'elohim - honorific plural or multiple personality?

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What's his line?

Will the real God please stand up?

For some - not that common today - God has been a barbarian war lord, offering food and protection in exchange for work and obedience. Behave and his goons won't beat you up, and you don't have to worry about those hoods in the other valley. You pay your taxes, you sneak what you think you can get away with.

For some - more likely today - God is Jeeves, a servant who is there to see to your needs and do as he is told. And if you ask for a pony and do not get it, you will probably fire him.

Then again, for some God is the absentee landlord, the guiy witgh the statue in the town square who built the library [the Carnegie name is carved on it] and has not been seen since. First cause perhaps; a factor in our equations no.

Others have God as teacher and judge. Get the lesson wrong, get caught with taps on your shoes, and you will be sorry - a rap on the knuckles or a trip to the principal.

Or there is God the amnesiac. He has forgotten he is God and EVERYTHING and thinks he is matter and energy and several fragmented human beings. In time he may remember that we are / the universe is - God.

There are some who feel God is the sadistic child - as I was - who keeps a stinking tank of pond life - us - in his room and occasionally experiements, pulling off a leg to see us squirm.

And the others for whom God is Comrade Stalin, a powerful sadist who will send us to Siberia or kill us for using the wrong word or just because he feels like it.

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Or there is my personal position, where he operates as senior professor in my department, colleague and mentor.

If I believed in God, it would be the 2nd to last one.

Hahaha. When I was a kid, I had this idea that God kept his universes in shoe boxes in his closest. Also, while playing with Barbies and GI Joes, I'd wonder if there was an unseen hand guiding me around as I did the dolls, which led me to wonder if my Barbies had an unknown consciousness, and perceived me to be their god. Funny the ideas that kids get.

When contemplating the "sadistic" nature of some people's view of God, I often equate that concept to the nasty little child with the magnifying glass who spends his afternoon tormenting the little ants.

Nasty? Nasty, you say? You were not even there. You completely ignore the scientist's insatiable and admittedly sometimes ruthless quest for knowledge.

NOT nasty, NOT sadistic, NO different from pouring unlabelled liquids from the garage into the burning barrel or sticking two pieces of wire in the electric outlet.

NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ME!

I never ran across the doll plat analogy before - maybe one of my sisters would have come up with it, but I was into sorting things not doing scenes. Male spectral child, was willst du? Was kannst du?

I guess I never viewed the magnifying glass as science.. When I wanted to see a bee burn, I put it into a paper bag, shook it really good, and set the bag on fire. (I do think I was a little sadistic.. though I never considered that maybe the bug might feel pain or even that it was a "life form that should be respected") Personally, I caught bugs and froze them because when I tried to dissect them their guts squished all over. I continuously got into trouble because my mom didn't appreciate slides of bug guts and carcasses in her freezer next to the ice cube tray.

I do understand the child's quest for scientific understanding. Perhaps I was never given a magnifying glass because I caused enough trouble without one.
Hmmm and, I used the word sadistic because you did. Nasty was all mine though.

I subscribe to the above view the most. I don't get those who view God as a celestial butler(many I've come across who also think that God is not judging or judgmental), nor do I get those who say that God is within us.

From reading the title I thought this was a J-document vs. E-document discussion - to which I reply that Elohim is the term for the universal God, and Jehovah is the personal God - the two are one of the same.

Not liking any of your "personality options", I guess I will just go with "honorific plural" ... and then admit I have yet to understand.

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My, my, my, oh my! However, I do still really understand.

Perhaps the Ancient Hebrews were polytheistic and the belief that "Elohim" was an honorific plural is merely an ad hoc way to reconcile the earlier parts of the Bible with the later parts.

I tend to think it might be more like a gradual move away from polytheism with "ancient texts" being written along the way ... but I have no difficulty at all in seeing the thought behind your "perhaps".

I'm referring to the modern practice of attributing "elohim" as an honorific plural as being the an ad hoc revision. The evolution of Ancient Hebrew thought probably went like this....

Polytheism ---- Henotheism ----- Monotheism

I don't do the E versus J tjing - too much like lit crit fore me, and I was never able to deal with Lit Crit.

The list was not intended to be at all exhaustive, just summarizing views I have run across in life and literature.

The sadistic in that particular god-image belongs to the stance, I simply want not to be labelled sadistic myself. Not that I have not had sadistic moments - but looking back what I did to ants and planaria was primarily dispassionate science not related to working off my impulses.

'elohim is hard. It is one of a set of divine lexicon found in Hebrew in plural form. Which suggests the honorific - not uncommon in many languages though usually used on humans not deities. BUT if 'el / 'elohim started out in Semitic - as ba`l / ba`lim certainly did - as a generic, not a specific personage - Akkadian seems to have used both as specific - then the switch from polytheism looks more plausible.

But of course in the head I was just doing wordplay.

That's a rather absurd view, that God is the senior professor in your department. Have you considered that you are just feeding that senior professor's ego??

In all seriousness though, I question the validity of such a conception. After all, it cannot help but be your invention(as opposed to discovery) as the historical notion of a God in any theological tradition today has not been this highly intellectual being. Now, one can come up with a bajillion excuses(read: lies) to say that God *really* is this intellectual being, and that the lack of the development of unique philosophies in early formulations of Judeo-Christian religions is just a fluke, but... these will still be excuses. If God were the "senior professor" we could expect him to act as such. However, if God is just your projection, he'll basically just reflect your life and experiences and well.... we don't see God as senior professor making as much sense as God as philologos's projection (read: lie).

I'd say something more like the sleeping giant. Close to the absentee landlord but not quite as he's literally too big to reach in and say high without unraveling the milky way let alone evaporate Earth. Its really tough to imagine such a being as well, nowhere close to anything else on the food chain, to be angry or vengeful simply because those types of annoyances are born of lack of lack of control - of which he's supposedly omnipotent, that would mean he's also the wellspring of all motion in existence.

Oh. Awesome!

By any chance, do you relate PRECISELY the same way to everybody in your life? Well, I do not. Nor do I believe God does - and if there is anything the available tradition says it is that he treats us as individuals.

Clearly he does not relate as senior professor to my wife, nor to most others I know. But he [knowing and having designed and made me] comes to me in that mode, and we havbe some good seminars.

This is all speculation You need a backward going time machine.

ruveyn

Other than the matter of having never had to make bricks for the Pharaoh, I have experienced an "exodus", I have "been to the mountain" -- What an experience that turned out to be! -- and then on "through the desert" and all of that ... and not all by myself.