A different approach to interpreting Genesis
We encounter the phrase in the “image of god” in the very first chapter of Genesis on page 1, where it is stated “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.” There are many different ways this phrase can be interpreted. My way of interpreting this is in more of a symbolic way instead of a literal way such as that god might look like a human. I believe this saying is a veiled astrologically based idea. Vast majority of major religious traditions of antiquity (prior to Christianity) are deeply based in astrological principles, including Judaism (referring to the Kabbalistic tree of life for example). Considering Genesis is the Torah, a piece of Judaic scripture, it would not be implausible that this is indeed an astrologically based creationist reference, and it is actually quite probable when you consider how fundamental astrological ideas are to the Sefer Yetzira (The Book of Creation/Formation, the Kabbalah) and the core of the Jewish religion. With that said, to break down the phrase; God is usually associated with heaven, and heaven is commonly associated with the skies, or that which is above our earthly sphere. In the vast majority of cultures and religions of antiquity, the celestial bodies (planets and stars) are what composed the heavens where God, or Gods for polytheistic cultures, resided (many times the gods of various ancient pantheons actually represented said celestial bodies, such as in Greek and Roman paganism, to name a couple). Throughout these various religious traditions, it was commonly believed that man was composed of those heavenly bodies, or “gods,” as various organs and temperaments were of certain planetary or astrological influences. In other words, according to such astrological traditions, the formation of man's body and temperament are directly affected by those celestial bodies (“gods”). With that said, and the fact that Jewish mysticism is steeped in Astrology, it is highly probable that the phrase created in the “image of God” is a veiled astrological reference to man being created in the image of celestial influences.
On a different note, I did not bring this up in the class discussion, so I felt I would post it here in the blog. There is another way that some Jewish/Hebrew scholars approach reading the Old Testament, although this method is not a way of actually reading the outright text, but 'decoding it' so to speak to look for secret messages. This is not a literal way of reading it, but is an interesting topic which has yielded some interesting results, so I thought I would blog about it to bring it up to those who may not be familiar with this. Some people in this class may have heard of the “Bible Code” or the “Torah Code.” What those refer to are coded messages hidden within the original Hebrew Torah. It is important to understand that the Jews consider Hebrew to be a mystical language, with various unique aspects to the language (such as gematria, which means words of the same numeric value are directly related to each other (IE “god” and “love” in Hebrew have the same numeric value, so God would then be equal to love because of that connection). Also, the Torah is supposed to be given to humanity directly from God through Moses, which makes it a holy and mystical text to the Jews. Taking both of those points into context, it is believed that various secret messages and information can be extracted from the Torah using these methods. What they do is take the scripture, then form a grid using ELS, or equa-distant letter spacing, where they take a symbol at a given regular interval to form a grid just like a crossword puzzle. Then they search this grid for words and names to find secret messages within the grids. Many interesting results have been produced using this method, and there are many Rabbis who have dedicated their lives to this study. With that said, my post here does not do this topic justice, and for those who are interested in this topic, you should google for more in depth explanations.
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