Elohim Is a Title

Latter-day Saints are told they worship a different God because they say the word “God” names an office rather than an individual. The Hebrew text settles that question by itself, and then the New Testament closes it.

Nearly every charge brought against the Restoration’s doctrine of Deity rests on one unexamined assumption. The critic assumes that “God” is a proper name, the personal designation of exactly one being, the way “Peter” designates Peter. Grant him that and a great deal follows automatically. Deny it and most of his argument never gets off the ground. So the assumption deserves to be stated at full strength before it is tested.

The Charge

“There is one God, and ‘God’ is who He is, not what He does. Mormons turn the divine name into a job description so they can hand it out to Jesus, to the Holy Ghost, to exalted men, and eventually to themselves. That is polytheism with a vocabulary trick on top of it. The God of Israel does not share His name with anyone.”

He is right about one thing. The God of Israel does not share His name with anyone, and the Restoration has never claimed otherwise. The name is YHWH. “God” is not the name. It never was, and the Hebrew grammar of the word makes that impossible to miss.

The Grammar Will Not Let It Be a Name

Hebrew treats proper names in a particular way, and the rules are not subtle. A proper name does not take a possessive suffix. It does not take the definite article. It does not stand at the head of a construct chain. There is no “my Abraham,” no “the Abraham,” and no “Abraham of the Abrahams.” The word elohim does all three of those things, and it does them in the plainest passages of the Old Testament.

Three Things a Name Cannot Do

Possessive suffix — elohai, “my God” (Genesis 28:21).

Definite article — ha-elohim, “the God,” the cry of all Israel on Carmel after the fire fell (1 Kings 18:39).

Construct chain — elohei ha-elohim, “God of gods,” the word governing itself, in a verse where Moses is piling up superlatives for the God of Israel and reaches for this one first (Deuteronomy 10:17).

Look hard at that third one, because it is the phrase that decides the matter. What would “God of gods” even mean if the word were somebody’s personal name? It would be gibberish, the way “Peter of the Peters” is gibberish. Moses wrote it as a title of supremacy within a class, and Hebrew builds a whole family of phrases on exactly that pattern: king of kings, lord of lords, song of songs, holy of holies. Every one of them says the same thing about the word it repeats. The word names a category, and the construct names the highest member of it.

This is not a Latter-day Saint reading imposed on the text. It is the text.

Scripture Hands the Word to a Whole Class

If elohim were a name, it would attach to one person and stay there. It does not. The Old Testament applies it to foreign deities (Judges 11:24; Exodus 12:12), to the judges of Israel who sat in God’s place to render judgment (Exodus 21:6; 22:8–9), to Moses standing before Pharaoh (Exodus 7:1), to Samuel brought up out of the ground at Endor (1 Samuel 28:13), and to the heavenly beings standing in the divine council (Psalm 82:1; 97:7).

Then comes the detail almost nobody stops on. The word gets COUNTED. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). “New gods that came newly up” (Deuteronomy 32:17). Who has ever spoken of other Yahwehs, or of new Yahwehs? Nobody has, in any text, in any century, because you cannot count a name. You can only count the members of a class, and the first commandment is not a lesson in arithmetic. It is a command about worship, given by the one Being who holds the office over every other claimant to it.

Paul understood the word exactly this way, and said so in a single sentence: “For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) but to us there is but one God, the Father” (1 Corinthians 8:5–6). Many bear the word. One is ours.

The Name Is YHWH

The passages where God actually gives His name draw the line themselves, and they draw it in one breath.

Exodus 3:15

“The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.”

Where the King James translators printed Lord in small capitals, the Hebrew reads YHWH. So read the verse as it stands in the original: YHWH, the elohim of your fathers, and this is my name forever. The NAME is YHWH. Elohim is what He is. The same distinction is stated again to Moses a few chapters later, where God says He appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, “but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them” (Exodus 6:3).

And that is why Carmel ends the way it does. The fire falls, the people fall on their faces, and the cry that goes up is YHWH hu ha-Elohim — “the Lord, he is the God” (1 Kings 18:39). The name is the subject of that sentence, the title is what is predicated of Him, and the entire contest with the prophets of Baal turned on which person truly holds the office. Elijah did not call down fire from heaven to settle a spelling.

The Son Who Is God Has a God

Now take the argument into the New Testament, where the critic believes he is strongest, and watch what the word does there.

Jesus is called God. “The Word was God” (John 1:1). “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). No Latter-day Saint has ever wanted a syllable of that softened, and the Restoration confesses it without hesitation. Jesus Christ is God.

Jesus also has a God, and He said so Himself on the morning of the resurrection, standing outside the empty tomb: “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17). Eleven verses later Thomas calls Him God. Both statements stand in the same chapter, from the same evangelist, about the same person. How can both be true at once? Only if the word is a title, because the single thing no person can possess is his own personal name.

This is not a feature of the mortal ministry that expired at the tomb, either, which is where critics usually try to file it. The resurrected and glorified Christ, speaking from the throne to the church at Philadelphia, says “my God” four times in one verse (Revelation 3:12). John opens the same book blessing Him who “hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father” (Revelation 1:6). Paul writes of “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory” (Ephesians 1:17), and states the order of things without any hedging at all: “the head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthians 11:3).

Hebrews 1 Does Both in Two Verses

If any passage in the Bible was written to end this argument, it is this one.

Hebrews 1:8–9

“But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever… therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.”

The Son is addressed as God in verse 8 and told that He has a God in verse 9. Same writer. Same quoted psalm. The author of Hebrews is citing Psalm 45:7, where the Hebrew reads elohim elohekha — the word twice over, the second time carrying a possessive suffix. That is the exact grammatical form a Hebrew proper name is never given, and the writer of Hebrews reaches for it deliberately to describe the exalted Christ.

Read it as a name and the verse becomes nonsense the moment it leaves the page. God, even thy God? A person cannot be handed his own name as a possession, and no writer in scripture ever tries.

Jesus Made This Argument Himself

They took up stones. The charge was blasphemy, “because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.” And what did the Savior do with that charge? He did not deny the claim, and He did not appeal to mystery. He quoted a psalm.

John 10:34–36

“Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?”

That defense works on one condition and one only. Elohim has to be a category into which a man can be placed by the word of God, exactly as Psalm 82:6 places them. If the word were the personal name of one single being, then the argument the Lord made in His own defense collapses in His own mouth, He has conceded the charge instead of answering it, and the stones were justified. Say that out loud and hear how it sounds. The scripture cannot be broken, He told them, and He rested His life on the plain sense of a word.

Whoever insists that elohim is a proper name is not arguing with Joseph Smith. He is arguing with the defense Jesus Christ gave in Solomon’s porch at the feast of dedication.

The Creed Admits It in Its Own Wording

There is one more witness, and it is a hostile one. The Council of Nicaea in 325 met precisely to settle how the Son could be God alongside the Father, and the confession that came out of that century of controversy describes Him as “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God” — Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero.

Now ask the question the phrase invites. God of God? That is the identical construct pattern as elohei ha-elohim, and it is unreadable unless the word describes what someone is rather than who he is. The bishops could not say what they needed to say about Christ without using “God” twice in a single phrase for two persons, which is the very usage the modern critic calls polytheism when a Latter-day Saint employs it. What followed was three centuries of machinery — one substance, three persons, eternal generation — built to keep that phrase from meaning what the words plainly say.

The Restoration did not invent this problem for Christianity. It answered it, by taking the Hebrew word in the sense the Hebrew scriptures actually give it, and by letting the Father and the Son be the two distinct persons the New Testament everywhere shows them to be.

The Verdict

Set the two readings side by side and see which survives contact with the text. If “God” is a proper name, then Jacob’s “my God” is incoherent, “God of gods” is gibberish, “other gods” counts the uncountable, Hebrews hands the Son a name He already owns, and the Lord’s own defense against a capital charge falls apart under the lightest examination. If it is a title, in the ordinary way that king, lord, and judge are titles, then every one of those passages reads plainly and not a single verse has to be explained away. The King of kings has a King. There is nothing strange in that, and there is nothing new about it either.

So the charge fails at its foundation. The Gospel of Jesus Christ teaches one God to whom we are accountable, the Father, and it teaches that His Son bears the same office in its fulness while still calling the Father “my God” from the throne of glory. That is Paul’s doctrine in Ephesians and in First Corinthians. That is John’s doctrine in his gospel and in his Revelation. That is what the writer of Hebrews put in two consecutive verses and expected the Saints to hold together without flinching.

Read elohim as a title and the whole New Testament testimony of Christ holds together without a paradox in sight. Read it as a name and the Son of God cannot be described at all. Reject the title, and you are not rejecting the Restoration. You are rejecting the plain words of the apostles who wrote the book you are holding.