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Naming names: Kristin Swenson looks at Biblical titles for God.
‘At the very beginning of the Bible, we read of a God unlimited by sex, both male and female simultaneously.’
‘Gosh’, we’re taught to say, instead of ‘God’. Or ‘Golly’ or ‘Jeez’. The impulse comes from prohibitions against blaspheming the name of God, ‘taking the name of the LORD in vain’, or otherwise misusing it. In the ancient world out of which the biblical texts came, people would invoke deities as witnesses to binding promises. The divine name was a powerful thing. To use it in a false oath was a grave offence. But just what is that name, biblically speaking?
There isn’t only one. For that matter, what does ‘the name’ mean, anyway? The very first character, the first person to take action at the very beginning of the Bible – book 1, chapter 1, verse 1 – is, you got it, God. The Bible’s very first verb indicates, by its particular form, that its subject is singular. So far so good. But the word that follows, the word that names the subject, elohim in transliteration, is a plural form: ‘gods’. So with this grammatically plural form, we begin with a theological conundrum that you’d never appreciate if you didn’t know this little bit about the Hebrew behind our translations.
The word elohim appears elsewhere in the Bible to refer quite clearly and explicitly to other gods; that is, it functions in a traditional sort of way with the translation ‘gods’. But here in Genesis chapter 1, the verb, which also contains the number and gender of its subject, indicates that the word should be read as singular. What’s more, the context and tone of the chapter would seem to support such a reading: ‘God’, not ‘gods’. In other words, we have good reason to assert that elohim in the Hebrew Bible can function as another name for God and that ‘God’ is indeed a fine translation for it. So why the plural? El by itself, in the singular, is also a divine name. It is a name of the (Canaanite) Ugaritic high god, who incidentally is described as an old man with a long white beard who sits on a throne in the clouds. In the Bible, God is variously called el something-or-other. We read that Abraham spoke of el-olam, ‘the everlasting God’. Moses refers to el-elyon, ‘the Most High’. And we read of el-shaddai (especially popular in the book of Job), an el construct that translators don’t quite know what to do with. One possibility is ‘the one (in charge) of deities’. Other possibilities have to do with hills or breasts. ‘The one of breasts’, as in a nurturing or even female God? Maybe. Female fertility figurines were common in the places and times from which these texts come.
While el names that specify a quality of God are common, one especially stands out. In only one case does a person take the initiative and presume to name God (with impunity, I might add). Remarkably, that person is a woman, not even Hebrew, and an enslaved woman at that. Hagar was an Egyptian enslaved by Abraham and Sarah, compelled to bear them the child Sarah could not herself conceive. When pregnant, Hagar became intolerable to Sarah, who behaved so hurtfully toward her that she ran away. In the wilderness, an angel confronts Hagar and gives her the kind of future-telling promise otherwise reserved for the Hebrew patriarchs: that Hagar would have many descendants (‘a great nation’, in chapter 21). And she should name her son Ishmael, ‘God hears’. After that, Hagar ‘named the LORD who spoke to her, “You are elroi”; for she said, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?”’ The Hebrew roi here has to do with seeing, whether it’s ‘the one seeing’ or ‘God who sees’.
So there are all these perfectly serviceable el names for God in the Bible. Why the plural elohim to launch the whole collection of texts? With this beginning, we run smack into the fact, like it or not, that there’s going to be more to God both in this story and throughout the Bible than a monotone, singular, consistently recognisable (read: predictable) deity. Elohim continues throughout the Bible to be a very common moniker for the seemingly singular God at the heart of the faith of the people responsible for the texts.
The story in Genesis chapter 1, the creation of the world in seven days, gives us a couple of other intriguing bits of information about God. Consider the peculiar creation-of-human-beings passage. For one thing, there’s God saying, ‘Let us… in our image’, further teasing out the possibility that the name Elohim does indeed suggest plurality. So what’s with God referring to God’s self in this first chapter as plural, as an ‘us’ (‘Let us make adam in our image’)? Note how the creation of humans in the image of God unfolds. While it begins with God’s declared intention to create humans ‘in our image’, plural, it concludes with ‘in his image’, masculine singular. What transpires in between is God’s creation of adam, referred to in the episode as ‘them’. The fluid plural-singular nature of God anticipates the singular-plural nature of humans in the story. After all, the grammatically singular form adam is, in this telling, plural – both male and female. While adam is often translated ‘man’, it is equally appropriate to translate it as ‘human being’ or ‘humankind’. The word adam can indeed be the guy Adam that you might guess from its transliteration, or the gender-specific ‘man’. But the word also refers collectively to human beings, regardless of gender. The context of this passage indicates that the latter is to be preferred. After all, it says that adam is male and female. What’s more, somehow this combo male-female adam is made in the image of this sort of plural God, which complicates assumptions that God is strictly ‘he’. Right here at the very beginning of the Bible, we read, ‘So elohim created adam in his image, in the image of elohim he created him; male and female he created them. Elohim blessed them, and elohim said to them…’ In other words, at the very beginning of the Bible, we read of a God unlimited by sex, both male and female simultaneously. This story suggests that God is both masculine and feminine, just as human beings are both male and female. You can debate this – the Bible invites such discussion – but there’s no avoiding the fact that this text suggests a deity that isn’t strictly male but rather equally female and male.
But what of the ‘he’ and ‘him’ in the aforementioned passage? It’s a function of rather mundane grammatical limitations. Hebrew has only masculine and feminine pronouns, no neuter. Add to that the fact that the Bible evolved and emerged out of predominantly patriarchal cultures and was finalised in definitively patriarchal circumstances. No wonder, then, that when faced with a choice between ‘him’ or ‘her’, ‘he’ or ‘she’, biblical Hebrew would choose the masculine. When gender is in question or when there’s a mixed group, Hebrew defaults to the masculine. It’s even less wonder that images of and language for God that prioritises the masculine would dominate the texts. Yet, given this patriarchal cultural context, it’s remarkable that, as Genesis 1 illustrates, the Bible also immediately and explicitly complicates the simple conclusion that God is male.
Kristin is associate professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. This article is extracted from her A Most Peculiar Book: The inherent strangeness of the Bible (Oxford University Press).
