The Tikvah Podcast

“God created man in His image: in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Thus reads verse 27 of the first chapter of Genesis, one of the most important lines ever written in history. The Hebrew phrase rendered as “in God’s image” is b’tselem Elohim, and that is the title of a new book that traces the extraordinary career of this concept, known in Latin as imago Dei, throughout the course of Western civilization. Written by Tomer Persico, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, the book is the biography of the idea that all human beings—not just kings or heroes—are created in the image and likeness of God. At the heart of the book is a deep irony: the religious idea of imago Dei contains within it the seeds of secularization; this religious innovation developed into a concept that would marginalize religion itself. The very emphasis on individual conscience and human equality that Judaism and Christianity cultivated eventually led to further questioning of law, and then