Paula

Lin,

Some say that the “us” is called “honorific plural” or something to that effect. It was common in ancient times to use the plural when referring to deities.

But if that were the case for the Bible, then we’d expect God to *always* use the plural when using a pronoun to refer to himself. Yet that isn’t the case. Granted it’s used more than we know about in English, since it isn’t typically translated as plural, but the exceptions argue against this honorific plural.

Some then theorize that “us” means the angels, but I think that’s pretty easy to dismiss.

The other possibility, to which I agree, is that “us” is the Trinity. The word there for God is “Elohim”, which is the plural of “Eloha”, so it literally reads “And he says the Lord Gods,  ‘Look, the human was as one from us…’ ”

The word “was” is the same root as that used in Gen. 1:2– “And the earth she was chaos and empty…” (In the young/old earth debate, old earthers prefer “the earth became chaos…”) So there is considerable debate between “was” and “became” on more than one topic.