Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yigal Levin <Yigal.Levin AT biu.ac.il>]

Dear Uzi,

The issues you raise are all legitimate issues, and, as Uri pointed out,
would take forever to cover. Obviously there is progression in the way
different biblical books "picture" God. Since, unfortunately, we do not have
any Iron-Age Hebrew literature besides the Bible, we have no way of knowing
whether God was commonly called Elohim, Eloah, El or whatever. My impression
is that Elohim, as a plural form that is used as if it were singular, was a
poetic form which was the adopted for other contexts as well, but I have no
way of proving this. I think that in this context, it is possible that the
writer imagined God as using a "royal We". 


Best,

Yigal

-----Original Message-----
From: Uzi Silber [mailto:uzisilber AT gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2011 5:10 PM
To: Yigal Levin
Cc: b-hebrew
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] k'ehad mimenou

Yigal,

several koosheeyot:

I know they were monotheists, but I even a tiny talmid such as I knows
that the notion of monotheism shifted over the 1000 years of writing
of the tanach, from the early anthropomorphic depictions and
mythological imageries in the torah and tehilim, to the impersonal
distant deity depicted in the later books. seems to me the editors
left in much apikorsut in the scripture...

1) Do you have any notions on this 'complex issue' you raise of who it
is being addressed? these anonymous ones would presumably be identical
to those being referred to with respect to 'betzalmeinu'.

2) why does elohim have to be singular? isnt el or eloha the singular of
elohim?

3) this begets the following question: does 'eloha' = 'el'? or is it
the case that eloha means
 'el shel', as it may be in 'eloha Yaakov'?

thank you,

Uzi Silber



On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Yigal Levin <Yigal.Levin AT biu.ac.il> wrote:
> Uzi, while this is undoubtedly correct, the writers/editors of the Bible
> were monotheists, who were very careful to weed out polytheistic views
(they
> admitted that such views existed, but did not express them themselves). So
> the question is, what was the monotheistic writer of Genesis (P? E?
> whatever) thinking. In my understanding, he used "Elohim" as singular. Who
> Elohim was addressing here is a more complex issue.
>
>
> Yigal Levin
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Uzi Silber
> Sent: Friday, October 28, 2011 4:52 PM
> To: Andronic Khandjani
> Cc: b-hebrew
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] k'ehad mimenou
>
> yes, but still -- could it not all point an earlier, polytheistic
> view? after all, Canaanites from whom we Jews may have emerged in part
> were polytheists, as were in fact so many of our Israelite/Judahite
> ancestors.
>
>
>
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