Elohim

Elohim (Hebrew: אֱלֹהִים) is a Hebrew word that functions both as a grammatically plural noun meaning "gods" or "deities" and as an abstract noun referring to the concept of "divinity" or "godhood." The word is morphologically the plural form of eloah, which itself is an expanded form of the Northwest Semitic noun 'il (related to the root meaning "to be strong" or "to be in front"). The plural ending -im normally indicates masculine plurality in Hebrew. However, when the term refers to the single God of Judaism in the Hebrew Bible, it typically governs singular verbs and adjectives, a usage that distinguishes it from its generic plural sense.

Hebrew Bible

In other biblical passages, Elohim takes plural agreement and denotes multiple gods, judges, or supernatural beings. The term appears over two thousand five hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, with meanings ranging from the general "gods of Egypt" to specific deities like Yahweh as the God of Israel, to seraphim, spirits of the dead (as when the witch of Endor summons Samuel), and even human kings or prophets. The phrase bene elohim ("sons of the Gods") parallels Ugaritic and Phoenician texts describing a divine council. An exact cognate exists in Ugaritic as ʾlhm, referring to the family of the creator god El and the Canaanite pantheon.

Grammar and etymology

Rabbinic scholar Maimonides considered "Elohim" (divinity) and "elohim" (gods) to be homonyms. One modern theory proposes that the term originated from a Proto-Semitic broken plural that was reanalyzed as singular, possibly as a polite form of address for the singular God. Another theory, building on earlier work, suggests that even before Hebrew was a distinct language, the plural elohim carried both a plural meaning of "gods" and an abstract meaning of "godhood" or "divinity," similar to how the plural avot can mean "fathers" or "fatherhood." This abstract sense was then concretized to refer to specific deities, domestic and foreign, while still occasionally used adjectivally as "divine." The term is central to understanding the development of monotheistic and monolatrist thought in ancient Israelite religion, as most singular uses of Elohim in later biblical texts imply a view that is at least monolatrist at the time of writing.