The Image of God in the Book of Genesis, A Study of Terminology

James Barr's The Image of God in the Book of Genesis is a scholarly philological study examining what the Hebrew phrase for humanity being made in God's image actually meant in its ancient Near Eastern context, written by one of the most respected biblical Hebrew scholars of his generation. Its authority rests on close linguistic and comparative textual analysis rather than theological argument for its own sake, and Barr's conclusions have been influential in shifting scholarly discussion of the phrase's original sense away from later doctrinal readings developed centuries after Genesis was written. As a technical philological study its scope is specifically the phrase's ancient meaning, not a survey of how the image of God concept was subsequently developed across the long history of Jewish and Christian theology, which is a separate and much larger body of literature.