Elohim

169:4.8To the Jews, Elo­him was the God of gods, while Yah­weh was the God of Is­rael. Je­sus ac­cepted the con­cept of Elo­him and called this su­preme group of be­ings God. In the place of the con­cept of Yah­weh, the racial de­ity, he in­tro­duced the idea of the fa­ther­hood of God and the world-wide broth­er­hood of man. He ex­alted the Yah­weh con­cept of a de­i­fied racial Fa­ther to the idea of a Fa­ther of all the chil­dren of men, a di­vine Fa­ther of the in­di­vid­ual be­liever. And he fur­ther taught that this God of uni­verses and this Fa­ther of all men were one and the same Par­a­dise De­ity.

169:4.5Ex­cept when quot­ing the He­brew scrip­tures, Je­sus re­ferred to De­ity by only two names: God and Fa­ther. And when the Mas­ter made ref­er­ence to his Fa­ther as God, he usu­ally em­ployed the He­brew word sig­ni­fy­ing the plu­ral God (the Trin­ity) and not the word Yah­weh, which stood for the pro­gres­sive con­cep­tion of the tribal God of the Jews.

97:9.17By this time Yah­weh’s tem­ple at Shiloh was dis­cred­ited, and all the wor­ship of the na­tion was cen­tered at Je­bus in the gor­geous royal chapel. The north­ern king­dom re­turned more to the wor­ship of Elo­him. They en­joyed the fa­vor of the Pharaohs, who later en­slaved Ju­dah, putting the south­ern king­dom un­der trib­ute.

96:1.85. Elo­him. In Kish and Ur there long per­sisted Sume­rian-Chaldean groups who taught a three-in-one God con­cept founded on the tra­di­tions of the days of Adam and Mel­chiz­e­dek. This doc­trine was car­ried to Egypt, where this Trin­ity was wor­shiped un­der the name of Elo­him, or in the sin­gu­lar as Eloah. The philo­sophic cir­cles of Egypt and later Alexan­drian teach­ers of He­braic ex­trac­tion taught this unity of plu­ral­is­tic Gods, and many of Moses’ ad­vis­ers at the time of the ex­o­dus be­lieved in this Trin­ity. But the con­cept of the trini­tar­ian Elo­him never be­came a real part of He­brew the­ol­ogy un­til af­ter they had come un­der the po­lit­i­cal in­flu­ence of the Baby­lo­ni­ans.

104:1.8The He­brews knew about the Trin­ity from the Ken­ite tra­di­tions of the days of Mel­chiz­e­dek, but their mono­the­is­tic zeal for the one God, Yah­weh, so ec­lipsed all such teach­ings that by the time of Je­sus’ ap­pear­ance the Elo­him doc­trine had been prac­ti­cally erad­i­cated from Jew­ish the­ol­ogy. The He­brew mind could not rec­on­cile the trini­tar­ian con­cept with the mono­the­is­tic be­lief in the One Lord, the God of Is­rael.

142:3.64. Elo­him. From the times of Adam the teach­ing of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity has per­sisted. Do you not re­call how the Scrip­tures be­gin by as­sert­ing that “In the be­gin­ning the Gods cre­ated the heav­ens and the earth”? This in­di­cates that when that rec­ord was made the Trin­ity con­cept of three Gods in one had found lodg­ment in the re­li­gion of our fore­bears.

169:4.9Je­sus never claimed to be the man­i­fes­ta­tion of Elo­him (God) in the flesh. He never de­clared that he was a rev­e­la­tion of Elo­him (God) to the worlds. He never taught that he who had seen him had seen Elo­him (God). But he did pro­claim him­self as the rev­e­la­tion of the Fa­ther in the flesh, and he did say that whoso had seen him had seen the Fa­ther. As the di­vine Son he claimed to rep­re­sent only the Fa­ther.

169:4.10He was, in­deed, the Son of even the Elo­him God; but in the like­ness of mor­tal flesh and to the mor­tal sons of God, he chose to limit his life rev­e­la­tion to the por­trayal of his Fa­ther’s char­ac­ter in so far as such a rev­e­la­tion might be com­pre­hen­si­ble to mor­tal man. As re­gards the char­ac­ter of the other per­sons of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity, we shall have to be con­tent with the teach­ing that they are al­to­gether like the Fa­ther, who has been re­vealed in per­sonal por­trai­ture in the life of his in­car­nated Son, Je­sus of Naz­a­reth.

97:3.6Eli­jah shifted the Yah­weh-Baal con­tro­versy from the land is­sue to the re­li­gious as­pect of He­brew and Ca­naan­ite ide­olo­gies. When Ahab mur­dered the Naboths in the in­trigue to get pos­ses­sion of their land, Eli­jah made a moral is­sue out of the olden land mores and launched his vig­or­ous cam­paign against the Ba­al­ites. This was also a fight of the coun­try folk against dom­i­na­tion by the cities. It was chiefly un­der Eli­jah that Yah­weh be­came Elo­him. The prophet be­gan as an agrar­ian re­former and ended up by ex­alt­ing De­ity. Baals were many, Yah­weh was one—mono­the­ism won over poly­the­ism.