Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From "David Kimbrough (CLWA)" <dkimbrough AT clwa.org> 
=====
>Elohim is used in a variety of situations.  It is the plural of eloa, or
>God.

This is a minor, picky point (well, at least for the sake of this thread it 
is), but the he at the end of eloah is consonantal. That's why it's written 
with a mappiq, and that's why it generates a furtive patach. (That's also why 
it appears in forms with endings added, like elohim, for instance). It should 
therefore be written in any transcription system that I know of.

>However it is generally understood to be the "majestic plural", rather
>the way the queen of England might say "We find our country most beautiful".
>That does not mean that there are many queens or she suffers from multiple
>personalities but rather she is too important to be referred to in the
>singular.

I would make one quibble here as well--somewhat more substantive than the 
last, though. When we get, for instance, na`ase 'adam btsalmenu (Gen 1:26), 
that might be the same sort of thing as your queen of England parallel. (Then 
again, this doesn't seem to be the normative way that God refers to himself 
in 
BH, so maybe it's something else here.) But the apparently plural form of 
elohim is different. I'm not saying it couldn't possibly have some 
connection, 
but it's not the same thing. Rather than a deferential use of grammatical 
inflexion, we have here a more or less frozen form--apparently plural, but 
regularly treated grammatically as a singular entity.
>
>Elohim is also used to refer to "foreign" or "false" gods, i.e. gods other
>than Yahweh.  When Saul uses a medium to call up the spirit of Samuel, the
>medium says she sees "gods" (elohim) ascending out of the earth, i.e.
>Samuel's spirit raising from Sheol.

To clarify, when it is used of other gods, it sometimes functions as a 
singular with reference to one pagan deity, sometimes as a plural. 
Interestingly, there is a strong tendency in the Aramaic Targums of Onqelos 
and Jonathan to render a Hebrew singular referring to a pagan god or idol as 
plural. It's hard to say exactly why this is, but one suggestion I've heard 
is 
that the extent of paganism was heightened by always referencing a plurality 
of false gods. (Not just one false god, but many of them.) This is 
particularly significant, since the Aramaic alaha that translates Hebrew 
elohim is not overtly plural in form.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics