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Early Hebrew defined “to create,” ברא, not as Grecian “ποίησις,”123 “making,” “fabricating” in an artistic, aesthetic, mimetic, visionary way, but simply as “to fashion” “to shape” “to build;”124 endowing creation with theological significance only in Old Testament Hebrew. It expresses God’s effortless, spontaneous creation, and is used exclusively of God’s action, says Anderson, to avoid any divine analogies to either potter, or architect who create from something (cf. Pss. 51:10 – H 51:12; 104:30; Isa. 43:1, 7, 15; 48:7), given that matter places limitations on God’s will, 125 as Al- Ghazali, too, counsels.126 When ברא was linked to “to make” or “to fashion,”127 עשה, of Genesis 1:26-27,128 and to “to form” and
123 Sanders, J.N. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia. “The Word.” Ed. Arthur Buttrick and Emory Stevens Bucke. Volume 4. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962. 868-869.
.The Old Testament Hebrew Lexicon. Brown, Driver, Briggs, Gesenius ברא 124 Strong’s Number 1254.
125 Anderson, B.W. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia. “Creation.” Ed. Arthur Buttrick and Emory Stevens Bucke. Volume 1. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962. 728.
126 Al Ghazali. The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God. Trans. By David B. Burell and Nazih Daher. Cambridge: The Islamic Text Society, 2009. 68-70.
.The Old Testament Hebrew Lexicon. Brown, Driver, Briggs, Gesenius עשה 127 Strong’s Number 06213.
128 Gen 1:26-27 “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” KJV . 27 “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” KJV tr.
It needs to be studied whether Plato’s Demiurge, or his account of Creation, in the Timaeus, speaks of man’s Creation in the Demiurge’s semblance. This needs to be compared to the many interpretations of the Hebrew understanding of “imago- Dei.” This means the God or Gods already possess a notion of likeness. This could support Creation out of the image of the Gods.
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