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; the ending -im is the ordinary Hebrew marker for a masculine plural, the same ending that turns one seraph into seraphim. Yet when the word names the God of Israel it almost always takes singular verbs and singular adjectives — “in the beginning Elohim created,” a plural noun governing a singular act.

Hebrew grammarians and later theologians have a name for this: a plural of majesty or of fullness, a single subject spoken of in an amplified form, much as a sovereign might. The word is not reserved for Israel’s God alone. In other passages the same term, with plural verbs, means simply “gods” — the gods of the nations, or the divine beings of the heavenly court — and in at least one place it is used of a human judge or of a departed spirit. What Elohim denotes is therefore set by its grammar and context, not fixed in the word itself; this is established philology rather than doctrine. The older critical scholarship made the word a tool of its own: the strand of the Pentateuch that prefers Elohim before the name YHWH is revealed was labeled the Elohist source, one thread in the documentary analysis of how the text was composed.

The plural form, neutral to a grammarian, became generative for the mystics. In Kabbalah the divine names are mapped onto the sefirot, the ten emanations through which the hidden Godhead unfolds, and Elohim is read there as a name of particular depth — associated above all with Binah, the great mother and the womb of the lower powers, and with the side of judgment and severity. On this reading the plural is no accident of speech but a trace of plurality within the one: the many gathered in the source. Heterodox and gnostic currents pressed the ambiguity further. Where some second-century teachers spoke of archons and a lesser creator beneath the true and unknown God, the plural in the opening of Genesis could be heard as the speech of a crowd of lower makers rather than of the highest. Such readings were, of course, exactly what the rabbinic and patristic traditions wrote against; they survive largely because their opponents quoted them.

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.

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