HaRaAYaH

I just asked a couple of Rabbis this week and it's pretty clear that in the Torah any place the Torah speaks about the God of Israel, Elohim is singular and when it is speaking about God's generically, it is plural. In other words the context makes the meaning.

So in the first sentence of Genesis:



Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'arets.
In the beginning God created heaven and earth. Not Gods

Veha'arets hayetah tohu vavohu vechoshech al-peney tehom veruach Elohim merachefet al-peney hamayim.
The earth was without form and empty, with darkness on the face of the depths, but God's spirit moved on the water's surface. Not the spirit of the Gods.

Compare to at the shore of the sea of reeds:

Mi-cha-mo-cha ba-e-lim A-do-nai.
Who is like You, Adonai, among the gods that are worshiped.

It's all context. Think of Elohim like the English word fish. The verb (hence context) determines if it is singular or plural.

The fish swims around the tank. A single fish swims around.... singular

The fish swim around the tank. More than one fish swims around... plural

Same word, different meaning, it's all context

Loomis

http://hebrewjudaic.as.nyu.edu/object/marksmith.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_S._Smith

http://books.google.com/books?as_auth=Mark+S+Smith

Yes. To support his claim he offers verses like Genesis 33:20

There he (Jacob) erected an alter and proclaimed, “El is the god of Israel.”

nurse_ratchet

It is interesting to note that if you take the four Hebrew letters that are transliterated into the Roman alphabet as YHVH and look at the four Hebrew letters and stack them one on top of the other beginning with the first letter on the right they form the image of a stick man. Maybe this means that "god" is us or something in us.

mg01

Yes.



Here's the text. The suggestion is each of the "by the ..." is referencing a different deity.



Another example of a reference to multiple deities included in this etiological tale of how Mahanaim received it's name.



Use of Elohim in this manner seems rather ambiguious to me. I see no reason when taken in isolation why we have to automatically assume that Elohim=YHWH in the oldest texts. Elohim here can easily be taken as a reference to the divine in general, but when used as "elohim of x" references a particular deity. This is most obvious in the text assigned to E. In J, there are very few occurenance of elohim and the ones that are there are in a completely different context from the usage of YHWH. In the text assigned to P however Elohim is definately used in reference to YHWH. By the time of P, YHWH has grown in scope from a single deity/el to a grander power encompassing all of the Elohim.

Anat

Except this is only true in square script that was adopted during the Babylonian exile. The name YHWH was in use already pre-exile, when Phoenician script was used. Moreover, in post-exilic documents even when the rest of the text is in square script, YHWH is in Phoenician script.