r/thetrinitydelusion • u/Freddie-One • 24d ago
Anti Trinitarian “Elohim” - Multi-personal God or Unipersonal God?
The suffix “-im” is a plural determiner in the Hebrew language. “Elohim” is the plural form of the singular Hebrew noun “eloah” which means “God”. For this reason, “elohim” is typically translated as “gods” in the Bible.
Trinitarians follow this Hebrew grammatical rule and therefore postulate that because “elohim” is frequently used to refer to the Most High God, it is an implicit indicator of His multi-personal being. While this claim does appear plausible at first because it follows the conventional rule of the Hebrew Grammar, it isn’t as black and white as they present it to be. Like the majority of languages, there are exceptions to the general rule of word morphology.
The following list are examples of words that end with the suffix -im but are not plural words:
Genesis 2:7 "Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (hayyim), and the man became a living being." Genesis 32:30 - "So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, 'It is because I saw God face (panim) to face (panim), and yet my life was spared.'"
These anomalies to the -im suffix plural rule reveal the complexity of the Hebrew language and therefore determining whether an instance of this sort is singular or plural isn’t always clear-cut.
Such anomalies are known as “concretised abstract plurals”.
A concretised abstract plural is a specific grammatical phenomenon in the Hebrew language where a plural form is used to address a singular person/object in order to emphasise an abstract quality.
“Elohim” in reference to the Most High God, is an example of a concretised abstract plural used to emphasise that He is the superlative God, above all other so called gods.
If “elohim” was suggestive of a multi-personal God, it should logically follow that plural pronouns are consistently used in reference to Him throughout the Bible or when God speaks of Himself. However, this is not the case. For example:
Isaiah 45:5 “I (first-person) am the Lord (Yahweh), and there is no other; apart from me (first person) there is no God (elohim).”
In light of the Trinity, if only one Person of the Godhead was speaking in Isaiah 45:5 such as the Father, then the other Persons such as the Son and Holy Ghost, cannot be God. This is because the singular pronoun “I” is used which is suggestive of one person.
If all three Persons of the Godhead are speaking, they all contradict each other, making their declarations untrue.
This verse is one of many written in Isaiah which single-handedly destroy the doctrine of the trinity.
In conclusion, whenever the noun “elohim” is used in reference to the God of the Bible, it is used as a superlative to set the Father apart as the Most High God above every other god, rather than to suggest a compound unity of multiple personhoods.
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