maggio 7th, 2012
There are some elements to note: first of all Greek translators have used two terms whose meanings are twofold:
• Omòiosin has an abstract value and clearly represents the concept of similarity.
• Eikòna, instead, has a more concrete value and represents any object showing the image of someone or something: a painting, a sculpture, a bas-relief, an inlay or embroidery work…
We must here recognize that by translating tselèm with the word eikòna, Greeks have come close to the very deepest meaning of this Semitic consonantal root.
Indeed, tselèm does not indicate the abstract concept of image as it is variously interpreted by religious literature and traditional theology, which try to provide different explanations: in fact, it denotes, specifically, “a quid of matter that contains an image”.
Greek translators have maintained the same value for both prefixes that have in Hebrew quite dissimilar meanings: in the biblical text, the two words indicating the image and the resemblance are in fact preceded by two different prefixes, B (be) and U (ki), which have different meanings; such differences are no small matter:
B (be) actually means “with, by…”.
U (ki) instead means “as, according to…”.
Therefore, it is correct to translate “ki-dmuté-nu “ with the phrase “katà omòiosin”, which means “as resemblance”.
Instead, it is less correct to translate “be-tsalmé-nu” with “katà eikòna” because this Hebrew code does not have the meaning of “as resemblance” but the precise meaning of “with the image” or better: “with – through – that material which contains the image”.
Accordingly, we would have not been created “in the image” of the Elohìm, but “with that material something that contains the image” of the Elohìm. Quite a key difference!
Here is the concrete and new evidence, always left out by traditional religious interpretations because it is non-compatible with the doctrine they want to spread and support…
Note also that the Genesis says that all creatures «were made according to their species», but this is not said referring to man: after the “divine” intervention, his species are different from his own original one!
But there’s more (and while continuing, let’s always keep in mind the Sumerians’ stories, when they assert that the item implanted into men was removed from ANUNNAKIS’ purified blood…).
Actually, the term tselèm denotes not only a concrete and material quid but also it contains, in the original meaning of the Semitic root, the concept of “cut off from…”.
Under the term “tselèm” (rWb) the “Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon” Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic15 writes the following definitions: «something cut off».
The verbal root rWb is translated as “cut off“.
• And what is it which contains the image of someone who can be “cut off, cut out, extracted”? There is only one possible answer: DNA!
If this is so, then it is easy to understand why the writer of Genesis has felt the need to repeat twice that we have been made “with his tselèm…the Elohìm’s tselèm”… He wanted to be sure the reader understood the concreteness of the event, the extraordinary nature of an act resulting from a decision of the Elohìm (the lords who came from above) to introduce something “really theirs” in this creature, which has thus received its life, the new life breath, directly from “gods”.
Could this extraordinariness be so difficult to accept as to induce the main early Jewish commentators to claim the reading and explanation of man’s creation had to be a prerogative of the few who had the ability to understand?
From “The book that will forever change our ideas about the Bible”, you can find it HERE
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