Paul Wallis & Mauro Biglino - ELOHIM are not GOD - Ep 1 - 06-26-2022
Episode Summary:
Wallis and Biglino delve into the etymology and usage of "Elohim" in the Bible, highlighting inconsistencies and anomalies in traditional translations. They emphasize the importance of understanding the ancient texts' original meanings without theological bias, suggesting that Elohim might refer to multiple entities or beings with significant power. The scholars point out that the term is plural and often associated with verbs in the plural form, conflicting with the singular notion of God in monotheistic traditions. They argue that a literal, uninterpreted translation of ancient texts reveals a different narrative than the commonly accepted one, potentially altering our understanding of human origins and the nature of divinity.
Key Takeaways:
- Elohim might not refer to a singular God but a collection of powerful entities.
- Traditional translations of the Bible may have obscured the original meanings due to theological biases.
- Reexamining the term Elohim with a literal approach to ancient texts reveals a drastically different narrative.
- The plural form of Elohim and its associated verbs challenge the monotheistic interpretation.
- Understanding the original context and meaning of biblical words is crucial for a complete understanding of the texts.
- The scholarly work of Paul Wallis and Mauro Biglino opens up a discussion on cultural memory and the potential misinterpretations made over centuries.
Key Takeaways:
- Elohim as a Plural Term:
Traditional View: Elohim is singular in context, referring to the one monotheistic God.
Authors' Argument: Elohim is plural, often used with plural verbs, suggesting it refers to multiple entities or "powerful ones" rather than a singular omnipotent deity. - Translation and Interpretation:
Traditional View: Biblical translations and interpretations have been consistent and accurate, reflecting the divine and infallible nature of the texts.
Authors' Argument: Translations are often influenced by theological bias, and a literal translation without interpretation reveals a different narrative, especially concerning the word Elohim. - Nature of Divinity:
Traditional View: The Bible speaks of a singular, omnipotent, and omniscient God.
Authors' Argument: The text, when taking into account the original meanings and usages of words like Elohim, suggests a more complex picture that could involve a council or assembly of powerful beings, not a singular God. - Biblical Anomalies and Inconsistencies:
Traditional View: Apparent anomalies and inconsistencies are either symbolic or can be explained within the theological framework.
Authors' Argument: Many of these anomalies and inconsistencies, especially related to Elohim, are due to mistranslations or misinterpretations over time, reflecting a different story when corrected. - Hebrew Language and Its Implications:
Traditional View: The Masoretic Text and other traditional Hebrew texts have preserved the true meaning of the original scriptures.
Authors' Argument: Understanding Hebrew, particularly its evolution and the original context, is crucial. The authors argue that the Hebrew language, particularly its reconstruction in the Masoretic Text, might not accurately reflect the original texts' meanings. - Theological Implications:
Traditional View: The theological implications of the Bible are clear and centered on monotheism and the worship of a singular God.
Authors' Argument: The traditional theological implications might be a result of interpretational errors. The actual implications might challenge or broaden our understanding of the divine and human origins. - Cultural and Historical Context:
Traditional View: The Bible is a document that transcends its cultural and historical context, offering timeless truths.
Authors' Argument: A deep understanding of the cultural and historical context, including the meanings of words at the time, is essential. The authors suggest that much of what we understand as biblical truth is colored by later cultural and theological influences.
Mauro Biglino - MI-KA- EL: THE ARCHSTRATEGYST - 12-29-2021
For hundreds and thousands of years, people around the world have turned to the
Bible for information about God. Two scholars, Maro Bilino and Paul Wallace, argue
for a radically different interpretation.
Seeking out the root meanings of key words in these ancient texts, they find
another quite different story emerges, one with enormous implications for our
understanding of the human race and our place in the universe. For more than two
millennia, readers have interpreted the ancient texts of the Bible as stories of
God, a seamless narrative in which God creates the heavens and the earth, botanical
and animal life, and eventually the human race. However, a number of anomalies in
the texts, along with intriguing questions of translation, point to another
possibility. Paul Wallace is an internationally best selling author, researcher
and scholar of ancient mythologies. Over the last decade, Paul's work has probed
the world's mythologies and ancestral narratives for the insights they hold on our
origins as a species and our potential as human beings.
As a senior churchman, Paul served as a church doctor, a theological educator, and
an archdeacon in the Anglican Church in Australia. Paul's work in church ministry
has included training pastors in the interpretation of biblical texts. His work in
biblical translation and interpretation has revealed a forgotten layer of ancient
story with far reaching implications for our understanding of human origins and
our place in the cosmos.
Maro Bilino is an internationally best selling italian author, researcher and
highly regarded scholar of ancient Hebrew. For many years he worked for Rome's St.
Paul Press as a Bible translator, providing with great precision the literal
meaning of hebrew words for Vatican approved interlinear Bibles. It is an exacting
discipline. The scholar must be rigorous in avoiding any kind of interpretation of
the word and give only the literal, etymological meaning of each word.
Part Morrow's findings set him at ods with the conventional expectations of the
catholic world and propelled him onto the international stage, where his work has
opened up a world of cultural memory recorded in the Bible, yet hidden from the
public for centuries by mistaken translation and the dogmas of the church.
Together, morrow and Paul show that the root meanings of a series of keywords in
the Bible reveal an earlier layer of information very different to the story of God
associated with the Bible. Hidden plain sight in the pages of Genesis is an even
more ancient narrative, one which reframes the whole story of human beginnings.
The oldest word in the Bible, rendered as God, is the hebrew word Elohim. But is
that what the word means?
And what are the implications of the translation choices surrounding this
mysterious word?
Hello everyone. It makes me smile a little bit to see this Bible star that I
consulted to prepare this video. It is a real pleasure for me to be here with my
friend Paul Wallace to talk together about biblical topics. I will tell you about
a very simple concept, but very respectful of the way of reading the so called
sacred test. Then we will start from here with a series of short videos with the
aim of obtaining very simple indication for a respectful reading of the Bible, as
respectful as possible towards the ancient authors.
In this way we could do an autonomous reading and we could get an idea of what the
Bible probably tells us beyond what theology has told us. Instead.
At the beginning, of course, I would also like to give you some indications
relating to the absolute uncertainty that we have when we approach that text. I
mean the awareness of the fact that we know very little about that text. To
develop this topic, it is interesting to read some concepts expressed by Professor
Garbini, professor at the Sapienza University of Rome, professor of semitic
philology. Professor Garbini argues that Hebrew is a canonic dialect South
Phoenician. Actually, Hebrew is one of the many dialects within the canonic
languages.
We only know Hebrew as it was reconstructed at the end of the first millennium
after Christ, the so called Masoretic Hebrew. At that time, the important thing
was not to know the linguistic structure of those texts, but the theological
implications deriving from the various currents of Judaism.
This means that when we read the Bible, we do not read a text that followed grammar
rules, but we read a text that followed an ideological path, and grammatical rules
were not a problem for the authors.
This is important because over the centuries, many grammatical rules have been
developed, for example, those relating to the term elohim, which from plural
witches must absolutely become singular. The linguistic and grammatical rules have
therefore been elaborated after. So we know only one of interpretation of the
biblical text, that of the school of Tiberius, which produced Mesoretic Hebrew.
The hebrew language in the beginning was expressed through the consonants of the
phoenician language. Hebrew was written without vowels.
We will never know how the Bible was originally written.
The vowel sounds were introduced by the school of Tiberius between the 6th and 9th
centuries after Christmit. Professor Garbini says that when we speak of ancient
languages, even the agreement of all scholars on the meaning of a term is not a
guarantee of certainty. Based on this information, what we can honestly do is try
to do a literal reading of the Bible regarding the term Elohim. In the face of
all these uncertainties, I think the best thing to do is what I will tell you
shortly. Elohim is actually a term that you don't know how to translate.
For this reason, it is translated in many ways.
For example, it is translated with the term God. But the jewish exeget themselves
say that in the hebrew language there is no term that indicates God as we
understand it, as an omniscient, omnipotent, transcendent spiritual entity that is
to be worshipped. Elohim is also translated as judges, legislators, governors, the
bright ones from above, and so on. All these terms that are used actually
indicate the functions that this Elohim performed, but do not say who they really
were.
The Elohim were certainly judges, they were certainly legislators, they were
certainly governors. But who they really were and what the term loom really means,
we don't know.
This is the fundamental thing. Since we don't know, we must have the correctness
to say it.
Here in Genesis 2013, we see one of the examples relating to those uncertainties I
mentioned earlier that concerns the term Elohim and the verbs that are used.
This is the passage where Abraham tells his story and tells when the Elohim
brought me out of my father's house.
Then you see that here the verb is translated in the plural form. This is the
Bible translated for scholars who know the hebrew language. This is the guide of
the verbal forms present in the Old Testament. And also here it is said that the
verb it is in the plural form in the third person.
So it is certain that the verb connected to the term Elohim is plural. But in the
Bibles translated for families, the verb is theologically translated into the
singular because the term Elohim must indicate God, and so it must have the verb
in the singular, even if it is plural in Hebrew.
As you can see, the bibles translated for scholars respect the letter of the hebrew
text, while the bibles translated for families contain theological translations.
That is, they must convey an idea, a different concept from what is written in the
original Bible. Labia di rutero, la bibia de Jerusalem, labivia concordata, labia
de la garciona. All these Bibles are translated for the public, and therefore they
have the translation of verb in the singular form. Luther's Bible the Jerusalem
Bible the Bible of the German Bishops Conference, the King James Bible, the
septuaginta, that is, the Bible translated into Greek, the Bible published by the
House of the Geneva Bible.
All this derives from the fact that Elohim must be translated with the singular
term God.
The Bible of Jehovah's Witnesses translates the verb into the singular, but in
the note it says that in reality the verb is plural, plural.
Various commentators from different schools try to explain why this plural verb
must be translated into the singular. But each time they are explanations that
always have the purpose of affirming that Elohim refers to the one God.
I don't want to go into the merits of all the explanations that have been worked
out to try to prove that Eloim is singular.
To refute them. It is sufficient, for example, to take psalm 82, which clearly
speaks of an assembly of the eloim and follow what Professor Manuel Tov of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem says.
He says that the various ways used by Hebrew to indicate the term we translate with
God actually refer to different people, and the terms are Elion and Yahweh.
El is probably one of the singular forms of the term elohim. The other form is
eloa.
In Aramaico, abiamo.
In Aramaic we have elaha.
In syriac language we have Allah.
In Arabic we have ilah. To then get to identify the unique God with Allah. The
Arabs say la ilaha ilalah wa muhammad rasoul allah. There is no God apart from
Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.
We still remember that even the Jews tell us that we will never know how the Bible
was read because there were no vowels.
As you can understand all these terms, if they are considered without the vowels,
they are all very similar.
So we are faced with the same category of individuals. Also, from the point of
view of the meaning of nouns, from the point of view of the use of verbs, from
the point of view of uncertainties in the translations, we are faced with a
situation in which we don't know.
So in this situation of not knowing what, we can do a very simple thing to read
the Bible respectfully, I think it is right not to translate the term elohim, the
term l, the term eloah.
And when in the Bibles we have at home, we find the term God, we can replace it
with the term elohim, thus living the word used by the biblical authors.
So we will understand that without entering into useless discussions and with the
utmost respect for the biblical authors, if you read the Bible while keeping the
terms they use, we will realize that we are faced with a Bible different from the
one we are told, but a Bible much more fascinating, much more concrete, much
more understandable, but above all, much more logical than what we are told at
this point. I give you an appointment here in the videos with my friend Paul
Wallace to address other indications about the most respectful way to read the
Bible.
Ciao from Italy.
I'm very happy to be in conversation with Maro on these topics because my own
research journey in the Eden series have brought me to very similar conclusions.
And it was initially the issues around the word Elohim, the plural form of the word
elohim, that broke me out of my old world of narrow christian orthodoxy to a point
of view from which I can see that the Bible is not a book about God in the way I
thought it was, but it is actually representative of a kaleidoscope of entities
from the beginning of the hebrew canon to the very end. Now, the word elohim is the
Bible's oldest word that gets translated as God. But as Mauro has pointed out, it
is a masculine plural form that takes plural verb forms. And as I began drilling
down into those questions, I realized that the problems thrown up by the plurality
of that word are not just a grammatical glitch.
They represent an earlier form of the story in which Elohim was understood to
represent a diversity of beings. There is a body in the hebrew canon referred to as
the sky council, in which a number of elohim sit in council together. Now, in my
Eden books, escaping from Eden, the scars of Eden, and echoes of Eden, I argue that
the Elohim stories make better sense if we do just as Maro just said and read them
with the word Elohim still in place, or if we use a root meaning, the powerful
ones. When we read the stories that way, the stories change, but not in a random
way. They change in a way that resolves many of the moral questions we would have
over the Elohim stories, why such brutal and unconscionable things are done, how it
is that human beings get slaughtered in the conflict of the Elohim, something that
doesn't make sense if Elohim is translated in the singular as God.
But the other thing that is revealed is that the moment you reread the stories as
stories of the Elohim, the powerful ones, you quickly realize that you're reading
the summary form of the source narratives from out of ancient Mesopotamia, the
narratives from out of ancient Sumeria, Babylonia, Arcadia, and Assyria.
I sometimes get a knee jerk reaction from people of faith regarding what I argue for
in the translation of Elohim as the powerful ones. And the knee jerk reaction is
when people of faith say, ah, but wait a minute. We know that God is Father, son,
and Holy Spirit. So this is the christian theology of the Holy Trinity.
Surely that's why Elohim, the Bible's oldest word for God, is a plural. It must
represent the persons of the Holy Trinity well, there are many problems to that
reaction, and the first is that the Holy Trinity is a christian doctrine. It's
separated from the work and intent of the original authors by millennia. And the
theology of the most recent redactors of the hebrew canon was a monotheistic
theology. They did not believe in multiple gods.
And in fact, the insertion of the holy name Yahweh over earlier Elohim texts such
as we see in Genesis three or Genesis eleven, reveals that that later redactor is
turning the stories of the Elohim into a story of God. And it's those adjustments
that throw up many of the moral problems. Why would a holy God genocide people?
Why would a loving God bomb people back into a Preston age condition from having
previously been a technological civilization? This is what we read in Genesis
eleven.
So, no, it's not a representation of the Holy Trinity. And would it make any
sense for thousands of human beings to get killed in the crossfire between the
Elohim? Is that what happens when the Father, son, and Holy Spirit get into a spat?
Of course not. Now, the original stories are about something else, Elohim.
What I would argue are powerful ones. Now, some theologians argue that when the
word Elohim is understood as the powers or the powerful ones, that it doesn't
specify what kind of entities they are, that this word could refer to anything more
powerful and advanced than humanity. And so we shouldn't draw specific conclusions
from the word. T. T. Clark published a theology of the Old Testament which was modestly titled the Theology of the Old Testament. It's edited by S-D-S. Salmond, and in it they quote the theologian A. B. Davidson, and he writes, these words, in contrast to men, angels belong to the class of Elohim.
Now, I'll pause right there, because that's a reminder that the word Elohim gets
translated in various ways through the hebrew canon. In one place, it's God, and in
another place, it's chieftains or judges or landlords. In another place, it's
angels. How can this earliest word for God be so elastic? And why would the
ancients choose a word to denote the unique, transcendent God, but also denote
random other entities who they never define?
It's slightly ill fitting. So the quote goes on, it might be interesting to
contemplate the question of how the same name, Elohim, came to be applied to God
and this class of beings. Agreed? Good question. Then he goes on.
Perhaps we should be satisfied with the general explanation that the name meaning
powers is applied from the standpoint of men. To all that is above man, to the
region lying above him. That's an interesting phrase, isn't it? Though? The same
name is given I.
E. To angels and God. The two are never confounded in scripture. Well, that's a
rather disingenuous thing to say. The two are never confounded in scripture.
That's a nonexplanation of why the word can mean angels here, or false gods here,
or demons here, or judges here, or God over here. What's the truth of the word?
And that's why I argue for rereading the Elohim texts and leaving Elohim in the
text, so that the shape of the stories becomes that much clearer to the modern
reader. Another theologian who points to the word Elohim as representing a
kaleidoscope of powerful entities is Michael Heiser, and he rightly points out
that the word is far more elastic than we generally believe. But it's only a
halfway explanation as to why that is the earliest designation for God.
Why would God be categorized with arconic entities, other material beings? Why
would there be this competition among Yahweh and the other Elohim? And it's clear
in moments in the Bible, Yahweh classes himself as an Elohim. There's an occasion
when his king wants a prognosis on his health, and he sends for advice from the
Elohim of the people of Ekron. Yahweh gets furious and says, is there no ElohIM
here that he could consult, that he would run off and consult the Elohim of Ekron?
And it's a moment when you realize these Elohim are in competition with one another
for hegemony. Go to the ten CommanDments and you've got something similar, where
there's a great forgetting of the other Elohim being commanded. You're not to bow
down to them. You're not even to depict them. You serve only Yahweh.
And then Moses'successor, Joshua, says something very similar. Cut yourself off
from the Elohim the Egyptians serve, and the Elohim YOur ancestors served on the
other side of the river in Mesopotamia, and you should serve only Yahweh. So there
we have a world of many powerful entities, but you serve this one. And so the
Yahweh character is set among the many Elohim of the hebrew stories. You also have
stories about a sky council in which a number of elohims sit in council together,
presided over by the character Yahweh.
How can you have a council where a number of those entities are fictitious, but the
president of the council is real, and that's God. That's not quite coherent. We
have to realize there is an earlier form of the stories, prior to the 7th to 6th
century BCE edit, and the original form is a world in which there are many Elohim,
many powerful ones, all presiding over their own respective human colonies. Maoro
and I are not the first people to point out the moral problems thrown up by reading
the Elohim stories as God's stories. There were some really significant church
fathers at the beginning of Christianity who pointed this out very clearly and who
were wishing to nudge the church away from regarding the hebrew scriptures as
foundational for Christianity.
That decision had already been taken in acts 15 reading that book, and yet the
arguments had to be had all over again in the first 1234 centuries of Christianity.
An origin argued that if you read the Elohim stories as if they were God's stories
and took them at face value, then you would end up believing in a God of whom you
had to justify the most brutal actions. We would have to believe of God. He said,
quote such things as we would not believe of the most savage and unjust of men. So
he pointed out very clearly, there is a moral problem when you translate the Elohim
stories as God stories.
I completely agree with Maro that when the final redaction of the hebrew canon was
done in the 7th to 6th century BCE, the agenda driving that edit was an ideological
one, not a grammatical one. And that is why you can have texts where the
theological problem of too many gods has been cleaned up, but the grammar is a
mess. The fact that the earlier grammar of the Elohim stories survives in stories
where the name Yahweh has been pasted over the top is a clue that you're not
reading the original form, and a clue that the original form had more gods or
advanced beings in it than the current translation wants to give away. And the
shape of the hennetheistic world remains. The stories don't make sense until you
realize there are many powerful ones in the picture in competition with one
another.
When Abraham gives this explanation of why he moved from ur of the Chaldes, he
says, the powerful ones told me to move, and we have the Elohim, the plural form
noun, and then told me to wander is a plural form verb. Now, the plural form verb
is clear in the Hebrew, so that survived that 7th to 6th century BCE edit. But
what that information does not survive is the translation into English, because
you translate it into English and told me to is no different whether you've got a
single or a plural subject of that verb. And so the translation into English hides
the fact that Abraham is actually referencing many powerful entities. And this is
why it's important to go back to the Hebrew, to look at the translation of these
words.
This is the power of the work that Mauro has done, because as a translator of
interlinear Bibles, he had to give a very precise rendering of each word in the
hebrew text with no interpretation, no theological orthodoxization of the text.
Simply report what's in the text, and then you have the translations either side,
and you can see I've got a plural form verb in the Hebrew, and it's been changed
into a singular form word because the translators want this to be about God when
it clearly isn't. I argue in the Eden series that when in the text, the Elohim
say, let us make the humans to look like one of us, they really do mean that. Look
like is a very concrete term, and one of us is very clear. The plurality is
emphasized there.
If that word is translated as God, you've got a philosophical problem, and you've
got a grammatical problem. As soon as you translate Elohim as the powerful ones,
the problem resolves. Elsewhere in Genesis three, you have the Elohim arguing over
how intelligent the human beings should be, and one of them says, we don't want the
humans to be as intelligent as us. And once again, the conflict and the plurality
of the language throws up a problem that even a child can recognize in the telling
of the story from conventional family translations of the Bible. Those questions
resolve as soon as you realize that you are reading a story about multiple Elohim,
conflicting over how intelligent human beings should be.
Not a new story. It's actually a summary form of the conflict between Enlil and
Enki in the ancient mesopotamian stories. In my book escaping from Eden, I argue
for the root meaning of the word Elohim as being the powerful ones and suggest that
when we read the stories that way, they make sense and they line up with their
sources. There's a coherence to that picture which emerges. But if you don't want
to follow that logic, just keep the word Elohim in the Elohim texts and reread the
stories that way.
And that's quite sufficient for a different shape of the story to emerge, a story
that has something different to say about the world in which our ancestors lived,
that gives different information about our origins and our place in the cosmos.
The final edit of the Old Testament of the Bible, the hebrew canon, included the
layering of some beautiful and profound theology over the top of ancient texts.
Unfortunately, mistranslating traumatic ancestral memories as if they were
encounters with God is a choice with far reaching consequences. Belief in a
violent, xenophobic, hierarchical God has been used through the ages to justify
violent wars and all manner of abuses. However, the fidelity which the ancient
manuscripts have been curated in the hebrew canon by countless generations of
priests and scribes means that in our generation we can now return to these
fascinating artifacts of our prehistory and ask how differently they might be
translated.
To find out more about Paul Wallace and Maro Bilino, along with links to their
published works, follow the links in the video description.