The Elohim

Elohim is a Hebrew word which literally translates to "Gods and Goddesses" or more simply "Deities". The term Elohim occurs in the more ancient versions the Old Testament. Recent interpretations, of which there are many, appear to have completely edited out the term, regarding it as archaic. Understanding the term and where it came from is a key element to understanding the Bible and more importantly the ancient sources from which the Bible was derived.

The word Elohim is dominant in the five Books of Moses, generally known as the Pentateuch or as the Elohist Tradition, in which 'Elohim' rather than 'Yahweh' was used to refer to the Creators. In Hebrew, the term 'El', stemming from the Akkadian word "Ilu", was a generic term for a God or Deity, and 'Elohim', being it's plural literally meant 'the gods'.

Every place you see the word 'God' in Genesis, replace it with the word Elohim, the original word used. In several cases when the leader of the Elohim is addressing the other 'Gods', it has been rendered in English as "the Lord God"; it should be read as "the Leader of the Gods".

The Elohim were also known by the Hebrews as the Anakim, which is a derivative form of the Sumerian word 'Anunnaki'. Anakim was used by the Hebrews exactly as the Sumerians used Anunnaki, when referring, collectively, to the race of Gods. 

When talking of a specific God the Hebrews used "El" normally in a context such as "El Shaddai", which means God of the mountainor any specific title. In Hebrew Elohim and Anakim are often confused, even by "experts" with the Nephilim. The Nephilim is the term employed to describe the children of a union between people of the race of Anakim and Humans a "Demi-God" if you will.

There is no doubt that the word Elohim is a plural word:

• Genesis 1:26 Then the Lord Elohim said, "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness..."
• Genesis 3:22 Then the Lord Elohim said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever."
• Genesis 11:4-8 And they said, "Come let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a Shem for ourselves lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."
• But the Elohim came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.
• And the Lord Elohim said, "Behold the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.
• Come let us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech."
• So the Elohim scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.

As in many other cases, the edited "monotheistic" Bible has compressed into one deity the roles played by one or more other"Gods" who did not always act in accord.

A little Background

The Sumerians developed one of the earliest civilizations on earth (3500-1750 B.C.), but the existence of such a people and civilization was not even suspected until the middle of the 19th century.  People had long known about the Babylonians, since the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, and Greeks had all come into contact with them and written about them. But no one knew that the Sumerians  had preceded the Babylonians and had developed the writing, religious, and agricultural systems which the Babylonians adapted and modified later.  In the early 19th century, British, German and French archeologists began to dig out the earthen mounds that are the remains of cities that once flourished thousands of years ago in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, a region called Mesopotamia ["between the rivers"] in the history books and called Iraq today. In the process of deciphering tablets written in the Babylonian language (called "Akkadian"), they came to suspect that the writing system was ill-suited for that language and thus must have been invented for an earlier, unknown tongue. Eventually, after a half-century of decipherment and excavation, the existence of the Sumerian language, people, and civilization was confirmed.


Sumerian civilization originated in what is now southern Iraq, just upriver from the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  "Civilization" in this context means a settled town or city-dwelling people who possess a stable agricultural technology (including domesticated animals) and have developed a hierarchical system of social classes (peasants, laborers, slaves, craftsmen [smiths, masons, carpenters, potters, etc.], farmers, fishermen, merchants, doctors, architects, priests and temple attendants, bureaucrats, scribes, advisers, priest-kings). Since the climate of southern Iraq is hot and dry, agriculture requires an extensive irrigation system of canals and dikes. Often, the Sumerians wrote as if their civilization (agricultural techniques, cities, classes of people) came first, and people later. (Why do you think they thought this way?)  In such a hot climate, we find some recurring images and motifs:  the tree of life, shade, the desert or steppe beyond the irrigated areas, the storehouse for grain and other agricultural products, bricks for building cities and temples, and the measuring rod of the priest-king.

Sumerian cities were close agglomerations of one or two story mud brick dwellings.  These low structures were overshadowed by the temple of the god, "a massive staged tower" (Kramer, Sumerians 73) called a ziggurat.  Each city was sacred to one god, and the priest-king of each city followed the god's instructions on how to run it.  Perhaps as much as ¼ of the land surrounding the city was owned by the god (the temple as an institution); the rest was owned by "nobles" (ruling princes, palace administrators, and priests) and ordinary citizens (Kramer, Sumerians 75-77).  The Sumerians developed a form of writing called cuneiform around 3000 BC  This script began as pictographic writing but eventually developed into a "purely phonetic system of writing in which each sign stood for one or more syllables" (Wolkstein and Kramer 125).  This writing is called cuneiform because it consists of wedge-shaped marks which were inscribed into wet clay tablets with a reed stylus.  The tablets were then baked, thus preserving a brittle and heavy, but rather permanent record of a very old civilization.  For more on the Sumerians, read S. N. Kramer's "Sumerian History, Culture, and Literature" (Wolkstein and Kramer 115-126).