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Updated: June 20, 2025
And Lot's entreaty is addressed to Him whom he calls 'my Lord. He uses singular pronouns throughout, although the narrator says that he 'said unto them. There seems to be here the same idea as is embodied in the word 'Elohim'; namely, that the divine powers are regarded as in some sense separable, and yet all inhering in a personal unity.
El Shaddai, "the Almighty One," was the name by which he had been heretofore known to the preceding patriarchs; in its meaning it was analogous to Elohim, who is described in the first chapter of Genesis as creating the world. But his name of Jehovah was now for the first time to be communicated to his people.
Without doubt this triad represents a monad Deity similar in character to the one observed in Egypt and other countries. In the minds of all well-informed persons, there is no longer any doubt that in Abraham's time the Canaanites worshipped the same gods as did the Persians and all the other nations about them namely, Elohim, the dual or triune creative force in Nature.
For these give no definite substitute whatever for the old story, that Elohim "spoke, and it was done he commanded, and it stood fast." Whence the fiery mists by the rotation and cooling of which the worlds were slowly evolved? We are told that the same process is going on now within the ken of astronomers.
They reveal a firm conviction that, when death takes place, a something termed a soul or spirit leaves the body and continues to exist in Sheol for a period of indefinite duration, even though there is no proof of any belief in absolute immortality; that such spirits can return to earth to possess and inspire the living; that they are, in appearance and in disposition, likenesses of the men to whom they belonged, but that, as spirits, they have larger powers and are freer from physical limitations; that they thus form a group among a number of kinds of spiritual existences known as Elohim, of whom Jahveh, the national God of Israel, is one; that, consistently with this view, Jahveh was conceived as a sort of spirit, human in aspect and in senses, and with many human passions, but with immensely greater intelligence and power than any other Elohim, whether human or divine.
This is what seems to me at the bottom of this merry-making. One hears in it an echo of Satan, the temptation to make self the center of all things, to be like an Elohim, the worst and last revolt of man.
Laban indignantly demands of his son-in-law, "Wherefore hast thou stolen my Elohim?" which Rachel, who must be assumed to have worshipped Jacob's God, Jahveh, had carried off, obviously because she, like her father, believed in their divinity.
"Elohim" may be arrived at by reasoning; for the reason tells us that the world has a ruler; though the various classes of men differ as to details, the most plausible view being that of the philosophers. But the conception of Jhvh cannot be arrived at by reason. It requires that prophetic vision by which a person almost becomes a member of a new species, akin to angels.
Huxley to differ from a ghost only in degree, not in kind. Elohim, or El, the creative, differs from a ghost in kind, because he, in Hebrew belief, never was a ghost, he is immortal and without beginning. Mr. Huxley now enforces his theory by a parallel between the religion of Tonga and the religion of Israel under the Judges.
It will be observed that Samuel is not spoken of here as, in any special sense, a seer or prophet of Jahveh, but as a "man of Elohim" that is to say, a seer having access to the "spiritual powers," just as the wise woman of Endor might have been said to be a "woman of Elohim" and the narrator's or editor's explanatory note seems to indicate that "Prophet" is merely a name, introduced later than the time of Samuel, for a superior kind of "Seer," or "man of Elohim."
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