Elohim

Elohim (Hebrew: אֱלֹהִים, romanized: ʾĔlōhīm: [(ʔ)eloˈ(h)im]), the plural of אֱלוֹהַּ (ʾĔlōah), is a Hebrew word meaning "gods" or "godhood". Although the word is grammatically plural, in the Hebrew Bible it most often takes singular verbal or pronominal agreement and refers to a single deity, particularly the God of Israel. In other verses it refers to the singular gods of other nations or to deities in the plural.

Morphologically, the word is the plural form of the word אֱלוֹהַּ^[a] (eloah) and related to el. It is cognate to the word 'l-h-m which is found in Ugaritic, where it is used as the pantheon for Canaanite gods, the children of El, and conventionally vocalized as "Elohim". Most uses of the term Elohim in the later Hebrew text imply a view that is at least monolatrist at the time of writing, and such usage (in the singular), as a proper title for Deity, is distinct from generic usage as elohim, "gods" (plural, simple noun).

Rabbinic scholar Maimonides wrote that Elohim "Divinity" and elohim "gods" are commonly understood to be homonyms.^[1] One modern theory suggests that the notion of divinity underwent radical changes in the early period of Israelite identity and development of Ancient Hebrew religion. In this view, the ambiguity of the term elohim is the result of such changes, cast in terms of "vertical translatability", i.e. the re-interpretation of the gods of the earliest recalled period as the national god of monolatrism as it emerged in the 7th to 6th century BCE in the Kingdom of Judah and during the Babylonian captivity, and further in terms of monotheism by the emergence of Rabbinical Judaism in the 2nd century CE.^[2] Another theory, building on an idea by Gesenius, argues that even before Hebrew became a distinct language, the plural elohim had both a plural meaning of "gods" and an abstract meaning of "godhood" or "divinity", much as the plural of "father", avot, can mean either "fathers" or "fatherhood". Elohim then came to be used so frequently in reference to specific deities, both male and female, domestic and foreign (for instance, the goddess of the Sidonians in 1 Kings 11:33), that it came to be concretized from meaning "divinity" to meaning "deity", though still occasionally used adjectivally as "divine".^[3]

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