'elohim - God/gods

The Hebrew word for God, or gods. It is plural in form but, in contexts where God is clearly intended, it is always used with singular verbs. Why this is the case remains a puzzle, though some scholars believe that the plural serves to denote God's majesty.[1]

On its use in Gen 1:1, John Goldingay says:

It does not use a title for God of the kind Israel shared with its neighbors, such as Melchizedek's term El Elyon, God Most High. Nor does it use Israel's own distinctive name for God, Yhwh. It uses the ordinary Hebrew word for deity, 'elohim. Elsewhere the plural can be a numerical plural, referring to gods. But applied to the one God, it is an honorific or intensive plural suggesting that this God embodies all the deity there is. So the creator God is very deity itself." [2]

Alan Richardson further reflects on the possible significance of this plural:

It represents a deep biblical insight: God is not, and never was, a lonely God. There is personality in God, and a person could not exist alone. . . God is the supreme and 'only' God, but he is not 'alone'. Hence the use of the plural in several passages (e.g., Gen 1.26, 'Let us make man'; 3:22; 11:7, etc.). The Christian Fathers and the older commentators regarded such passages as adumbrations of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Of course the O.T. writers had no such conception in mind; but yet they were in their own way insisting upon that truth which the doctrine of the Trinity teaches—that a 'unitarian' or 'lonely' God is not the God of the historic biblical revelation."[3]

'elohim is also used as an adjective expressive of the superlative, meaning "great," "terrible," though such occurrences are infrequent.

1. B. K. Waltke, with C. J. Fredricks, Genesis A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001) 58.

2. John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology. Volume One: Israel's Gospel (Downers Grove, Ill.:InterVarsity Press, 2003), 76.

3. Alan Richardson, Genesis 1-11 (Touch Bible Commentaries; London: SCM, 1953) 46.