Elohim (אֱלֹהִים) is the most common Hebrew word for "God" in the Hebrew Bible, and it is grammatically plural: the -im ending is the ordinary Hebrew masculine plural. When it refers to the God of Israel it normally takes singular verbs, which is why most grammarians treat it as a "plural of majesty". The same word can also mean "gods", divine beings in general, and even the spirit of a dead man, and that range is exactly why the Elohim have become one of the most debated words in the Bible.
The question matters because the plural shows up in the places readers notice most. Genesis 1:26 has God say "Let us make man in our image," and the Psalms describe God judging among the elohim in a heavenly council. Mainstream scholars explain these passages through Hebrew grammar and the divine-council imagery Israel shared with its Canaanite neighbours. Ancient-astronaut writers read them as memories of a group of real beings, and Billy Carson goes further, identifying the Elohim of Genesis with the Anunnaki of the Sumerian tablets.
What does the word Elohim mean?
Elohim means "God" or "gods", depending on context, and the Hebrew form itself does not decide which. It is related to the shorter words El and Eloah, both also meaning "god", though the exact derivation is still debated. Elohim appears more than 2,500 times in the Hebrew Bible, far more often than either shorter form.
The range of meaning is wide:
- The God of Israel. Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," uses Elohim with the verb bara, "created", in the singular.
- Other nations' gods. Exodus 20:3, "You shall have no other gods before me," uses the same word, elohim, for the gods Israel is forbidden to worship.
- Divine beings in a heavenly court. Psalm 82:1 reads, "God stands in the divine council; among the elohim he judges."
- A human acting with divine authority. In Exodus 7:1 God tells Moses, "I have made you elohim to Pharaoh."
- The spirit of the dead. In 1 Samuel 28:13 the medium of Endor tells Saul she sees elohim coming up out of the earth; the figure turns out to be the prophet Samuel.
So the word works less like a proper name and more like a category: it marks something as belonging to the divine or spirit realm.
Why is a plural word used for one God?
The standard answer from Hebrew grammar is that Elohim, used of Israel's God, is a plural of majesty or abstraction rather than a numerical plural. Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, the classic nineteenth-century reference, classes it with other Hebrew plurals that express greatness, fullness or rank rather than a count. The strongest evidence is agreement: in the overwhelming majority of cases the verbs, adjectives and pronouns attached to Elohim are singular when the God of Israel is meant. Genesis 1:1 says "Elohim created" with a singular verb, not "the Elohim created" with a plural one.
There are exceptions, and a fair account has to mention them. In Genesis 20:13 Abraham says that Elohim "caused me to wander" with a plural verb, and in Genesis 35:7 Jacob names Bethel because there "Elohim revealed themselves" to him, again with a plural verb. Grammarians explain these as the verb following the plural form of the noun, or as references to the angels Jacob saw at Bethel in Genesis 28. Writers who favour a literal plural point to the same verses as evidence that an older plural sense survived in the text. Either way, they are a small handful against thousands of singular constructions.
"Let us make man": the plural passages in Genesis
Four passages put plural speech in God's mouth, and they are the heart of the debate:
- Genesis 1:26: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."
- Genesis 3:22: "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil."
- Genesis 11:7, at Babel: "Come, let us go down and there confuse their language."
- Isaiah 6:8, in the prophet's throne-room vision: "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?"
Readers have offered at least four explanations. The first is the divine council: God is addressing the heavenly beings around his throne, as in Isaiah 6, where seraphim surround him. This is the view of Michael Heiser in The Unseen Realm (2015) and is widely held in modern scholarship; it also has an old Jewish pedigree, since the medieval commentator Rashi explained Genesis 1:26 as God taking counsel with his ministering angels. The second is a plural of deliberation, a speaker encouraging himself, as in English "let's see". The third is the Christian Trinitarian reading, found as early as Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho in the second century CE, which takes the "us" as the Father speaking with the Son. That reading is a later theological interpretation, not something the Hebrew author could have meant. The fourth is the literal plural, the idea that a group of beings is speaking, which is where the ancient-astronaut reading begins.
One textual detail cuts against a simple plural reading. Genesis 1:27, the very next verse, reverts to the singular: "So God created man in his own image." Whoever the "us" of verse 26 includes, the act of creation is narrated as the work of one actor.
The divine council and the Ugarit background
The idea of a council of gods did not start with Israel; it was common across the ancient Near East, and the clearest parallels come from Ugarit. Ugarit was a port city on the Syrian coast (modern Ras Shamra) whose clay tablets, written in the fourteenth to twelfth centuries BCE, were excavated from 1929 onward. In those texts the god El is the aged head of the pantheon, presiding over an assembly of gods often described as his sons.
The overlap with Hebrew vocabulary is direct. El is also a word for God in the Bible, appearing in titles such as El Elyon ("God Most High", Genesis 14) and El Shaddai (Genesis 17:1). Psalm 82 describes God judging in "the council of El" and calls its members "sons of the Most High". Mark S. Smith's The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001) traces how Israelite religion drew on this shared Canaanite picture before moving toward strict monotheism.
The clearest trace is Deuteronomy 32:8–9. The standard Hebrew text (the Masoretic Text) says the Most High divided the nations "according to the number of the sons of Israel". A Hebrew manuscript of Deuteronomy among the Dead Sea Scrolls reads "sons of God" instead, and the Greek Septuagint tradition reads "sons" or "angels" of God. Most textual critics now think "sons of God" is the older reading: the nations were assigned to lesser divine beings, while "the LORD's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage". The same phrase, bene ha-elohim, "sons of God", opens the story in Genesis 6:1–4 that leads to the [Nephilim of Genesis 6 and the Book of Enoch](/who-were-the-nephilim-giants-of-genesis-6-and-the-book-of-enoch), and the Book of Enoch expands those beings into the fallen Watchers, as covered in [the Book of Enoch explained](/the-book-of-enoch-explained-the-watchers-nephilim-and-why-it-was-left-out).
Elohim and Yahweh: two names, two sources?
Genesis uses two main names for God, Elohim and Yahweh (YHWH, usually rendered "the LORD"), and the alternation between them launched modern biblical criticism. In the eighteenth century the French physician Jean Astruc suggested that Genesis combined earlier documents distinguishable by their divine names. Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1883) built this into the documentary hypothesis: a Yahwist source (J), an Elohist source (E), Deuteronomy (D) and a Priestly source (P).
In that model the first creation account, Genesis 1:1–2:3, is Priestly and uses only Elohim, while the second, from Genesis 2:4b, uses "the LORD God" (YHWH Elohim). The model also explains Exodus 6:3, where God tells Moses he appeared to the patriarchs as El Shaddai "but by my name YHWH I did not make myself known to them". Scholars have since revised the hypothesis heavily, and many now doubt a continuous E source existed, but most still accept that the Pentateuch combines material from different hands. The takeaway for the Elohim question is that the switch between names reflects how the text was put together, not a change of cast.
Where the Anunnaki reading comes from
The identification of the Elohim with the Anunnaki comes from Zecharia Sitchin, whose The 12th Planet (1976) read the plural Elohim and the "us" of Genesis 1:26 as the Anunnaki, the great gods of Mesopotamian myth, whom he treated as flesh-and-blood visitors. For the Sumerian and Akkadian background and how Sitchin's readings compare with the tablets, see [who were the Anunnaki](/who-were-the-anunnaki-sumerian-texts-vs-ancient-astronaut-theory).
Two later writers have pushed the idea in different directions. The Italian author Mauro Biglino has published literal renderings of the Hebrew arguing that the Elohim were flesh-and-blood visitors rather than spiritual beings; academic Hebraists reject his translations. Paul Wallis, a former archdeacon, argues in Escaping from Eden (2020) that the Elohim of Genesis were a plural group of beings rather than a single God. Wallis has appeared on Billy Carson's Bible Study show.
There is a genuine parallel that draws readers to this comparison. In Mesopotamian creation stories, humanity is made after the gods deliberate together. In the Old Babylonian epic of Atrahasis, the gods create humans from clay mixed with the blood of a slain god, to take over the labour of the lesser gods. In the Enuma Elish, tablet VI, Marduk proposes making humankind and Ea fashions it from the blood of the rebel god Kingu, as described in [the Enuma Elish explained](/the-enuma-elish-explained-seven-tablets-of-creation). Ea is the Akkadian name of Enki, whose role is set out in [Enki and Enlil, the two brothers of Sumerian myth](/enki-and-enlil-the-two-brothers-of-sumerian-myth). Mainstream scholars see that parallel as shared literary tradition: Genesis adopts the council scene but reduces the other gods to an audience. Michael Heiser was himself an outspoken critic of Sitchin's translations.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson's position is that the plural Elohim of Genesis and the Anunnaki of the Sumerian tablets describe the same beings. In his reading, the plural of Genesis points to a real group of beings rather than a grammatical form, and the older Mesopotamian tablets name that group as the Anunnaki.
Carson's reading takes the plural passages, the divine council and the Mesopotamian creation parallels as evidence of a single historical memory recorded by two cultures. Mainstream scholarship accepts the parallels but explains them differently: Elohim is a plural of majesty when used of Israel's God, the council is a literary and theological motif shared across the Levant, and Genesis reshapes older Near Eastern material rather than preserving eyewitness history. Readers can weigh both accounts against the same texts. Carson's [Bible Study show](/watch/bible-study), where Paul Wallis has been a guest, is the place to hear the case in his own words.
Watch, read and go deeper
Billy Carson reads the biblical text through his own lens on [4BK TV's Bible Study show](/watch/bible-study), and Paul Wallis is among its guests. For a broader selection of his talks, [Best of Billy Carson](/watch/best-of-billy-carson) gathers highlights in one place. Everything on the site about Sumer, the Anunnaki and their parallels in the Bible is gathered on [the Anunnaki topic hub](/topics/anunnaki).
Frequently asked questions
Is Elohim singular or plural?
Elohim is plural in form, with the Hebrew plural ending -im. When it refers to the God of Israel it almost always takes singular verbs and adjectives, so grammarians treat it as a plural of majesty. When it refers to other gods or divine beings, as in Exodus 20:3 or Psalm 82:1, it is a true plural.
Who is God talking to in Genesis 1:26?
The Hebrew does not say. Mainstream and many traditional interpreters read it as God addressing the heavenly council or angels; others read it as a plural of self-deliberation; Christian tradition, from Justin Martyr onward, reads it as the Trinity. Ancient-astronaut writers, including Billy Carson, read it as a real group of beings.
Are the Elohim the same as the Anunnaki?
That is Billy Carson's position, and earlier Zecharia Sitchin's. Mainstream scholars and Hebraists do not accept it: they see real parallels between Genesis and Mesopotamian creation myths but explain them as shared literary tradition rather than two records of the same beings.
What is the divine council in the Bible?
The divine council is the assembly of heavenly beings over which God presides, described in passages such as Psalm 82, 1 Kings 22:19–22 and Job 1–2. The idea parallels the assembly of the gods under El in the Ugaritic texts. Michael Heiser and Mark S. Smith are two of the best-known scholars of the subject.
What is the difference between Elohim and Yahweh?
Elohim is a general word for God or gods, while Yahweh (YHWH) is the personal name of Israel's God. Genesis alternates between them, which led scholars to propose that it combines earlier sources, the Elohist and Priestly sources favouring Elohim and the Yahwist favouring Yahweh.
Sources and further reading
- Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (2015)
- Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (2001)
- Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, edited by E. Kautzsch, translated by A. E. Cowley (2nd English edition, 1910)
- Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1883)
- W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-Hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (1969)
- Zecharia Sitchin, The 12th Planet (1976)
- Paul Wallis, Escaping from Eden (2020)
