In the Beginning

Put together, the Hebrew of the first two verses describes God beginning to work on something rather than conjuring something from nothing. That reading is not a Latter-day Saint innovation — it is the reading most Hebraists give — but it happens to be exactly what the Restoration teaches.

Once you see it, the chapter stops being a list and becomes an argument. Days one to three build the containers; days four to six supply the contents. The seventh day then has nothing to make, and is instead blessed and sanctified — the first thing in scripture called holy.

Abraham 4 does two things at once. Its plural — the Gods — takes the Hebrew ʾĕlōhîm and the "let us make" of Genesis 1:26 at face value, describing a council. And its substitution of time for day removes the pressure to read the six days as twenty-four-hour periods, a question the Church has deliberately not settled.

Moses 3:5 is the addition most worth sitting with: "For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth." It supplies a category — a prior spiritual creation — that makes premortal existence a structural feature of the plan rather than an isolated proof text.

Latter-day Saint doctrine reads the image literally and relationally: God has a body of flesh and bones (D&C 130:22), human beings are His offspring (Acts 17:28–29), and the resemblance is of family rather than of metaphor. The Family Proclamation states it as doctrine — each person is "a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents."

Note also the last clause of verse 27. Male and female are both, and equally, the image. Whatever else the chapter is doing, it is not ranking them.