Friday, March 19, 2010

★✩ Elohim אֱלהִים

“Elohim” is the name given figuratively to represent our Eternal Parents. “Elohim,” translated to its most original form, literally means “Gods,” not one, but a plural number. It is the plural version of the Hebrew word “Eloah,” which means “one God.”

“Jehovah” follows as a derivation of the word “Adonai,” which means “My Lord.”

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elohim


Elohim (אֱלהִים) is a Hebrew word which expresses concepts of divinity or deity, notably used as a name of God in Judaism. It is apparently related to the Northwest Semitic word ʾēl (אֱל) "god". Within Hebrew, it is morphologically a plural, in use both as a true plural with the meaning "angels, gods, rulers" and as a "plural intensive" with singular meaning, referring to a god or goddess, and especially to the single God of Israel. The associated singular Eloah (אלוה) occurs only in poetry and in late Biblical Hebrew, in imitation of Aramaicusage.[1]
In the Torah, the word sometimes acts as a singular noun in Hebrew grammar, and is then generally understood to denote the single God of Israel, while in other cases, it acts as an ordinary plural and refers to the polytheistic notion of multiple gods (see Sons of God).
The notion of divinity underwent radical changes throughout the period of early Israelite identity. The ambiguity of the term Elohim is the result of such changes, cast in terms of "vertical translatability" by Smith (2008), i.e. the re-interpretation of the gods of the earliest recalled period as the national god of the monolatrism as it emerged  in the 7th to 6th century BC in the Kingdom of Judah and during the Babylonian captivity, and further in terms of monotheism by the emergence of Rabbinical Judaism in the 2nd century AD.[2]
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