The image of God

“...the image of God is rarely applied to humanity as a whole in the rest of the ancient world (the major exception being in The Instruction of Merikare). When the image of deity was attached to specific individuals—invariably kings—in either Assyria or Egypt, it endowed the king with divine sonship and enabled the king to function on behalf of the deity. That is, the 'image of god' operated within the political/ bureaucratic model in which the ruling function of deity was carried out on earth by the king.”— Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology, pages 175-176