"God" (Gen 1:1)

Reading through the story of creation

We’ve started our close reading of the creation story with a thorough discussion of just the first two words of the first verse of the Bible, the verse that you see below. Those first two words are translated by the English words in bold.

1 When God began to create the sky and the earth —

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

Today’s post will cover just one more word – but it is a major one.

Now … the Hero of Our Story

That word is אֱלֹהִים elohim. It occurs more than 2600 times in the Bible, and many of those times – but not all – it refers to the being whom we call in English “God.” That’s how I’ve translated it as well, but that is not only possible translation for this word.

The most important point to start out with is that elohim is not a name – it is a job description, like “pope” or “president.”  That is, this is a common noun and not a proper noun. We often capitalize “God” in English, as I’ve also done, but we often do the same with “the Pope” or “the President,” because there is generally only one person at a time whom we mean when we use that word.

But of course the President of the United States is not the only person in the world who is called by that title. At the current moment, there are two Popes as well. And there have been many presidents and many popes in history, any of whom we might wish to call “the Pope” or “the President.”

Moreover, as I’ll discuss in more detail when we get to v. 5, Hebrew does not have an indefinite article, like “a” or “an” in English. So it is not impossible to imagine that our verse is simply telling us that “a god” created the sky and the land.  Since Hebrew does not have capital letters either, if the Bible had indeed wanted to say that, the subject of this sentence would be written exactly the same way it actually is: elohim. Other nations in the Bible certainly believed in other gods, and the Bible calls those gods elohim just as it does the God of Israel.

The reason we identify elohim here specifically as God – that is, the God of Israel – and not simply “a god” who has not yet been identified is, first, that the God who is one of the main characters of the Bible is often referred to simply by that word, and second, that in the retelling of creation that begins with the second paragraph of Genesis 2, this God is identified by name.  I’ll have more to say about that, and its implications for what we might think about the beginning of the book of Genesis, when we get to chapter 2.

To steal the famous line, knowing a little Hebrew can be a dangerous thing. Those who do know a little Hebrew – perhaps because there’s some Hebrew in English, in the names of the angels whom we call “cherubim” and “seraphim” – will realize that in Hebrew the -im ending is ordinarily a plural: one har (a mountain), many harim.  So could our phrase actually be saying, as the Enuma Elish does, “When gods began creating”?

The way we know in this particular case that it would be wrong to read our text as saying that “gods created the sky and the land” is that all the verbs in this section are singular and not plural.  It is unusual for a plural noun to use a singular verb, but the word elohim is almost always treated as singular when it refers to God with a capital G.  (Gen 20:13, “when elohim made me wander,” may be an exception; it uses a plural verb, but standard translations have Abraham referring to “God” here too and not to “gods.”)

There are other nouns with plural-sounding endings that can also take singular verbs.  This is true (for example) of the words אֲדֹנִים adonim and בְּעָלִים b’alim, used for the owner of an animal or the master of a slave.  It should not surprise you that both these words are also used as divine titles: Adonai and Baal. Baal began at some point to be treated as a proper noun, a name. (All these god-words are grammatically masculine as well.)

On the other hand, there is in fact a singular form of elohim, also used for the God of Israel, and it is אֱלוֹהַּ eló’ah. (Yes, it is e-LO-ah and not e-lo-HA or even e-lo-HAI as some people mispronounce it in the synagogue. You can learn more about this in Lecture 10 of my Biblical Hebrew course for the Teaching Company.) The “plural” form occurs 2,603 times in the Bible – sometimes actually meaning “god” or “gods” rather than “God” – and the singular only about 5 dozen times.

It’s not clear, at least to me, precisely what this word “means.” As you certainly understand by now, knowing how to translate a word into English is not the same as understanding it! It is conceivably related to the word אֵל el, which occurs several hundred times in the Bible and sometimes names God but can also be a word meaning “power.” (It’s used in names too, as in בֵּית־אֵל beit-el “Bethel.”) The word עֶלְיֽוֹן elyon, which looks related if you read it in English, is obviously not related when you see it in Hebrew; we’ll discuss this complicated divine name another time.

The bottom line is that, of the three possible options for translating elohim – “God,” “a god,” or “gods” – the one everybody knows, “God” with a capital G, is the correct one here.  You knew that already – but perhaps you didn’t know that this was not, after all, an obvious translation that required no thought.

So far, we have only considered the first 3 words of the Bible.  On Thursday, we will rush ahead and finish all of verse 1.

Note: I’ll be maintaining the Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday schedule even during this month crammed with Jewish holidays. I can schedule them in advance to post when I want them to, and those of us who don’t use electronics on such days can come back and read them later.