Elohim

Elohim (Hebrew: אֱלֹהִים, romanized: ʾĔlōhīm [(ʔ)eloˈ(h)im]) is a Hebrew word meaning "gods" or "godhood". Although the word is plural in form, in the Hebrew Bible it most often takes singular verbal or pronominal agreement and refers to a single deity, particularly but not always the God of Judaism. In other verses it takes plural agreement and refers to gods in the plural.

Morphologically, the word is the plural form of the word אֱלוֹהַּ^[a] (ʾĔlōah) and related to El. It is cognate to the word ʾl-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 term elohim originated from changes in the early period of the Semitic languages and the development of Biblical Hebrew. In this view, the Proto-Semitic *ʾilāh- originated as a broken plural of *ʾil-, but was reanalyzed as singular "god" due to the shape of its unsuffixed stem and the possibility of interpreting suffixed forms like *ʾilāh-ū-ka (literally: "your gods") as a polite way of saying "your god"; thus the morphologically plural form elohim would have also been considered a polite way of addressing the singular God of the Israelites.^[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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