If G-d’s ‘let us make man’ implies others present, were those beings also part of what man was created in the image of?
Q. Here it seems that there is someone else besides Him, because He uses the plural. If those who are next to Him are angels, was man created in their image too?
In Hebrew, as in ancient Arabic and Latin, respect is conveyed by using the plural (“Pluralis majestatis”), sort of like the “Royal ‘we’” in English, where the king refers to himself as “we”. See for example Isaiah 19, 4 where the Bible uses singular and plural together regarding the Egyptian king: “… in the hand of hard (singular) masters (plural) and a brazen king”, where obviously that monarch is the one and only ruler. Similarly in Breishit 39, 40 regarding Potiphar, “And Joseph’s masters (plural) took (singular) him”; and (42, 30), regarding Joseph, “that man (singular), the masters (plural) of the land”; Shemot 22, 10, “its owners (plural) shall accept (singular) it”; and (21, 4) “if his masters will give (singular) him a wife”. None of these could have ever been misconstrued as referring to several, although they are all technically plural.
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