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Plural of fullness and divine co-agent(s) of creation:
According to both ancient Christian interpreters such as the Patristics (St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, Tertullian, St. Basil of Caesarea) and in a refined form a number of modern scholars (i.e.
Hasel 1975:58–66), it may be a 'plural of fullness' - whereby the singular Creator is referring to Himself as having some kind of plural aspect within His own nature, such as an emanation of His unitary being acting as a divine co-agent of creation, like one finds in the
chokmah or personified Wisdom tradition attested in the biblical and extrabiblical sapiential literature in Proverbs 8:22–30 ("
I, wisdom...before the hills, I was born (holalti), when he established the heavens I was there...when [God] marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, as an amon (confidante, masterwork, little daughter)
; and I was daily his delight, playing before him always"), Wisdom of Solomon 7:22; 8:5–6 and Sirach 24, where Wisdom is pre-existent beside God from eternity at the creation of the world and humanity as a kind of emanation of his being, and is often characterised as the agent 'through' which He fashioned the universe and human beings: "
O God of my ancestors and Lord of mercy, who have made all things by your Word, and by your Wisdom have formed humankind to have dominion over the creatures you have made...give me the Wisdom that sits by your throne" (
Wisdom 9:1-2); "
[Wisdom] is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation (aporroia eilikrinēs) of the glory of the Almighty...she is a reflection (apaugasma) of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God (tēs tou theou energeias), and an image (eikōn) of his goodness" (
Wisdom 7:25-26).
Hasel notes that: "
Proverbs 8:31 may be understood to allude "to the topics of conversation
between Yahweh and Wisdom.""
While post-Jewish Christian doctrinal ideas of God being 'one essence in three hypostases (persons or subsisting relations)' i.e. Trinitarianism,
cannot be anachronistically imputed to an ancient Hebrew author with any degree of scholarly objectivity, this interpretation also cannot be dismissed, in light of the ancient Jewish tendency to 'personify' divine attributes such as the
Chokhmah (Wisdom),
Ruach (Spirit) and
Memra (Word) in a manner that treats them as akin to emanations of God with quasi-independent agency in creation
and the widespread creative inner-biblical exegesis that combined speculation on the different possible meanings of
be-re**** in Gen 1:1 with the language for Wisdom in Prov 8:22–31 ("
The Lord created me (qanani) as the beginning (re****) of his way." (
Proverbs 8:22)).
Important examples of the latter exegesis are the
Jerusalem Targum to Genesis 1:1 ("
In wisdom (be-hukema) the Lord created") and Genesis 1:27 ("
And the Word of the Lord created man in His likeness, in the likeness of the presence of the Lord He created him, the male and his yoke-fellow He created them"); the
Targum Neofiti to Genesis 1:1 ("
From the beginning, with wisdom, the Lord created and finished the heavens and the earth"); the
Fragment Targum, one of the oldest Palestinian targumim on the Torah, likewise translates the verse Genesis 1:1
be-re**** bara Elohim not as “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” but instead as “
through/by means of wisdom (be-hokhmah) God created and perfected the heaven and the earth" (
mileqadmin, “in/at the beginning,” and be-hokhmah, “through/by means of wisdom”): the tractate
Sanhedrin 38a in the Bavli/Talmud which reiterates this idea that God created the universe through Wisdom ("
The baraita explains: “Wisdom has built her house”; this is referring to the attribute of the Holy One, Blessed be He, Who created the entire world with wisdom").
This is the exegesis taken up by and reflected in the New Testament texts that exegete these passages, since they emerged from this particular theological strain within Second Temple Judaism, for example the Pauline hymn in
Colossians 1:15-16: "
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible... all things have been created through him and for him". (where the Son is identified with every possible meaning of both the
beth and the
reʾ**** of Gen 1:1; as the “firstborn” (vv. 15b, 18c), “beginning” (v. 18c), “sum-total” (v. 17b), “head” (v. 18a), and the one who is “preeminent” (v. 18e) and everything was created “in,” “through,” and “for/to” him).
Contrary to this but still in the same tradition of 'divine agency' at creation, the grand
Midrash Rabbah on Genesis also linked the
be-re**** of Genesis to the
re**** of Proverbs' Wisdom but interpreted
chokmah not as a quasi-independent and personified divine attribute or emanation, but rather as being synonymous with the Torah: "
The great Rabbi Hoshaya opened [with the verse (Mishlei 8:30),] "
I [the Torah] was an amon to Him and I was a plaything to Him every day." Amon means "pedagogue" (i.e. nanny)....
amon means "artisan." The Torah is saying, "I was the artisan's tool of Hashem." In the way of the world, a king of flesh and blood who builds a castle does not do so from his own knowledge, but rather from the knowledge of an architect...So too Hashem gazed into the Torah and created the world. Similarly the Torah says, "Through the reishis Hashem created [the heavens and the earth]," and reishis means Torah, as in "Hashem made me [the Torah] the beginning (reishis) of His way" (Mishlei 8:22)."
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Pluralis Majestatis:
A minority of interpreters, beginning with
Ibn Ezra (Rabbi Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra (1089-1164), have thought that it could be a
pluralis majestatis or 'royal we', in which case it is a purely rhetorical device. However, this theory is rejected by modern commentators for a variety of reasons, including that the 'royal we' is first clearly attested in usage by the Greeks of the eastern Roman Empire in the third to fourth century in the context of a diarchic or tetrarchic imperial order (more than one emperor in Constantinople reigning concurrently with at least one co-ruler Caesar in the West) and was not normative for ancient Israelite or Near Eastern rulers.
Plurals of majesty exist with nouns in the Hebrew language but there are no certain examples of plurals of majesty with either verbs or pronouns. Moreover, the verb used in Genesis 1:26 is never used with a plural of majesty, with Hasel thus concluding: "
There is no linguistic or grammatical basis upon which the "us" can be considered to be a plural of majesty".
Barnes Notes: ‘
Such was not the usual style of monarchs in the ancient East. Pharaoh says, “I have dreamed a dream” (Gen. 41:15). Nebuchadnezzar, “I have dreamed” (Dan. 2:3). Darius the Mede, “I make a decree” (Dan. 6:26). Cyrus, “The Lord God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth” (Ezra 1:2). Darius, “I make a decree” (Ezra 6:8). We have no ground, therefore, for transferring it to the style of the heavenly King':
"
There are no undisputed examples of a pronoun or a verb displaying the pluralis majestatis (in Hebrew); plural self-reference by a deity, e.g., ‘let us make humankind in our image’ (Gen. 1.26), has occasionally been explained as pluralis majestatis, but comparative Semitic and contextual factors favor other explanations (for further discussion, see GKC 398; Hasel 1975:58–66; Westermann 1981:144–145)" [
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS Volume 3].
