Dominic Bnonn Tennant (the B is silent)

Genesis 1

26

And God said, “Let us make Adam1 in our image, as ‹unto› our likeness, and let them hold sway2 in3 the fish of the sea and in the birds of the heavens and in the beasts and in all the land4 and in all crawlers that crawl upon the land.”

27

And 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.”

Footnotes

  1. Adam. Genesis 5:2 says that adam is the name God gave to humanity when he created them. Some translators thus render this as “humankind.” However, this leads to confusion, since it is clear that adam is also the name of the man specifically; it is a collective noun because we all come from him. We could therefore translate adam simply as “man,” as most Bibles do; however, this comes with two problems: firstly, “man” is not a name, as adam evidently is at times. Secondly, this gives us no way to distinguish between adam and the regular word for “man,” ish—the first instance of which only comes later, from the mouth of Adam himself, in comparison to issha, woman, during his poetic outburst in Genesis 2:23. Since Adam is a name everyone knows, it seems to me that leaving it untranslated is the best option, as we generally do for names. ↩

  2. 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. ↩

  3. in. I have chosen to consistently translate the Hebrew preposition in these verses, which really does mean “in” (cf. “in our image”). I have two reasons: Firstly, “in” maintains a better cadence than “over.” Secondly, the central idea of what God says is that Adam holds sway “in all the land,” which is perfectly comprehensible in English; thus, Adam’s holding sway “in” the fish etc can be read in light of this. ↩

  4. all the land. I resist translating erets as earth, since its central meaning is the land as opposed to the sky and sea; the face of the world which man inhabits. It does not refer to a “planet” as we tend to conceive it. ↩