From: tgpedersen
Message: 17718
Date: 2003-01-17
> Etymologyas
>
> Elohim has been explained as a plural form of Eloah or as plural
> derivative of El. Those who adhere to the former explanation do not
> agree as to the derivation of Eloah. There is no such verbal stem
> alah in Hebrew; but the Arabist Fleischer, Franz Delitzsch, and42,
> others appeal to the Arabic aliha, meaning "to be filled with
> dread", "anxiously to seek refuge", so that ilah (eloah) would mean
> in the first place "dread", then the object of dread. Gen., xxi,
> 53, where God is called "the fear of Isaac", Is., viii, 13, and Ps.from
> lxxv, 12, appear to support this view. But the fact that aliha is
> probably not an independent verbal stem but only a denominative
> ilah, signifying originally "possessed of God" (cf. enthousiazein,to
> daimonan) renders the explanation more than precarious. There is no
> more probability in the contention of Ewald, Dillmann, and others
> that the verbal stem, alah means "to be mighty": and is to regarded
> as a by-form of the stem alah; that, therefore, Eloah grows out of
> alah as El springs from alah. Baethgen (Beitrage, 297) has pointed
> out that of the fifty-seven occurrences of Eloah forty-one belong
> the Book of Job, and the others to late texts or poetic passages.would
> Hence he agrees with Buhl in maintaining that the singular form
> Meaning of the Word
>
> If Elohim be regarded as derived from El, its original meaning
> be "the strong one" according to Wellhausen's derivation of El,from
> ul (Skizzen, III, 169); or "the foremost one", according tometaphorical
> Nöldeke's derivation of El from ul or il, "to be in front"
> (Sitzungsberichte der berlinischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
> 1880, pp. 760 sqq.; 1882, pp. 1175 sqq.); or "the mighty one",
> according to Dillmann's derivation of El from alah or alay, "to be
> mighty" (On Genesis, I, 1); or, finally "He after whom one
> strives", "Who is the goal of all human aspiration and
> endeavour", "to whom one has recourse in distress or when one is in
> need of guidance", "to who one attaches oneself closely",
> coincidentibus interea bono et fine, according to the derivation of
> El from the preposition el, "to", advocated by La Place (cf.
> Lagarde, Uebersicht, etc., p. 167), Lagarde (op. cit., pp. 159
> sqq.), Lagrange (Religions semitiques, pp. 79 sqq.), and others. A
> discussion of the arguments which militate for and against each of
> the foregoing derivations would lead us too far.
>
> If we have recourse to the use of the word Elohim in the study of
> its meaning, we find that in its proper sense it denotes either the
> true God or false gods, and metaphorically it is applied to judges,
> angels, and kings; and even accompanies other nouns, giving them a
> superlative meaning. The presence of the article, the singular
> construction of the word, and its context show with sufficient
> clearness whether it must be taken in its proper or its
> sense, and what is its precise meaning in each case. Kautzschgiver
> (Encyclopaedia Biblica, III, 3324, n. 2) endeavours to do away with
> the metaphorical sense of Elohim. Instead of the rendering "judges"
> he suggests the translation "God", as witness of a lawsuit, as
> of decisions on points of law, or as dispenser of oracles; for theof
> rendering "angels" he substitutes "the gods of the heathen", which,
> in later post-exilic times, fell to a lower rank. But this
> interpretation is not supported by solid proof.
>
> According to Renan (Histoire du peuple d'Israel, I, p. 30) the
> Semites believed that the world is surrounded, penetrated, and
> governed by the Elohim, myriads of active beings, analogous to the
> spirits of the savages, alive, but somehow inseparable from one
> another, not even distinguished by their proper names as the gods
> the Aryans, so that they can be considered as a confused totality.in
> Marti (Geschichte der israelitischen Religion, p. 26), too, finds
> Elohim a trace of the original Semitic polydemonism; he maintainsand
> that the word signified the sum of the divine beings that inhabited
> any given place. Baethgen (op. cit., p. 287), F.C. Baur (Symbolik
> und Mythologie, I, 304), and Hellmuth-Zimmermann (Elohim, Berlin,
> 1900) make Elohim an expression of power, grandeur, and totality.
> Lagrange (op. cit., p. 78) urges against these views that even the
> Semitic races need distinct units before they have a sum, and
> distinct parts before that arrive at a totality. Moreover, the name
> El is prior to Elohim (op. cit., p. 77 sq.) and El is both a proper
> and a common name of God. Originally it was either a proper name
> has become a common name, or it was a common name has become aderivative
> proper name. In either case, El, and, therefore, also its
> form Elohim, must have denoted the one true God. This inferencea
> becomes clear after a little reflection. If El was, at first, the
> proper name of a false god, it could not become the common name of
> false god, it could not become the common name for deity any morename
> than Jupiter or Juno could; and if it was, at first, the common
> for deity, it could become the proper name only of that God whoI was wondering, given all that terror Dei, whether that
> combined in him all the attributes of deity, who was the one true
> God. This does not imply that all the Semitic races had from the
> beginning a clear concept of God's unit and Divine attributes,
> though all had originally the Divine name El.
>
>
>
>
> VIGOUROUX in Dict. de la Bible, s.v.; KNABENBAUER, Lexicon Biblicum
> (Paris, 1907), II, 63; KAUTZSCH in Encyclopaedia Biblica (New York,
> 1902), III, 3323 sq.; LAGRANGE, Etudes sur les religions semitiques
> (Paris, 1905), 19, 71, 77 sqq.
>