The Elohim were never one

Mauro Biglino's Gods of the Bible begins with a translator's discomfort, and I am grateful he stayed uncomfortable. In the versions most people hold, Elohim has already become "God." In the Hebrew, the word is still Elohim, and his claim is modest and enormous at the same time. The translators chose a theology. The consonants did not force it. I am not a Hebraist by chair. I am a reader who thinks he is following the sentences more honestly than the pulpit, and more honestly than the academic habit of calling every hard plural a figure of speech.

Read as he asks, the text keeps introducing more than one. The sons of the Elohim see that the daughters of the Adam are beautiful and take whomever they choose, Genesis 6. If Elohim were only Yahweh, the sentence is a mess the later editors had to preach around. Elyon and Yahweh are not always the same office. Deuteronomy 32:8-9, in the reading he defends, has Elyon dividing the nations according to the number of the sons of God, and Yahweh's portion being his people. That is henotheism with the lights on. A high god. National gods. A people bound to one of them. Blood and allotment. I do not sand that into "ancient people were doing symbolism about ethics." They were talking about powers and about inheritance.

The names are not abstractions. Ashtoreth, Elohim of the Sidonians. Chemosh of the Moabites. Milkom of the Ammonites. Hadad of the Arameans. Melqart of Tyre. Rimmon of Damascus. A commander in Judges tells an enemy king to go back and worship his own god, because that god handed him his land, the way Yahweh handed Israel its land. Chemosh and Yahweh can both be real officers in that sentence. I will not merge them with a Mesopotamian commander or an Egyptian scribe to make one neat alien. Closeness of the pantheons, as a memory of one lost civilization, is a different page. This page stops at the Hebrew.

Then the making of the Adam. Genesis 1:26 is usually preached as "in our image," a spiritual likeness, a royal we, a Trinity speaking in advance. Biglino stays with the preposition. The Adam is not made merely according to an image. The phrasing he defends is with the tzelem, with that something that contains the image of the makers. Adam is also the ground. The creature is named from the earth he is taken from. A group says let us make. On the reading I run, they are specifying a form and placing it into a body of this world. That is the Earth Adam. A superior local build. Not the invention of life. The tzelem is material enough, in his argument, that later verses can talk about the ones called Elohim dying like Adam. A government with a long life. Not a mood.

Yahweh, in this light, is the Elohim who attaches himself to one people and is jealous of the attachment. He needs a name told to Moses because there are colleagues. He lives in association with a mountain. He arrives with fire, cloud, noise, and messengers. Satan, in the passages Biglino walks, is a function: an adversary, sometimes a man, sometimes one of the sons of the Elohim appointed to prosecute. None of this is a sneer at people who pray. I pray-adjacent my own way, inside a clan practice, and I am not here to take your grandmother's comfort away from her. It is an invitation to hear the older music under the later hymn. Monotheism is a real historical development. It is not what the sentences were doing when a king could be told, in public, that Chemosh and Yahweh both hand out land.

Biglino ends without a collar, and I like him for it. Will it one day be shown that the Elohim were extraterrestrials? An antediluvian people of this Earth? A higher race associated with the interior of the world? He writes, again and again, that he will take note of it. So will I. I am already running the superior-build reading, the one where a class of powers put a mark on a creature that already walked. I am open to a better account of what they were. The oldest secret in the subtitle of his book may simply be that the Bible remembered a government, and later ages needed it to be a single god. Follow the plural. I am, and I do not think I am finished.