ABSTRACT
When the world began, there was earth and water, undifferentiated and lifeless. The first sign of life came from the divine, ‘hovering’ perhaps like an eagle over its young.14 Elohim, normally translated ‘God’, is grammatically plural, but the Hebrew verb for creating is here conjugated as singular. So is the divine singular or plural? Grammarians rule in favour of the singular, giving priority to the verb, but this is a short-lived solution to the question. The assumption of unity in the heavens is maintained for most of the chapter, but it is not sustained with absolute consistency. In 1.26 Elohim speaks in the plural, implying some kind of divine council: ‘Let us make humankind in our image, as our similitude.’ Indeed, there are more occasions in the primal history where the divine plural appears: ‘The human has become like one of us, knowing good and evil’ (3.22); ‘Come, let us descend and confuse their language so that they will not understand the language of their neighbour’ (11.7). So the question eludes a simple grammatical solution: is God one, or is God many? Is there differentiation in the heavens? How is God named, and what implications does this naming have for human beings?
