Elohim

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Elohim is one of the principal Hebrew words for God in the Tanakh, and the one that carries an old grammatical puzzle on its surface: it is plural in form. The singular eloah exists but is rare — clustered in poetry and late prose, with the largest concentration in the Book of Job — while the ending -im is the ordinary Hebrew marker for a masculine plural, the same ending that turns one seraph into seraphim or one cherub into cherubim. Lexically the word is the plural of eloah, itself an expansion of the short, archaic el that the Northwest Semitic languages share — ilu in Assyrian, the cognate term across Phoenician and Ugaritic — so that the most exalted name of Israel’s God is built, at the root, from the most ordinary Semitic word for a god. Yet when Elohim names that God it almost always takes singular verbs and singular adjectives. The opening clause of Genesis is the standing example: “in the beginning Elohim created” — bara, a singular verb — a plural noun governing a single, undivided act.

The counts make the strangeness plain. The word stands in the Hebrew Bible on the order of two and a half thousand times; the bare singular eloah fewer than sixty. For the overwhelming majority of those occurrences the grammar is resolved in favor of the one: a plural subject, a singular predicate, a single God. The Jewish Encyclopedia’s philological article on the names of God states the situation directly — Elohim is plural in form though commonly construed with a singular verb or adjective, and this is most probably to be explained as a plural of majesty or excellence.

The plural of majesty, and what the form actually does

Hebrew grammarians and later theologians have settled vocabulary for this: a plural of majesty, of rank, of magnitude, or of fullness — a single subject named in an amplified form, much as a sovereign is addressed in the first person plural. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia records the same range of grammarians’ terms — plural of majesty or rank, of abstraction, of magnitude — and notes a fact that cuts against any naive reading of the form as a fossil of polytheism: the singular eloah appears to have come into common use only after the plural Elohim had long been the ordinary word. The plural is the older, settled form; the singular is the back-formation. On this account the -im expresses intensity and not number — the whole of deity gathered into one term, what some grammarians call a plural of potentiality. This is established philology, the description of how the language behaves, rather than a doctrine about how many the divine is.

The word is not reserved for Israel’s God alone, and here the same six letters slide across a wide span of senses fixed entirely by grammar and context. With plural verbs and plural adjectives, Elohim means simply “gods” — the gods of the nations whom Israel is told to put away, the powers named alongside Israel’s God when the texts set him against the divinities of the surrounding peoples, the Baal of the storm and the rest of the West Semitic pantheon — and, in a register the texts keep distinct from idols, the divine beings of the heavenly court, the assembly that stands in the divine presence. Psalm 82 stages exactly this: God takes a place in the council of el and renders judgment in the midst of elohim — one Elohim judging among many elohim. The plurality there is not a slip but a cosmology: a high God presiding over a graded company of lesser powers.

The reach goes further still, and downward. In the legal sections of Exodus the term is applied to human judges — those who render verdicts “before Elohim,” the magistrates who hold delegated authority. And in one strange scene at Endor, a woman who calls up the dead reports seeing elohim rising out of the earth: the departed spirit of Samuel, a single risen shade named with the same word that opens Genesis. A creator, a council of gods, a bench of judges, a ghost — the denotation is set by what governs the noun, not carried inside it. The standard lexical apparatus collects these senses side by side: gods in the ordinary plural sense; the supreme God in the intensive singular; and, by deference, rulers and judges.

That mobility made the word a working tool for the critical study of how the Pentateuch was composed. The strand of narrative that prefers Elohim in the generations before the personal name YHWH is disclosed to Moses — the disclosure itself a turning point dramatized at the burning bush — was labeled the Elohist source, one thread in the documentary analysis of the Pentateuch that ran through nineteenth-century scholarship. The name a text chooses for God became, on that method, a fingerprint of the hand that wrote it; the alternation of Elohim and the divine name was read as the seam between sources rather than as a single author’s variation. The method has been qualified and contested in the century since, but the observation that started it is older than any theory: the Torah does not call God by one name only, and the choice is patterned.

Philo: the name as a power

Long before the critical sources were proposed, the alternation of the divine names was already being read as doctrine rather than accident. Working in first-century Alexandria, Philo treated the two principal designations of the Greek scriptures — theos, which renders Elohim, and kyrios, “Lord,” which stands for the personal name — as the marks of two distinct Powers in the one God. Theos, the name behind Elohim, he assigned to the creative and beneficent Power, the Power by which the world is made; kyrios to the kingly, ruling Power, the Power by which what is made is governed. In Philo’s reading of the Cherubim that guard the way to the tree of life, the two winged figures are these two Powers, creative and royal, flanking the Logos that mediates between the unnameable Existent and the world. The grammatical fact — that scripture has more than one word for God — becomes, in his hands, a map of the divine activity. The plural form is not yet the issue for Philo; the plurality of names is. But the move he makes — reading the surface of the divine vocabulary as a coded account of the divine structure — is the move that the later mystics would make on the form of Elohim itself.

The Kabbalistic reading: the name on the side of judgment

The plural, neutral to a grammarian, became generative for the mystics of the Kabbalah, the central current of later Jewish mysticism. In their account the divine names are not labels for a God already complete behind them but channels into the structure of the Godhead — each name mapped onto the sefirot, the ten emanations through which the hidden infinite, the Ein Sof, unfolds into the worlds. On this map Elohim is read as a name of particular depth, associated above all with Binah, “Understanding” — the supernal mother, the great womb in which the undifferentiated overflow of the higher source first takes form, and from which the lower powers are born. Binah stands at the head of the pillar of severity, on the side of din, judgment and limitation; and Elohim, read there, is the name of God under the aspect of measure, restriction, and law rather than unbounded mercy. The plural of the name, on this reading, is no longer an embarrassment to be explained away. It is a trace — the many already latent in the one, the lower powers gathered, before their emergence, in the mother who will bear them.

The systematizers who fixed this symbolism are concrete and datable. In thirteenth-century Castile Joseph Gikatilla, in his Sha’arei Orah (“Gates of Light,” composed before 1293), organized the whole sefirotic structure as a hierarchy of divine names, working the names of God through the ten emanations and treating Binah and its appellations as the upper reach of the edifice — making the name-to-sefirah correspondence a transmissible, teachable map rather than a private vision. Two and a half centuries later, in Ottoman Safed, Moses Cordovero (1522-1570) gathered the inherited symbolism into the most comprehensive systematic theology Kabbalah ever produced, the Pardes Rimonim (“Orchard of Pomegranates,” first printed 1591), with a dedicated gate on the divine names and their lodging in the sefirot. For this tradition the question is never whether the verb is singular. It is what the plural noun discloses about the inner life of the One that contains, without ceasing to be one, the roots of all multiplicity. The reading runs alongside, not against, the philosophical austerity of Maimonidean rationalism, which had insisted that the divine names predicate nothing positive of an absolutely simple God — and the tension between the two ways of reading a name is one of the long arguments of medieval Jewish thought.

The gnostic reading: a crowd of lower makers

Other second-century currents pressed the ambiguity of the plural in a direction the rabbis and the church fathers alike would write against. Where some teachers of gnosis — the gnostic schools mapped in the heresiological reports — spoke of archons, ruling powers, and of a lesser, ignorant craftsman, a demiurge, set far beneath the true and unknown First, the plurals scattered through the opening chapters of Genesis offered an unexpected proof-text. “Let us make man in our image” could be heard not as the majestic self-address of the one God but as the speech of a crowd: a collective of lower makers, the seven planetary rulers and their chief, conferring over the fashioning of the human body. On this reading the Elohim of the creation account is precisely not the highest — it is the workshop of the lower demiurge and his fellow powers, and the plural form, far from a plural of majesty, is a literal count of the makers. The hidden God lies beyond and above them, unreached by the verse.

These readings did not survive in their own scriptures until modern times — the primary gnostic library at Nag Hammadi was not recovered until 1945 — but they were never wholly lost, because their opponents preserved them by attack. Irenaeus, writing against the heresies around the year 180, and Hippolytus after him, quote the gnostic interpretations in order to refute them; the demiurge’s plural council reaches us first through the very polemic that condemned it. The structure of the argument is older than the surviving texts: a plural in the sacred speech, read by one party as the fullness of the one God and by another as the chatter of his deficient understudies.

Scholarship and the textual record

The modern study of the name sits within the broader scholarship on the divine names of the Hebrew Bible. The standard treatment in English is Tryggve N. D. Mettinger’s In Search of God: The Meaning and Message of the Everlasting Names (Fortress Press, 1988), which traces the names — El, Elohim, the personal name, Shaddai, Sabaoth — as a sequence of theological developments rather than as fixed labels, treating El and Elohim as appellatives, titles applied to deity, against the personal name proper. The reference apparatus that fixes the word’s grammar and range of senses for general readers is older and in the public domain: the Jewish Encyclopedia article on the names of God (1901-06) and the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Elohim, which between them record the count, the eloah-after-Elohim sequence, and the grammarians’ inventory of plural-of-majesty explanations; the standard lexical apparatus on the word, collecting Gesenius and the Brown-Driver-Briggs senses, lays the spread — gods, the supreme God, the heavenly ones, judges — in a single column.

For the mystical afterlife the primary witnesses are hosted in part in this library: the Sepher Yetzirah, the brief and ancient “Book of Formation” that gave Kabbalah its vocabulary of the ten sefirot, and S. L. MacGregor Mathers’s The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887), the influential late-Victorian English rendering of portions of the Zohar by way of Knorr von Rosenroth’s Latin Kabbala Denudata — the channel by which the sefirotic name-doctrine, including the placement of Elohim at Binah, reached the English-reading occult revival. Gikatilla’s Sha’arei Orah and Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim remain the indispensable Hebrew sources for the name’s sefirotic placement; the philological frame for Philo’s two-Powers reading is fixed by his own treatises On the Cherubim and the Allegorical Interpretation, available in C. D. Yonge’s public-domain English in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library; and the gnostic readings are reconstructed from the heresiological reports of Irenaeus and Hippolytus together with the Coptic codices recovered in 1945.

Mainstream Jewish and Christian theology has held the line throughout: the plural form, on the standard view, takes nothing from the oneness it names, and the verb that governs it settles the matter. The interest of Elohim is that the same six letters could be made to carry monotheism, a plural of majesty, a court of lesser beings, and a hidden multiplicity within the divine — and that each reading could appeal to the grammar of the word as written.

→ In the library: Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) · Sepher Yetzirah (Westcott, 1911)

→ Related: The One · Emanation · Gnosis · Ein Sof · Kabbalah · Jewish Mysticism · Gnosticism · Baal · Philo Of Alexandria · Moses Cordovero · Joseph Gikatilla · Maimonidean Rationalism · Tanakh · Torah · Pentateuch · Jehovah · Logos