious and grace toward them so fitting.

The True Image and Our Restoration

The New Testament gathers all of this up in Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God, Colossians 1:15, the exact imprint of his nature, Hebrews 1:3. What Adam was made to reflect, Jesus is. And salvation is described, remarkably, in image language: those God foreknew He predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, Romans 8:29, and believers are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, 2 Corinthians 3:18. Colossians 3:10 even echoes Genesis directly: the new self is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

So the storyline runs: image given, image marred, image incarnate, image restored. The gospel is not God scrapping His damaged statues but the Sculptor entering the workshop Himself to restore every one who comes to Him.

Why Image and Likeness Still Matter

This is not an antiquarian debate, because whole areas of modern life are decided by what we think image and likeness mean. If the image is a capacity, reason, say, or self-awareness, then those who lack the capacity, the unborn, the newborn, the profoundly disabled, the dementia patient, slide quietly out of protection, and the twentieth century showed where that road goes. But if image and likeness name what every human being is by creation, then dignity attaches to the being, not the performance, and no loss of function can revoke it. The church has always stood at this gate, and it must stand there now.

The doctrine also sets the agenda for your discipleship. If salvation is being renewed after the image of the Creator, then growth in Christ is not a religious hobby bolted onto life; it is your original design being restored, the portrait cleaned until the Subject shows. Every act of obedience, every sin put to death, every degree of glory in 2 Corinthians 3:18 is restoration work. Sit under the word, stay near the means of grace, and be patient with the process, because the Sculptor finishes what He starts, and what He is making of you is what man was always meant to be.

The Image and the Idols

There is a sharp irony in Scripture that ties this doctrine together. Fallen man refuses to be the image of God and instead manufactures images of his own, bowing to statues of wood and stone, and the psalmist observes that those who make idols become like them, blind and deaf. Idolatry is image-bearing run backwards: instead of living statues of the living God filling the earth with His likeness, dead statues of dead gods deaden their makers. Paul stood in Athens, surrounded by the finest religious art in the world, and announced that God does not live in shrines made by man, for we are His offspring.

That is why the second commandment forbids making images of God: He has already appointed His image, and it is you, and supremely it is Christ. The only likeness of God the world is authorised to see walks about in flesh and blood, loving its neighbour and keeping covenant. When the church grasps that, evangelism and ethics fuse into one calling: show the family likeness, and point to the perfect Image whose likeness it is.

It reaches parenting too. Every child eventually asks, in one form or another, what am I and why do I matter? The world will answer with performance: grades, looks, followers, medals. Genesis answers with bestowal: you are the image and likeness of God, valuable before you have achieved a single thing. A child anchored there can fail an exam without an identity crisis, and succeed without arrogance, because worth was settled at creation and confirmed at the cross.

So, now what?

Do not lose sleep over splitting image and likeness; the Hebrew will not let you, and the theology is healthier undivided. Instead, take the doctrine out into the week. The colleague who irritates you, the stranger on the bus, the person whose politics appal you: image and likeness of God, every one. Treat them accordingly. And if you are in Christ, remember that the Sculptor is at work on you, conforming you to the true Image, and He does not abandon His projects. What might change if you looked at the next difficult person you meet and thought, there stands a likeness of my Maker?

“Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth.” (Genesis 1:26, ESV)