(August 12, 2025 at 7:32 pm)GrandizerII Wrote:(August 12, 2025 at 6:22 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Apparently it's a special case in the Hebrew.
The word Elohim there (אֱלֹהִים) when used for the God of the Jews, is a plural word that takes a singular verb and adjective. There are various theories as to how the grammar evolved.
When used for other people's gods (e.g. the Egyptian gods in Exodus) the same word is used with plural verbs and adjectives.
No doubt the translators of the King James Bible and others were comfortable with the "royal we," so they wouldn't necessarily interpret this word to refer to multiple gods.
It's not unusual in Hebrew for certain words to take on plural form while still taking a singular verb/adjective (and in fact, in Genesis 1, it's not just the word Elohim that has this characteristic). But still, it's very grammatically unusual to associate with a plural pronoun rather than a singular pronoun, and elsewhere Elohim is associated with singular pronouns multiple times.
The divine/heavenly court explanation makes more sense because it doesn't rely on having what is unusual grammar be normalized in just one specific case and because we see throughout Genesis and elsewhere in the OT God associated with other heavenly beings. In the early chapters of Job, God clearly has a divine/heavenly council that he interacts with, so a plurality of divine/heavenly beings was not unusual in ancient Hebrew belief, at least not early on.
I hadn't heard that about the pronouns -- that's good to know.
Given the differences in grammar, the patchwork nature of how Genesis got written, and the early hints of henotheism, it must be an endless fascination for the scholars.
