Why the First World Failed

When does saying “I am created in God’s image” become dangerous?

It sounds absurd. After all, this biblical idea—that human beings bear the divine image—is one of the foundational concepts of Western civilization. It has inspired human rights movements, declarations of dignity, and the abolition of slavery. How could such a truth also be dangerous?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his penetrating analysis of the book of Genesis, reveals a startling insight. The problem isn’t the idea itself—it’s that we get it backward.

After the creation of the world, violence consumed the earth. Genesis 6:13 reports God’s assessment: “The earth is filled with lawlessness.” Every corner of civilization had rotted from within. Human beings, those creatures fashioned in the divine image with such promise and potential, had embraced violence as a way of life. So God did what seemed unthinkable: He destroyed it all. Flooded the earth. Started over.

Eight people survived. When Noah finally stepped off that ark, you’d think God would try something completely different. New species, perhaps. Different design. But no—He began again with the same human beings, the same blueprint that had just failed spectacularly. God explicitly acknowledges that “the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). He doesn’t sugarcoat this after the Flood. We carry within us a gravitational pull toward selfishness, violence, and destruction. Creating us in His image didn’t eliminate that pull.

Which raises the question. If God didn’t alter human nature after the flood, or give Noah’s descendants some new capacity for goodness that Adam’s line lacked, how could God expect different results the second time around? The divine image didn’t stop humanity from descending into total violence the first time; why would it work the second time? What did God change after the Flood to prevent humanity from destroying itself again?

Rabbi Sacks noticed something remarkable between the creation story and the verses that appear after the flood. In the creation account of Genesis 1, one Hebrew word appears seven times—tov, meaning “good.” God looks at His creation and repeatedly declares it good. Light is good. The separation of waters is good. Vegetation is good. The sun and moon are good. Animals are good. All of creation, including humanity, made in the divine image, is very good. The repetition drives home a point: creation reflects divine design, and that design is fundamentally sound.

But after the Flood, when God establishes His covenant with Noah, a different word appears seven times: brit, meaning covenant. Not an assessment of inherent quality but a description of relationship. The shift from tov to brit signals that God has learned something about His creation—and that humanity needs to learn it too. The world isn’t going to be sustained by people being inherently good. It’s going to be sustained by people honoring covenants, by recognizing obligations that transcend self-interest, by entering into binding relationships with others.

This change reflects a harsh reality that the pre-Flood world proved beyond doubt: human nature, even when stamped with the divine image, bends toward corruption when disconnected from relationships with others. God changed His approach because the first version had catastrophically failed. And the key to that change, says Rabbi Sacks, appears in how the Bible discusses the divine image before and after the Flood.

The first version, in Genesis 1, proclaims our own divine image. It speaks of human dominion over creation, of power and potential.

When we read these words, we naturally think: I am made in God’s image. I have special status. I am significant.

Then comes the Flood—the biblical reset button—and Genesis 9 reframes everything. This time, the divine image appears in a verse about murder:

According to Rabbi Sacks, this isn’t repetition—it’s transformation. Genesis 9 doesn’t tell us that we are in God’s image. It tells us that the other person is in God’s image. This shift, from first-person to third-person, changes everything.

After witnessing humanity’s capacity for violence—a world so corrupt that it had to be washed away—God changed His strategy. We are each unique, yet we’re social creatures who need one another. When any individual begins to see themselves as godlike in relation to another human being, violence follows. The divine image, understood only as my special status, becomes a weapon. It elevates me while diminishing you. But when I recognize the divine image in you—especially in you who are different from me—everything changes.

That shift—from recognizing divinity in myself to recognizing divinity in the person standing across from me—represents the heart of God’s new covenant with humanity. The pre-Flood world collapsed because people saw themselves as godlike. When you believe you have divine status and divine power, the person in front of you becomes an object, a tool, an obstacle. You stop seeing them as carrying something sacred. Violence becomes easy. Murder becomes routine. The Bible doesn’t say the earth was occasionally violent or frequently troubled. It says the earth was filled with lawlessness. Total saturation. Complete moral collapse.

God’s solution after the Flood wasn’t to make humans less powerful or to remove the divine image from humanity. His solution was to redirect our attention. Stop focusing on the divine spark within you. Start seeing the divine spark in everyone else. Particularly—and this is where the teaching cuts deepest—in people who don’t look like you, think like you, or believe what you believe.

Rabbi Sacks points to a blessing in Jewish prayer that captures this principle. After eating or drinking certain foods, we recite a blessing that praises God as “borei nefashot rabot v’chesronan“—who creates many souls and their deficiencies. The phrase seems bizarre at first. Why thank God for making us deficient, incomplete and lacking? Because our deficiencies force us to need each other. If you had everything, you’d need no one. You’d be utterly alone, self-sufficient to the point of isolation. But you lack things. I lack things. What you lack, I might provide. What I lack, you might supply. Our incompleteness drives us together. Our differences create the necessity for relationship, for mutual dependence and for covenant.

This is why the foreigner, the outsider, the stranger who makes us uncomfortable isn’t a threat to be eliminated but an image-bearer to be honored. The person whose politics enrage you, whose theology seems wrong, whose way of life strikes you as alien—that person carries God’s image just as surely as you do. The pre-Flood world couldn’t grasp this. People saw difference as danger. They saw the outsider as an enemy. They saw those not like them as less than human. And the world filled with violence until God wiped it away.

We’re watching history repeat itself. The violence consuming our world today—the bloodshed in our streets, the wars between nations, the casual cruelty that has become background noise—stems from the same source that destroyed the first world. We see people different from us and we rank them. We measure them. We decide they’re worth less. Different skin color? Lower. Different beliefs? Threatening. Different nationality? Expendable. We’ve returned to Genesis 6, where human life became cheap because people stopped seeing the divine image in anyone but themselves and their own tribe.

The post-Flood covenant demands something harder than being good. It demands seeing God in people who aren’t like us. It demands recognizing that the human other—especially the human other who challenges us, who disturbs our sense of order, who represents everything unfamiliar—is made in the divine image and therefore possesses infinite worth. Adam knew he was made in God’s image. Noah had to learn that everyone else was, too. We live in Noah’s world, not Adam’s. We live under the covenant, not just under the declaration of goodness. And that covenant survives only when we see the face of God in the face of the stranger.

What changed after the Flood? God shifted humanity’s gaze from inward to outward, from self to other, from my divine image to yours. He established that the world wouldn’t be saved by people recognizing their own godlikeness but by people recognizing everyone else’s. That’s the covenant. That’s what brit means in place of tov. The world isn’t good because of what we are. The world survives because of what we owe each other—the sacred duty to see God’s image in every human being we meet, especially the ones who make us most uncomfortable. That’s the only thing standing between us and violence.