Are women made in the image of God?

And God said, “Let us make adam in our image, as unto our likeness, and let them hold sway ❋ hold sway. I am following Robert Alter here. This is not the standard Hebrew word for rule or dominion (mashal; v. 16). I would prefer an idiom that gets closer to the meaning of the Hebrew root behind this word (“to tread down”); but I prefer “hold sway” to the traditional “have dominion” for two reasons: Firstly, it can be consistently used in every instance the word appears in scripture; secondly, “and let them have dominion” is seven arrhythmic syllables that butcher the cadence of the Hebrew’s three; “and let them hold sway” does much better. See Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: a translation with commentary (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), 12. in the fish of the sea and in the birds of the heavens and in the beasts and in all the land and in all crawlers that crawl upon the land.” 27And God created adam in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the land and subjugate it, and hold sway in the fish of the sea and in the birds of the heavens and in every living-thing that crawleth upon the land.” Genesis 1:26–28

Who is to rule in this passage? Clearly it is the same ones who are made in God’s image—adam (traditionally “man”). That is why God makes adam in the first place.

How then should we understand adam here? Is it a singular noun with masculine denotation: the man Adam? We can easily check by looking at who is given rule in this passage: it is both male and female; the text is explicit that God blessed them, and gave them rulership. So adam here cannot refer to the man only; it must be a collective noun with a neuter denotation: mankind. If the image and the rulership have anything to do with each other—and they surely do—both male and female are made in God’s image here. The symmetry of the passage requires it.

By the same token, the passage explicitly describes the recipients of the image as adam, created “male and female.”

Genesis 5:1–2 shows the same thing:

This is the scroll of the generations of adam. In the day God created adam, in the likeness of God he made him. 2Male and female he created them, and blessed them, and called their name adam in the day they were created. Genesis 5:1–2

When the passage switches to the plural form, the referent remains the same: adam. Both male and female are explicitly called adam here—“man”—and are said to be in the likeness of God. This is why many translations render adam as “humankind.” Sometimes the “gender-neutered” translations aren’t actually a liberal conspiracy. Sometimes it’s conservative Bible-believing scholars rendering gender-neutral terms in Hebrew as equivalently gender-neutral terms in English in an effort to keep bad readers from drawing bad conclusions that are just a mirror image of feminism.

God made men and women to image his dominion in the world. It seems that both feminists and extreme patriarchalists tend to think of dominion in terms of “high-profile use cases” like rulership over society—and since the Bible denies this to women, they therefore see it as treating women like beasts of burden with no place for dominion.

But Eve is pointedly not a beast of burden (Gen 2:20), and rule is pointedly not confined to authority over others. In the first chapter of Genesis, God carefully shows us what exercising dominion looks like:

Rule is about establishing right order. This is certainly imposed through an authority hierarchy (e.g. 1 Cor 11:3), which is why Paul can emphasize man as the image of God, with woman as the glory of man (1 Cor 11:7).

But mere authority does not exhaust dominion, and fulfilling the creation mandate is something that the man is explicitly not fitted to do alone (Gen 2:18). He needs a “helper opposite to him,” as the Hebrew puts it. This carries the connotation both of facing him as a reflection, but also of inversely corresponding to him; “helper” is ezer, meaning one who does for another what he cannot. Separately they are complete in themselves, and in their intended manner of imaging God; but that intended manner is incomplete with respect to completely ordering the world as God desires. Adam can subdue, but not fill; Eve can fill, but struggles to subdue. Together, they supply what the other lacks, and perfect the other’s natural virtues, duties, and abilities, to bring right order to every sphere of life.