What is the difference between ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ in Genesis 1:26?
Question 05017
Genesis 1:26 contains one of the most theologically loaded sentences in all of Scripture: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” The presence of two terms has generated centuries of theological reflection. Do they refer to the same thing? Do they describe distinct aspects of what it means to be human? And does the answer affect how we understand the fall, redemption, and what Christ is restoring in us?
The Hebrew Behind the Words
The two Hebrew words are tselem (צֶלֶם) and demuth (דְּמוּת). Tselem is the more concrete of the two, used elsewhere in the Old Testament for physical representations, statues, and idols. It conveys the sense of a representation or copy that reflects its original. Demuth carries more of a comparative sense, suggesting resemblance or likeness in a relational or qualitative mode. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, renders them as eikon (εἰκών, image) and homoiosis (ὁμοίωσις, likeness), which are the terms the early church fathers worked with in their discussions of human constitution.
What happens in verse 27 is telling. The text reads: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.” Tselem alone is used, without the pairing from verse 26. The repetition of the single term, without demuth, suggests that the two words in verse 26 are not pointing to entirely separate realities. They are being used together in a complementary or emphatic way, with demuth qualifying the sense in which tselem is meant: not a precise physical duplicate but a genuine resemblance.
The Scholastic Distinction
Medieval theology, drawing heavily on Augustine and Aquinas, developed a careful distinction between the two terms. The imago was understood as the natural capacities common to all humanity, reason, will, and moral awareness, which the fall damaged but did not destroy. The similitudo was understood as a supernatural endowment of righteousness and holiness added to human nature by God, which was entirely lost at the fall. This distinction supported the Catholic framework of the fall as the loss of a supernatural gift (donum superadditum) while the natural image remained impaired but intact.
The Reformers largely rejected this division. Calvin argued in his Institutes that the distinction is “frivolous,” because the biblical writers use the words interchangeably and without the theological weight the scholastic tradition had loaded onto them. His own view was that the image of God encompasses the whole person and was profoundly corrupted, though not entirely destroyed, by the fall. The plain reading of the Hebrew text does not support reading the two terms as denoting different realities.
A Complementary Reading
The most defensible position from the Hebrew text is that tselem and demuth function as a complementary pair, with the second term clarifying or intensifying the first. This is a grammatical pattern found elsewhere in Hebrew prose and poetry, where two related terms are placed alongside one another to convey a richer single idea than either word would carry alone. The construction “in our image, after our likeness” is asserting a genuine representation of God, of the kind that is truly like Him, as opposed to a mere formal copy or distant echo.
This does not flatten the two words into simple redundancy. Tselem carries the sense of representation: the human person as a reflection or embodiment of something of God within the created world. Demuth carries the qualifying sense of genuine resemblance, actual likeness rather than merely structural similarity. Together they assert that humanity is created to represent God in a way that is genuinely like Him.
What the Image Involves
What the image and likeness actually consist in is a separate question from what the two words mean, and it is one Scripture answers more by showing than by defining. Human rationality, the capacity to think, reason, and order understanding of the world, reflects something of the divine mind. Moral awareness, the capacity to recognise right and wrong and be held accountable for choices, reflects God’s own moral character. The relational dimension of humanity, made for genuine relationship with God and with one another, reflects something of the inner life of the God who exists in eternal relationship within the Trinity. The call to dominion over creation (Genesis 1:28) gives the image an active, representative dimension: human beings bearing God’s image as His stewards within the world He made.
The image is perhaps best located in the relational and communicative dimension of humanity: the capacity for genuine relationship with God, for moral reasoning, and for meaningful speech. This keeps the concept grounded in what Scripture actually shows about human beings rather than importing philosophical categories from outside the text.
The Image After the Fall
Genesis 9:6 assumes the image still present after the fall, using it as the ground for the seriousness of murder: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” James 3:9 makes the same assumption in warning against cursing people “who are made in the likeness of God.” The fall damaged the image but did not erase it. Every human being, regardless of belief or behaviour, still bears enough of that original likeness to carry both the dignity and the accountability that come with it.
The New Testament connects the restoration of the image directly to the work of Christ. Colossians 3:10 speaks of the new self being “renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” 2 Corinthians 3:18 describes believers being “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” What the fall corrupted, Christ is restoring: the full expression of what it means to be genuinely human as God designed humanity to be, a work that reaches its completion in glorification.
So, now what?
The distinction between image and likeness does not resolve into a neat doctrinal formula, and that is probably right. What it does is protect the richness of what Genesis 1:26 is asserting: that human beings are not incidentally like God or accidentally capable of relationship with Him, but that this resemblance is part of the original design and that its restoration is part of the point of redemption. Every person encountered, believer or not, bears that original mark, however distorted by sin it may be. That is at once a call to treat people with genuine dignity and a pointer toward what the gospel is ultimately doing in those who receive it.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:27
