What Does Elohim Mean in the Bible? The Hebrew Word for God

Elohim is the Hebrew word for God. It is the first word Scripture uses for him: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), and the word behind “God” there is Elohim. It is plural in form, but when it names the God of Israel it takes a singular verb and means one God.

Read the first page of the Bible and Elohim is everywhere. From Genesis 1:1 to the seventh day the word comes 35 times, and nearly every time God is doing something: he creates, speaks, sees, divides, names, blesses and rests. The word was an ordinary one. The peoples around Israel used words like it for their own gods. Genesis takes that common word and fills it with a single Maker, who speaks the world into being and then looks on all of it: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).

Elohim means God, and it can also mean gods. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon counts it about 2,570 times in the Old Testament and gives it a range of senses: the gods of the nations, divine beings and angels, rulers and judges, and above all “the (true) God”, the God of Israel. The singular form, Eloah, is much rarer. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that it occurs “only in poetry and late prose (in Job, 41 times)”. Both are probably related to El, the short Semitic word for God, which the Canaanites also used; Strong’s concordance calls Eloah “probably prolonged” from El.

Where the word itself comes from is uncertain. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 says plainly that “the root-meaning of the word is unknown”, and calls a link with an old Arabic verb, meaning to be afraid and to seek refuge, only “the most probable theory”. On that reading Elohim would be “He who is the object of fear or reverence”, or “He with whom one who is afraid takes refuge”. It remains a guess, not a certainty, but it is a lovely one: the God we fear is the God we run to.

Because Hebrew uses the plural for more than counting. Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar explains that Hebrew can use a plural to gather up the fullness of a thing, which grammarians call a plural of excellence or of majesty. Elohim is its chief example, and the grammar is firm about what follows: “the language has entirely rejected the idea of numerical plurality” in Elohim “whenever it denotes one God”. The proof is in the sentences. Elohim is “almost invariably joined with a singular attribute”, and in Genesis 1:1 its verb, bara, is singular: he created. Jewish grammarians, Gesenius adds, called such words a plural of powers.

The Bible even uses Elohim for a single false god. Jephthah sends word to the king of Ammon (Judges 11:12), “Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess?” (Judges 11:24), and the Hebrew for “thy god” there is a form of Elohim, used of one god. First Kings speaks of the worship of “Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians” (1 Kings 11:33), and the lexicon lists the same plural word there for a single goddess. A plural word for one god was ordinary Hebrew.

Not every scholar explains it the same way. Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok, in her introduction to Judaism, mentions the suggestion that the plural is “a final remnant of archaic polytheistic beliefs” or a “royal we”, and says that most scholars think Israel took the word over from Canaanite speech, in which people “seem frequently to have addressed their individual gods as ‘my gods.’” Gesenius thought the polytheistic explanation “highly improbable”. Either way, the faith of Israel left no room for many gods: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4), and the word “our God” in that sentence is a form of Elohim.

Jews and Christians have read a plural differently, and the clearest place to see it is Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” The plural there is not the noun Elohim, which still takes a singular verb, “said”. It is the pronoun “us” and the verb “let us make”. Then, at once, “So God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27). God speaks as “us”, and acts as “he”.

Grammarians have weighed that “us” too. Gesenius rejects the old idea of a royal “we” and sets out the readings: the “us” may be “communicative”, taking in the attendant angels, or it may express God’s fullness of power, “but it is best explained as a plural of self-deliberation”, God resolving within himself to act.

Jewish tradition has heard the “us” as God speaking to his heavenly court. Rashi, the great medieval Jewish commentator, says that God “took counsel” with the angels, and draws a lesson in humility from it: the verse teaches “that the greater should consult, and take permission from the smaller”. He adds that the very next verse answers anyone who would find more than one God here, since “it is not written ‘and they created’”. For Jewish readers, Genesis 1:26 says nothing against the oneness of God.

Christians have heard the Son speaking with the Father. In the second century Justin Martyr, arguing with a Jew named Trypho, built his case on the “us”: in this verse, he said, God “conversed with some one who was numerically distinct from Himself, and also a rational Being”: the Son, who “was with the Father before all the creatures”. Many Christians still read Genesis 1 that way, in the light of the New Testament. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it with care. God “has left traces of his Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation throughout the Old Testament”, but the Trinity remains “a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel’s faith before the Incarnation of God’s Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.” The plural form of Elohim does not prove the Trinity. Christians believe in the Trinity because of Jesus, who sent his disciples to baptise “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19), and they find the Old Testament’s first page ready to hold that faith. There is more in what the Bible says about the Holy Trinity.

No. The context decides. The commandment “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) uses Elohim for the gods of the nations. In the law of Moses a dispute “shall come before the judges” (Exodus 22:9), and the Hebrew for “the judges” is ha-elohim. Psalm 82 pictures God judging among the “gods”, whom many take to be rulers who would “judge unjustly” (Psalm 82:2); the lexicon notes that other scholars read them as angels. God says to them, “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High” (Psalm 82:6). Jesus quoted that verse when he was accused of blasphemy: “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” (John 10:34).

The word can reach from the highest to the lowest. Psalm 8 says of man, “thou hast made him a little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:5), where the Hebrew has Elohim. The King James follows the ancient Greek translation here, as the letter to the Hebrews does (Hebrews 2:7); the lexicon notes that the Revised Version and most modern scholars of its day read “God”. God tells Moses, “See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh” (Exodus 7:1). And the medium Saul consulted tells him, “I saw gods ascending out of the earth” (1 Samuel 28:13), using the same word for the spirit of Samuel.

One use points further. Psalm 45 addresses the anointed king: “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever” (Psalm 45:6). The lexicon calls him “the Messianic king”, and the letter to the Hebrews applies the verse to Christ: “But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever” (Hebrews 1:8).

Elohim is a word for God. Yahweh, the four letters YHWH, is his name, the name he gave Moses at the burning bush, saying, “this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations” (Exodus 3:15). The King James Version prints the name as LORD in capitals and Elohim as God, so “the LORD God” of Genesis 2:4 is YHWH Elohim, the name and the title together. There is more on the two words in the difference between God and Lord in the Bible.

Jewish tradition has loved this pairing. The midrash Genesis Rabbah, on Genesis 2:4, tells of a king who had cups of very thin glass. Hot water would shatter them and cold water would crack them, so he mixed the two, and the cups endured. So God said, “I will create it with [both] the attribute of justice and the attribute of mercy, would that it will endure”, “the Lord” signifying mercy and “God” signifying justice. The rabbis, the Jewish Encyclopedia adds, “recognized only one proper name for the Deity”, and treated the others as titles. The kabbalists compared the many names to someone looking at the sun through glasses of different colours, which change what the viewer sees “but do not affect the sun”. Out of reverence, Jewish commentators often wrote Elohim as “Elokim”, changing a letter so that the holy word would not be written casually.

Here are the names and titles of God that readers most often ask about, most of them built on Elohim or El, with the English the King James Version prints for them.

Hebrew	King James prints	Where to read it
Elohim	God	Genesis 1:1
Eloah (singular)	God	Job, 41 times
El Elyon	the most high God	Genesis 14:18
El Shaddai	the Almighty God	Genesis 17:1
YHWH Elohim	the LORD God	Genesis 2:4
Adonai YHWH	Lord GOD	Genesis 15:2
El Elohim YHWH	The mighty God, even the LORD	Psalm 50:1
Elohei ha-elohim	God of gods	Deuteronomy 10:17

In Genesis 15:2 the King James prints “Lord GOD”, with GOD in capitals, because the Hebrew there is Adonai YHWH. The capitals mark the divine name, as LORD does elsewhere, and GOD follows the way the pair was read aloud: by long Jewish custom, the Jewish Encyclopedia explains, “where Adonai and Yhwh occur together the latter was pronounced ‘Elohim.’” So the pair was spoken as Adonai Elohim, Lord God. The other titles have their own pages in the names of God and their meanings.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints uses Elohim as a name for God the Father. Its Guide to the Scriptures says, “It is generally the Father, or Elohim, who is referred to by the title God”, and “The God known as Jehovah is the Son, Jesus Christ.” It teaches that “there are three separate persons in the Godhead”, that the Father and the Son “have tangible bodies of flesh and bone”, and that “These three persons are one in perfect unity and harmony of purpose and doctrine.” Historic Christian teaching uses Elohim of the one God and confesses him as one God in three persons. The Orthodox say it in the creed, “I believe in one God”; the Westminster Confession speaks of “three persons, of one substance”; and the Catholic Catechism says, “We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons.”

The New Testament was written in Greek, so it does not use the Hebrew word, but it gives Jesus the honour the word carries. Hebrews applies to him the psalm’s “Thy throne, O God” (Hebrews 1:8). Isaiah calls the promised child “The mighty God” (Isaiah 9:6), where the Hebrew is El Gibbor, and Christians read it of Christ. Jewish translations read the titles as a name that praises God, given to a child of Isaiah’s own day: the JPS Tanakh renders it “The Mighty God is planning grace” (Isaiah 9:5 in Jewish Bibles), and Rashi takes the child to be King Hezekiah. And Thomas, meeting the risen Lord, says, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28).

On the cross the shortest form, El, comes to Jesus’ own lips. “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Eli is El with “my” joined to it, and Jesus is praying the first line of Psalm 22. The Son who was with the Father at creation calls him “my God” in the dark, and the prayer of the forsaken becomes the prayer of the Son of God.

The God named on the Bible’s first page was called on in its darkest hour, and he is still the refuge of the afraid. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,” Psalm 46 begins (Psalm 46:1). The mountains shake and “the heathen raged” (Psalm 46:3, 6), and then God himself speaks, using the word that opens Scripture: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

---

• What does Yahweh mean?
• What does Adonai mean?
• Jehovah Jireh: the Lord will provide
• What is the meaning of Jehovah-Nissi?