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God entered English when the language still had a system of grammatical gender.The word and its cognates were initially neutral but underwent transition when their speakers converted to Christianity, "as a means of distinguishing the personal God of the Christians from the impersonal divine powers acknowledged by pagans."
Elohim (Hebrew: אֱלֹהִים, romanized: ʾĔlōhīm: [(ʔ)eloˈ(h)im]), the plural of אֱלוֹהַּ (ʾĔlōah), is a Hebrew word meaning "gods" or "godhood". Although the word is grammatically plural, in the Hebrew Bible it most often takes singular verbal or pronominal agreement and refers to a single deity, particularly the God of ...
The first words of the Old Testament are B'reshit bara Elohim—"In the beginning God created." [1] The verb bara (created) agrees with a masculine singular subject.[citation needed] Elohim is used to refer to both genders and is plural; it has been used to refer to both Goddess (in 1 Kings 11:33), and God (1 Kings 11:31; [2]).
The Hebrew word for 'god' is El, which also as a proper noun referred to the chief deity in ancient Semitic religions. In the Hebrew Bible, God is also given a personal name, Yahweh, in contrast to the genetic name, and in origin possibly the name of an Edomite or Midianite deity who was adopted into ancient Israelite religion. [11]
Most Christian groups conceive of God as Triune, believing that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are distinct persons, but one being that is wholly God. [7] [8] God the Son (Jesus Christ), having been incarnated as a human man, is masculine. Classical western philosophy believes that God lacks a literal sex as it would be ...
'messenger' are aspects of God. [3] In the earliest records, the Bənē hāʾĔlōhīm are in heaven. They are depicted as the heavenly court or the pantheon of religious belief-system of their time. The phrase is a possible survival of Hebrew Polytheism, in which the Elohists refer to the Divine in a plural (ʾĔlōhīm). [4]
Genesis 1:26–27 says that the elohim were male and female, [3] and humans were made in their image. [4] Again, the verb vayomer (he said) is masculine; it is never vatomer, the feminine of the same verb form. The personal name of God, YHWH, is presented in Exodus 3 as if the Y (Hebrew yod) is the masculine subjective prefix to the verb to be
The manuscripts of the Septuagint and other Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible that are pre-Christian or contemporary to the Apostolic Age present the tetragrammaton in Hebrew within the Greek text [153] [172] or use the Greek transliteration ΙΑΩ , which, according to Wilkinson, may have been the original practice before a Hebraicizing ...