So I wrote something different here on my blog from what I wrote in Narrating the Torah and I thought I'd better do some homework to back up what I say.
See Genesis 1:25-27 in the table of contents, specifically this post. In it I go along with millennia of translations but I have changed my mind.
The -enu suffix does not always mean "our". My Hebrew word processor has a great function that lets you search your own files, so I did. I had to attach the "e" to a consonant so I used mem, tav, and dalet because of specific cases that suit my point. Out of 249 occurrences seven were odenu, which is always singular, and some were mimenu which can be either singular or plural.
How do you tell? What is it I always say? CONTEXT IS KING.
So what's the context of these two verses? Because naaseh is nifal 3rd masculine singular (NOT qal 1st masculine plural), they decree the making of humans. If Gd says "Our image", that's nonsense. Gd has no image. Judaism prohibits inventing an image for Gd, let along creating an image and claiming that it is Gd. All the more so as we know that people have gender and Gd does not.
Because Hebrew grammar allows the -enu suffix to be singular, b'tsalmenu is more likely to mean "in his image" than "in Our image". All the more so as there is no "Our" in creation. Verbs about what happened in creation are singular -- except for that other nifal decree for the waters to collect together, and it has to be plural because maim is a grammatical plural.
And those two nifal verbs divide the creation narrative neatly in half, with two THREE day intervals, at the THIRD day and the TWO TIMES THREE day. This is Olrik's classic Law of Three in his Epic Laws.
In the same way, ki-d'mutenu is also more likely to be singular. People are similar to people in a bunch of different ways -- and they are unlike Gd in all those ways except for one, which we don't get to until the denouement of the narrative, and another that we don't get to until the Gan Eden narrative.
And that throws out the window the argument that elohim ever was a plural in the creation story. When it refers to Gd, this word always comes with singular verbs. When it has plurals around it, it refers to mortals -- Genesis 6:2, Exodus 4:16 and Exodus 22:27 are examples.
It also throws out the window the idea that Genesis 6:2 is about gods having sex with mortals. Judaism would never allow such a thing. It comes from the mistaken idea that ben always means a genetic relationship. In Genesis 16:17 Avraham says he is ben meah shanah and there is no possible way to interpret that as him being the genetic descendant of a hundred years. If you call somebody a ben brit, you can't possibly mean that he is genetically related to a covenant. So in Genesis 6:2 we have people with the characteristic of being lords or masters or somehow the rule-makers, in my sense that elohim who is God is the rule-maker and the Tetragrammaton is the promise-keeper. But the bney-elohim are not gods.
And this all gets me into one of my pet peeves which is Gentiles writing about Jewish scripture. There's a three hour documentary on Internet Archive debunking alien astronaut claims and it would be fine except that the guy who did the documentary not only proves he knows nothing about Tanakh, he also drags in on it another guy who knows nothing about Tanakh, and at one point they burble about the Nefilim, whom I have debunked on my urban legend thread.
Plus they pretend to know what the Mahabharata says, quoting a translation of that. There is one, count 'em, one English translation of Mahabharata online, and I have compared it line by line to the Sanskrit (us retired people have time to do that sort of thing) and it is no better a translation than the horrible Septuagint is of Tanakh.
So I gave the documentary a one-star rating and told them why, then I went over on the website and gave him links to all my stuff here. It remains to be seen if the guy who posted the documentary is embarrassed enough to take it down, or the guy who made the documentary is embarrassed enough to go do his fucking homework.
So next time you see somebody claiming to know something about Tanakh or Mishnah or Talmud and it's not on a Chabad site, let me know. I mean, there's a sheet on the Sefaria site that burbles about something supposedly in Avot d'Rabbi Natan that isn't in there. Let me know, and I'll point you to data that proves you heard/read an urban legend.
In the meantime, here's the TOC for my Biblical Hebrew lessons, and here's the TOC for my urban legends page.
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