The Divine Council Part 4: “Let Us Make Man”
The Council, the Trinity, and Progressive Revelation
Hello brothers and sisters,
In Part 1, we established that elohim is a category term denoting divine or spiritual power and authority, not simply a name for God. In Part 2, we walked through Psalm 82, where God rises to judge the corrupt members of His own divine council. And in Part 3, we examined Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls each reveal a different layer of God's architecture for governing the nations. If you haven't read those yet, I'd encourage you to start there before continuing.
You can check them out below:
Now, here’s the key verse that has generated volumes of debate: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
It’s one of the most familiar sentences in Scripture. You’ve heard it in Sunday school. You’ve seen it on wall plaques. You may have memorized it as a child. It sits right there in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, and most of us glide right past it without stopping to ask the question that should stop us cold.
Who is God talking to?
Think about it. Up to this point in Genesis 1, every act of creation has been expressed in the third person singular. “God said, ‘Let there be light.’” “God said, ‘Let the waters be gathered.’” “God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth.’” God speaks, and it happens. No consultation. No collaboration. Just sovereign command.
And then, at the climax of creation, right before the most significant creative act in the entire narrative, the grammar shifts. The singular “God said” gives way to a plural proposal: “Let us make man in our image.”
The Hebrew is unmistakable. The verb נַעֲשֶׂה (na’aseh) is a first-person plural cohortative, a form that expresses a proposal or intention involving more than one party. The suffixes on “image” (בְּצַלְמֵנוּ, be-tsalmenu, “in our image”) and “likeness” (כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ, ki-demutenu, “according to our likeness”) are both first-person plural. “Our,” not “My.” “Us,” not “Me.”
Someone is being addressed. And we’re going to see who.
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Three Candidates for “Us”
Three major interpretations have been proposed over the centuries. Let’s look at each one with the seriousness it deserves.
Candidate 1: The Royal “We”
The simplest proposal is that God is using a “plural of majesty,” sometimes called the “royal we.” Just as a king might say “We are not amused” when speaking only of himself, God uses “us” to express His supreme dignity and authority.
This interpretation has a certain appeal. It doesn’t require us to identify anyone else in the scene. It keeps the focus on God alone. And it fits with the general observation that elohim, the word for God used throughout Genesis 1, is itself a plural form.
But there’s a problem, and it’s a significant one.
Hebrew scholars, including those who are not invested in any particular theological outcome, have pointed out that while the plural of majesty does exist in Hebrew for nouns, it does not apply to verbs and pronouns in the way this interpretation requires.
As the respected Hebrew grammarian Paul Joüon puts it in A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (revised and translated into English by Takamitsu Muraoka): “The ‘we’ of majesty does not exist in Hebrew.”
In other words, you can have a plural noun (elohim) used with a singular verb (”God created,” singular in Hebrew) to express majesty or fullness. That’s attested. What you don’t find in ancient Hebrew is a single speaker using first-person plural verbs and pronouns to refer to himself alone. There is no other example of this in the entire Hebrew Bible.
The royal “we” is a European courtly convention that became common in the medieval period. Projecting it backward onto ancient Hebrew is anachronistic. And since it doesn’t have the textual support it would need to be convincing, I think we can set it aside.
Candidate 2: The Divine Council
The second proposal, and the one championed most forcefully by Michael Heiser, is that God is speaking to the members of His divine council, the heavenly assembly we’ve been exploring throughout this series.
This reading has strong support from the broader context of the Hebrew Bible. We’ve already seen that God consults His council in 1 Kings 22:19-22, where He asks the assembled heavenly beings how to deal with Ahab and authorizes one of them to carry out a plan. We’ve seen God speak to His council in Isaiah 6:8, using the same kind of plural language: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?”
And Genesis 1:26 isn’t the only place in the Pentateuch where this pattern appears. In Genesis 3:22, after Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit, God says, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil.” In Genesis 11:7, at the Tower of Babel, God says, “Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language.” The same plural pronouns. The same pattern of a divine “We” in contexts where decisions affecting humanity are being made.
Ancient Jewish interpreters recognized this. The Targum of Palestine (also known as Targum Pseudo-Jonathan), an Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, explicitly interprets Genesis 1:26 as God speaking to “the angels who ministered before Him, who had been created in the second day of the creation of the world.” The same Targum interprets Genesis 3:22 as God speaking to “the angels who ministered before Him.” And for Genesis 11:7, it reads: “The Lord said to the seventy angels which stand before Him, ‘Come, we will descend.’”
Now, understand that these are not Christian scholars reading their own theology back into the text. They’re not being eisegetical or reaching for data points the text doesn’t support. These are Jewish scholars, working within a Jewish theological framework, who understood the plural pronouns as God addressing His heavenly court.
That’s significant. It tells us that the divine council reading isn’t a modern invention; it’s an ancient Jewish interpretation with deep roots.
Heiser’s argument builds on this foundation. An ancient Israelite hearing Genesis 1:26 would have immediately understood the plural as God addressing His heavenly court. The concept of a divine assembly was part of their worldview. They would have heard “Let us make” the same way we might hear a CEO say “Let’s build this product,” understanding that he’s announcing a decision to his team, not inviting them to do the engineering.
And there’s a crucial grammatical detail that supports this: the shift from plural announcement to singular execution. Genesis 1:26 says, “Let us make man.” But Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created (וַיִּבְרָא, vayyivra, singular) man in His own image; in the image of God He created him.” The announcement is plural; the action is singular. God proposes to the council and then creates alone. The council does not participate in the creative act. They witness it. They hear the announcement. But the creation of humanity is God’s work and God’s alone.
This is exactly the pattern we see in 1 Kings 22. God consults His assembly, but God makes the decision. The council witnesses, attends, and participates in the deliberation, but the sovereign acts.
Heiser argues that this reading is “correct” and that the Trinitarian interpretation is anachronistic, reading later Christian theology back into a text that its original author and audience would not have understood that way.
I think he’s half right.
Candidate 3: The Trinity
The traditional Christian reading is that God the Father is speaking to God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The “us” reflects the plurality of persons within the one Godhead. This is the reading that most Christians have been taught, and it’s the interpretation that has dominated Christian theology for nearly two millennia.
The argument builds from multiple lines of evidence within Genesis 1 itself, before we even get to the New Testament.
First, the Spirit is already present in the narrative. Genesis 1:2 tells us that “the Spirit of God (רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים, ruach elohim) was hovering over the face of the waters.” The Hebrew word רוּחַ (ruach) can mean “wind,” “breath,” or “spirit,” and there has been some scholarly debate about whether this refers to the Holy Spirit, a divine wind, or God’s breath. But the phrase ruach elohim is used elsewhere in Scripture to describe the Spirit of God acting with power and purpose (see Judges 3:10, 1 Samuel 10:6, 11:6).
The Spirit is present at creation. He’s not just scenery. He’s hovering, the Hebrew word מְרַחֶפֶת (merachephet) suggesting a vibrating, brooding, nurturing presence, the way a bird hovers over its nest. The Spirit is actively involved in the creative process from the very first verses.
Second, the New Testament reveals that the Son was active in creation. John 1:3 says, “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.” Colossians 1:16 declares, “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible.” Hebrews 1:2 says God “has in these last days spoken to us by His Son... through whom also He made the worlds.”
So by the time we reach Genesis 1:26, both the Spirit and the Son are present in the narrative, whether the reader can see them yet or not. The Spirit has been hovering since verse 2. The Son, as the New Testament reveals, has been the agent through whom every “Let there be” has been executed. When God says “Let us make man in our image,” the Trinity is already in the room. The question is whether the reader has the revelation necessary to recognize them.
This reading has the full weight of Christian orthodoxy behind it, and it’s supported by the entire witness of the New Testament.
But Heiser’s objection is worth taking seriously: is it sound interpretation to read a later theological development back into an earlier text? Did Moses intend to communicate the Trinity when he wrote Genesis 1:26? Could his audience have understood it that way?
The Both/And: Progressive Revelation at Work
I want to be very direct about where I stand on this, because it’s a place where I disagree with Heiser and I think his error, while understandable, is significant.
I believe both readings are true, simultaneously. And I believe the Trinitarian meaning is deeper and more ultimate than the divine council reading, even though the divine council reading may be closer to what the original human audience understood.
Let me explain.
I encountered the Holy Spirit and became a believer in Jesus about three years ago. Before that, I spent more than thirty years outside the faith, most of them as what I’d call an agnostic pagan. I wasn’t looking for God. I wasn’t open to God. And when I finally started reading the Bible with an open mind and heart, I wasn’t reading it as a believer.
I read it as a man who’d thought he had it all figured out then encountered evidence that had never reached me before. I was hopeful, but still very, very skeptical.
When I first read Genesis 1:26, I didn’t see the Trinity. I couldn’t have seen the Trinity. I didn’t know what the Trinity was. I had a vague sense from scraps that I remembered from my Mormon upbringing that Christians believed in “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” and that somehow they are all supposed to be one, but I couldn’t have explained the doctrine no matter how much money you offered me.
No matter what you threatened me with.
I saw a plural pronoun, “Let us make man in our image,” and I thought it was… both contradictory as well as confirmation of what I’d believed my entire adult life. It struck me as proof that the ancient Hebrews weren’t as monotheistic as they claimed to be.
It was only after I had read the entire Bible (twice), wrestled with the New Testament, grappled with who Jesus claimed to be, and eventually surrendered to the reality that this was all true, that I went back to Genesis 1:26 and saw it with newly opened eyes.
The same words were on the page. Nothing had changed in the text. But I had changed. I had received a fuller revelation. And now I could see what had been embedded in the text all along.
That experience, more than any academic argument, is why I believe in progressive revelation. I lived it. I experienced firsthand what it’s like to read a text at one level of understanding and then return to it with deeper knowledge and see layers that were invisible before. Not because the layers weren’t there, but because I didn’t have the eyes to see them yet.
And truthfully, that pattern repeats every time I read the Bible. No matter how many times I read it, every time I do I come away with a deeper layer than I got the time before.
That’s how progressive revelation works. And it’s the key to resolving this debate.
The original audience, Moses and the Israelites, lived in a world where the concept of a divine assembly was common. When they heard “Let us make man,” they would have understood God speaking to His heavenly court. They weren’t wrong. That’s a real and valid layer of meaning. God does preside over a council. God does make announcements in the presence of His heavenly assembly. The “us” does include the council, at minimum, as witnesses to the announcement.
But the divine Author of Scripture, the God who inspired Moses to write these words, knew something that Moses didn’t fully grasp. He knew that His own Son would one day be revealed as the agent of creation. He knew that the Spirit who hovered over the waters in Genesis 1:2 would one day be poured out at Pentecost. He knew that the “us” of Genesis 1:26 would one day be understood in its fullest sense as a Trinitarian statement.
The Trinitarian meaning was always embedded in the text. It was placed there by the divine Author, even if the human author and his audience couldn’t see it in its completeness. It was a seed planted in Genesis that would bloom in the Gospels.
This is not anachronism. This is the nature of inspired Scripture. The human author writes what he understands. The divine Author embeds deeper truths that will be progressively revealed over the centuries. Both levels of meaning are real. Both are “there” in the text. One is accessible to the original audience; the other becomes visible only in the light of fuller revelation.
Heiser argues that the divine council reading is “correct” and the Trinitarian reading is anachronistic. I think he’s wrong, but I understand why he says it. He’s applying a hermeneutical method that privileges the original audience’s understanding as the sole meaning of the text. That’s a defensible method for human literature. But the Bible isn’t merely human literature. It has two authors: one human, one divine. And the divine Author’s intended meaning may go beyond what the human author consciously understood.
Paul himself acknowledges this principle. In 1 Corinthians 2:7-8, he writes: “We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew.” God’s wisdom was hidden, ordained before the ages, and revealed progressively. The Old Testament is full of truths that were “hidden” in plain sight until the right moment of revelation.
Matthew 2:15, referencing Hosea 11:1 (“Out of Egypt I have called my son.”) is a perfect example of this. Neither Hosea nor his audience could ever have recognized this as a messianic prophecy. Only by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit did Matthew pull that out as a reference to Messiah.
And Genesis 1:26 is another such example.
Proverbs 8: Wisdom at Creation
There’s a passage in the Old Testament that bridges the gap between the divine council reading and the Trinitarian reading, and it’s one that deserves much more attention than it usually gets.
Proverbs 8:22-31 presents personified Wisdom speaking about her role in creation:
“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old. I have been established from everlasting, from the beginning, before there was ever an earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth... When He prepared the heavens, I was there; when He drew a circle on the face of the deep... then I was beside Him, as a master craftsman (אָמוֹן, amon). And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in His inhabited world, and my delight was with the sons of men.” (Proverbs 8:22-31, NKJV)
The Hebrew word אָמוֹן (amon) in verse 30 is debated. Some scholars translate it as “master craftsman” or “architect,” suggesting Wisdom was actively involved in the work of creation. Others translate it as “nursling” or “darling child,” suggesting Wisdom was a beloved companion present during creation. The LXX rendered it ἁρμόζουσα (harmozousa), which can mean “fitting together” or “joining,” again suggesting active participation in the creative process.
Either way, the picture is extraordinary. A figure exists alongside God from before creation. This figure is intimately present during the creative acts. This figure is God’s delight. And this figure rejoices in humanity.
Now, the early church fathers recognized something in this passage. They saw Wisdom personified as a distinct entity alongside God, present before creation, active in creation, delighting in humanity. And they connected it to what John would later write:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:1-3, NKJV).
Proverbs 8 doesn’t use the word “Trinity.” It doesn’t name the Son. But it presents a picture of a divine figure alongside God in creation, a picture that the New Testament fills in with breathtaking clarity. The Wisdom who was beside God as a master craftsman is the Word through whom all things were made. The delight of the Father before the world began is the Son whom the Father loved before the foundation of the world (John 17:24).
This is what I mean by progressive revelation. Proverbs 8 sits between Genesis 1:26 and John 1:1 on the timeline of revelation. It fills in details that Genesis only hints at. And it prepares the reader for the full Trinitarian revelation that the New Testament delivers.
The “us” of Genesis 1:26 is answered, in part, by Proverbs 8. Wisdom was there. The master craftsman was beside Him. And that master craftsman, the New Testament tells us, is the eternal Son.
The New Testament Makes It Unmistakable
Let’s be clear about what the New Testament actually claims about Christ and creation, because these are not ambiguous statements.
John 1:1-3:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.” (NKJV)
Notice the echoes of Genesis 1: “In the beginning,” “was with God,” “all things were made.” John is deliberately reaching back to the creation account and filling in who the “us” was.
Colossians 1:15-17:
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.” (NKJV)
Notice that Paul lists “thrones, dominions, principalities, powers”— the very categories of the divine council —as things created through Christ. Christ isn’t one of the council members. He’s the one through whom the council members themselves were made.
Hebrews 1:2:
“...has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds.” (NKJV)
The author of Hebrews states it plainly: God made the worlds through the Son. The Son was the agent of creation. When God said “Let there be light,” the Son was the one through whom the light came into being.
These passages don’t merely suggest Christ’s involvement in creation. They state it explicitly. And they do so in language that echoes and expands Genesis 1. The New Testament writers are not reading the Trinity back into Genesis; they are revealing what was always embedded there, hidden in the “us” and the “our” and the Spirit hovering over the waters.
Why This Matters: A Methodological Principle
Before I close, I want to step back and state a principle that governs not just this post but this entire series.
Progressive revelation doesn’t invalidate earlier understanding. It completes it. In much the same way that Messiah Himself came to fulfill the Torah.
When Moses heard “Let us make man in our image,” he heard something real. He heard God speaking to His heavenly assembly. That was true. It was the level of understanding available at that stage of revelation. And it wasn’t wrong.
But it wasn’t the whole truth.
The whole truth is that the “us” of Genesis 1:26 includes the Son and the Spirit, who were present and active in creation. The divine council was there too, as witnesses to the greatest announcement in the history of the cosmos. But the deepest layer of meaning, the Trinitarian layer, was embedded by the divine Author and made visible only when the Son was revealed.
This is how I read the Old Testament as a Christian. Not by ignoring what the original audience understood, but by holding their understanding alongside the fuller revelation that came later. The original audience’s reading is the first floor of a building. The New Testament revelation is the upper floors. You don’t demolish the first floor to build the upper ones. You build on it.
Heiser, in my view, wants to stop at the first floor. He argues that the divine council reading is the “correct” one and the Trinitarian reading is an imposition. I think he’s right that the council reading is valid and important. I think he’s wrong that it’s the only valid reading. The divine Author’s intent goes deeper than the human author’s awareness, and the New Testament makes that deeper intent explicit.
Both/and. Council and Trinity. The announcement to the heavenly assembly and the eternal collaboration of Father, Son, and Spirit. Not one or the other. Both, operating simultaneously, revealed progressively.
If you found this helpful or enlightening, or even challenging, share it with a friend who needs to hear the deeper truths of the divine council.
What This Means for You
If you’ve been following this series, you’ve now seen the divine council from four angles: what elohim means (Part 1), how God judges the corrupt council (Part 2), how the nations were assigned to divine beings (Part 3), and now how the council was present at creation alongside the triune God.
The picture that emerges is this: God has always governed through relationship. He didn’t need a council. He didn’t need angels. He didn’t need us. But it pleased Him to create, to delegate, to share the joy of His purposes with others. The council witnesses His creative acts. The Son participates in them. The Spirit moves over the waters. Humanity is made in the image of a God who is, in His very nature, relational.
And those two words in the Hebrew, צֶלֶם (tselem, “image”) and דְּמוּת (demuth, “likeness”), deserve a moment of reflection. Tselem has the sense of a physical representation, a carved image, a statue that represents a king in his absence. In the ancient Near East, kings would place their tselem in conquered territories to represent their authority. When God makes humanity in His tselem, He is placing His representatives in the earth, His image-bearers who carry His authority into the created world. Demuth carries the sense of resemblance, of similarity, of pattern. Together, the two words say that we are both God’s representatives (carrying His authority) and God’s reflections (resembling His character).
And notice: God says “in our image, according to our likeness.” Not “in My image.” If the “our” includes both the council and the Trinity, then humanity is made to reflect something of the entire divine community, the relational God who exists in eternal fellowship and governs through His assembled host. We are made for relationship because the God whose image we bear is Himself relational to His very core.
When you read “Let us make man in our image,” you’re not reading a grammatical curiosity. You’re reading the moment when the relational God announced His intention to create beings who would reflect His relational nature. We are made in the image of a God who exists in community, who consults His council, who creates through His Son, who animates through His Spirit.
You are not an accident. You are not an afterthought. You are the product of a divine announcement, spoken in the hearing of the heavenly host, executed by the eternal Son, and breathed into life by the Spirit of God.
That’s who you are. That’s whose image you bear. And that’s the story this series is telling.
What’s Ahead
In Part 5, we’re going to confront the most disturbing passage in this entire series: Genesis 6:1-4.
The sons of God, the daughters of men, the Nephilim. This is the moment when members of the divine council didn’t just govern corruptly, as Psalm 82 describes, but crossed the most fundamental boundary in creation by taking human wives and producing hybrid offspring.
We’ll look at the text in both the Hebrew and the Greek, examine why the Sethite interpretation that many Christians were taught in church doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and trace the New Testament’s confirmation of the supernatural reading through Jude and 2 Peter.
This is the passage that convinced me the divine council framework isn’t optional. I think it might do the same for you.
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“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of ALL creation. 16 For BY HIM ALL things were created, IN HEAVEN and on earth, visible and invisible, whether *thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities*—ALL things were created THROUGH HIM and FOR HIM. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Progressive revelation. Your argument for that position holds water for me as tangentially I personally experience progressive knowledge, understanding and wisdom when studying scripture. Truly a living breathing Word and not static as I find fresh new pieces of all three so often even in most familiar verses and sections. Case point, Col. 1:15-17 that you referenced. Even being mindful of Christ’s role in creation and His being the Word, I’d missed the significance and implication of His role in creating other Elohim! WOW! Right there. And yet I’d been overlooking that aspect! So again, I find myself seeing your take in stride with Heiser’s: the “us” as being both/and. Divine Council and trinity. Yet, I can too see how the presence of a trinitarian dialogue could be used to challenge Yahweh was speaking to a divine council, if not also looking at psalm 82 and other textual support well cited by Heiser (Though may I here confess I sometimes find myself still wrestling with Trinitarian versus biblical Unitarian or binatarian views and as such struggle to make a hard landing on any of the three? Maybe it’s a topic you’ve previously addressed or wouldn’t mind sharing views at some point if not?)
Eagerly looking forward to reading the rest of series!
Good insights. Looking forward to part 5.