Female created

1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

This is a significant milestone here.  It's the first time we start a sentence with a word other than "and" since the very first verse which started "In".  In verse 16, there was an independent clause which started "he".  By my count, we had 50 independent clauses starting "and".  My English teachers would have covered this in red and screamed that it was essentially one massive run-on sentence.  But now we have three clauses, and not one starts with "and".

So what does "so" mean?  Informally, at least in modern English, it doesn't have to mean anything.  "So, anyway, ..."  More formally, it means "Because of what preceded."  There was the cause; so there was the effect.  That's a little interesting, because it's applied to God.  That suggests that God, like all things we're familiar with, is subject to laws of cause and effect.  But, that's not really the meaning here, exactly.  This seems more like the "so" following a rationale for acting, the basis for a decision.  God decided to create man because ... well, in this case, because God had said they should.  This is strong committee talk, really.  The creation subcommittee created man because the planning subcommittee said to do so.

Except that there's only one guy in the creation subcommittee; the "us/our" from the last verse has turned into "he/his".

We get into equally convoluted details understanding what got created.  We have three phrases: in the first God created "man"; in the second God created "him"; in the third God created "them" (male and female).  There seems to be a lot of leeway in how we could interpret this.

One extreme would be a sequential individual interpretation.  God made one male person; then another male person; then a third male and a female.  The "individual" part of this interpretation conflicts with our interpretation of the earlier verse, where we read "them" as indicating that "man" was the whole species.

The sequential species interpretation doesn't really make much sense.  God made the species, then God made the species, then God made both genders of the species.

The fully parallel species interpretation is wildly repetitive, but makes sense.  God made the species, which involved God making the species, specifically both genders of the species.  I'm going to go with this one, but there are several others options which are possible; this is a verse rich in multiguity.

Let's note that when trees and grains and fish and birds and animals were created, there was the "after his kind" explanation.  We don't get that here.  But we can interpret the "male and female" bit as standing in for a discussion of the reproduction of people, just as "after his kind" referred to the reproduction of the other species.

This brings up the point that people are very distinct here from land animals.  Created on the same day, sure, but (1) people look like God, which apparently land animals don't; and (2) people's reproduction is discussed differently; and (3) people have dominion over everything.

This verse has the repetitive "in his own image, in the image of God"; that's clearly an important point.  That point isn't emphasized in the third phrase, the one which hints at reproduction by mentioning sexes.  The pronoun "he", used for God, suggests that God is male.  However, the interpretation of "man" as describing the species, male and female, suggests that both are made in the image of God; or at least in the image of the committee members.  This hints that perhaps the committee members were of both sexes.


It's interesting that land animals aren't supposed to look like God, while people do.  To my eyes, people look like land animals.  There isn't really that much diversity in land animals; two (back) legs, and either two front legs or two arms.  One head with two eyes, two ears, a nose with two nostrils and a mouth with a tongue and a bunch of teeth.  That describes people, horses, apes, cats, lizards, elephants.  Also consider that people don't look that much like each other; is it obvious at a glance that a 4'10" skinny white woman with blue eyes and straight blonde hair is the same species as a 6'10" fat black man with brown eyes and curly dark hair?  Yet both of those are presumably in the range of the first group of people created, in God's image.