Yahweh and Elohim: A God Among Gods

Yahweh and Elohim Part 1

This is part 1 of a multipart series.

I started reading the Old Testament, or the Tanakh, a little over a year ago. I am 7 books in at this point, or roughly 30% through. I want to get through Isaiah (5 more books), and read through Psalms, as a short-term goal, because Isaiah and Psalms seem like the two books most relevant to my New Testament studies. I am reading the Robert Alter translation, which I am really enjoying. It reads quite naturally, and feels quite accurate at the same time. There are also tons of notes – maybe half the text – many of which I read and find helpful.

The Old Testament largely narrates the history of a god called Yahweh, and his chosen people, the Israelites, who were living in the Middle East at the time, mostly in what is now Israel/Palestine, but also in Egypt and Jordan. This god Yahweh becomes the “one true God” for the major monotheistic religions of our time: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Well over half the people of the world belong to one of these three religions, so it is probably useful for all of us to know and understand at least a little bit about Yahweh. As a Christian, it seems particularly relevant to me. That’s why I’m reading this three thousand page book.

The first five books of the Old Testament are called the Pentateuch, or the Torah. Aside from the Psalms, I would guess that most of the well-known material from the Old Testament comes from here. We get the two creation stories, Noah and the flood, and the Tower of Babel. We get the stories of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob, and Miriam, Moses, and Aaron. The Torah stops just short of the Israelites reclaiming their “promised land”. You have to dig into the second part of the Old Testament, called the Nevi'im, or the Prophets, to get the story of the conquest of the lands of Israel.

Authorship of the Torah is traditionally attributed to Moses himself. That’s an interesting attribution, especially since the Torah narrates Moses’s death. Historians today more or less completely reject Moses’ authorship. Instead, the Torah is commonly understood to have been constructed from multiple earlier sources that got merged together at some point. This story of the construction of the Torah is called the documentary hypothesis. I learned about it from a brilliant historian named John Hamer, who posts lots of fascinating history lectures on the YouTube channel for Centre Place, his church in Toronto.

I’m not going to go into depth on the documentary hypothesis here, but I’d like to draw attention to some key points. First, we have no record of the earlier documents that the current Bible evolved from. The Hebrew Old Testament that we have now is more or less exactly the same as the earliest version of the Bible we have. So changes made by the later redactors could easily have removed, altered, or disguised parts of the original sources. And the fact that these redactors went so far as to, for instance, mix different accounts of Noah and the flood together, weaving them into a single narrative, it is clear that these redactors were not afraid of making major changes. As often happens in these kinds of situations, this leaves us to hypothesize about what the original sources looked like, doing our best to assure that our hypotheses are the most plausible, and fit the evidence as best as possible. Even if this means breaking from age-old traditions as to what these stories mean.

One thing that seems to be happening in the Old Testament is that, while the later authors believed in a single, transcendental god, the earlier authors understood their god, Yahweh, as one among many gods. For a hypothesis like this to work, we would have to start with some stories about a god among gods, that would later somehow get rewritten into stories about the One God. Perhaps the parts of the original story that were most blatantly polytheistic, could simply be removed. Or perhaps they could be altered – either intentionally, or even subconsciously – by later editors to better fit the monotheistic narrative.

We find two prominent names in the Old Testament that are commonly understood to refer to the One God: the Hebrew terms Yahweh (יְהוָ֣ה) and Elohim (אֱלֹהֶ֑֔יךָ). Yahweh, written as small-caps LORD in the King James Bible, is the name used when God talks directly to Moses, and to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. [Substack does not seem to support small-caps, so I will write it here as “LORD”.] Elohim, commonly translated as God, is the name used in the creation story where God created the Heavens and the Earth in seven days. Elohim is also used as a generic term for “god” or “gods”. The word Yahweh is used 6220 in the Old Testament, while the word Elohim is used 2598 times. A few other terms are understood to be referring to this same One God, such as El Shaddai and Elyon, but are used much less frequently.

It’s important to note that we are talking about the oldest written document that uses the terms Yahweh and Elohim. This means that our understanding of these words is based on the book as we have it, and later works. We can only hypothesize as to what these words meant to the original authors.

In his introduction to the Bible, page xl, Robert Alter tells us that the word Elohim is a plural:

The other most common designation of the deity is ’elohim, a word that is plural in form (perhaps, though this is far from certain, a plural of “majesty”) but that is generally treated grammatically as a singular.

I can’t attest to whether in the Bible, Elohim is more commonly treated as a singular or a plural. But I can point out instances of both: Genesis 1:1 couples Elohim with a singular verb; and Genesis 20:13 couples Elohim with a plural verb.

I find Robert Alter a reliable source, and I will assume that Elohim, despite being a word that is plural in form, is treated grammatically as a singular more often than not. One explanation for this is that the original authors intended it to refer to the One God. And I think this is probably true in some cases. Another explanation is that the original author used the word Elohim to indicate a group of entities, of which Yahweh was a member, and that a later author changed the grammar used with the word from plural to singular, effectively changing the meaning of the word from “gods” to “God”. I think this is probably also true in some cases.

In any case, we must at least take seriously the hypothesis that that Yahweh, the god of the Israelites, was one god amongst a host of gods, called the Elohim. This would certainly make sense of a very common epithet found in the Bible, Yahweh Elohim, which could then be read as “Yahweh, one of the Elohim.” In future articles in this series, we’ll look at some of the other gods found in the Old Testament, and review evidence we can find in the Tanakh that Yahweh was not the omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent God that he is commonly claimed to be by the Abrahamic religions.