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Elohim

Elohim (אֱלֹהִים) is grammatically plural in Hebrew — the word translated "God" throughout Genesis is a plural. The Raëlian canon reads this plural literally: the Elohim are an advanced extraterrestrial civilization that engineered life on Earth and were remembered as "gods" by the peoples they contacted. This hub gathers the canonical reading, the textual evidence, the parallel traditions, the scholarship that takes the plural seriously, and the limits on how far the reading stretches.

Definition

Elohim (Hebrew: אֱלֹהִים, 'ĕlōhîm) is the word translated as "God" throughout the opening chapters of the Hebrew Bible. Grammatically it is plural — the plural form of the Semitic noun 'ĕlōah (אֱלוֹהַּ), built on a root that means powerful ones or ones from above.

In the Wheel of Heaven frame the plural is read literally: the Elohim are an advanced civilization — biologically similar to modern humans, roughly 25,000 years more technologically mature — that engineered life on Earth and were remembered by early peoples as "gods." This is the Raëlian canon position, stated directly in The Book Which Tells the Truth and elaborated across the Raëlian corpus.

The wiki entry on Elohim carries the full etymology, Akkadian and Sumerian cognates, and the linguistic case for reading the plural literally. This hub is the comparative layer: it gathers how the Elohim appear across traditions, what scholars make of the plural form, and what the mainstream academic objections are.

The canon position

"We are the ones who made all life on earth; you mistook us for gods; we were at the origin of your main religions."

— Raël, The Book Which Tells the Truth (1973)

The Raëlian account reads the Bible, the Qur'an, and other scriptures as compressed historical memories of contact events with the Elohim. The claim is not that every biblical passage is literal history — it is that the layer of meaning beneath the religious wrapping is a record of a technologically advanced civilization interacting with early humanity. The word Elohim is the anchor for this reading because it names the actors and is already grammatically plural in the Hebrew text.

In the Hebrew Bible

The plural is consistent and early. The opening verse of Genesis is בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים (bərē'shîṯ bārā' 'ĕlōhîm), typically translated "In the beginning, God created." A grammatically literal rendering is closer to "In the beginning, the Powerful Ones created."

Four passages make the plural difficult to read as a singular plural- of-majesty:

  • Genesis 1:26 — "And Elohim said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" — first-person plural pronouns referring back to Elohim.
  • Genesis 3:22 — "And the LORD Elohim said, Behold, the man is become as one of us" — explicit "one of us" phrasing.
  • Genesis 11:7 — "Let us go down, and there confound their language" — at the Tower of Babel.
  • Psalm 82:1, 82:6 — "Elohim standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods… I have said, Ye are gods" — a divine-council scene.

The Raëlian reading treats these as straightforward plurals. Mainstream Jewish and Christian exegesis reads them as plurals of majesty or as God speaking to the heavenly host. The canon frame does not dismiss the traditional readings; it reads the text as compressed — multiple interpretations survive because the source material genuinely contains more than one voice.

In other traditions

Mesopotamian: Annunaki and the dingir sign

Akkadian has the word ilum (god), cognate with Hebrew 'ēl. The Sumerian logogram for individual deities, 𒀭 (DINGIR), doubles as the ideogram for "sky" or "heaven." The Sumerian name for the older generation of deities is 𒀭𒀀𒉣𒈾 — Annunaki — where the first sign is ān ("sky"). The Raëlian reading of the Hebrew plural maps cleanly onto the Sumerian image of "those who came down from the sky" and the wiki entry on Elohim walks the full linguistic chain from Hebrew through Akkadian to Sumerian.

Mormonism: an explicit plural godhead

The Latter-day Saint tradition is unusual among modern Christian denominations in reading the Genesis plural as genuinely plural. Joseph Smith taught that "God" is a council: Heavenly Father, a Heavenly Mother, and the pre-mortal Jesus Christ, with further beings in the divine council around them. Mormon scripture in the Pearl of Great Price retells the Genesis creation with "the Gods" as the explicit subject throughout. The Mormon reading arrives at plural Elohim from within a confessional framework independent of the Raëlian canon, which is why it is worth citing: two modern traditions, reading the same text, reaching similar grammatical conclusions without talking to each other.

Second Temple Judaism: the divine council

The apocryphal and pseudepigraphal literature of the Second Temple period — including the Book of Enoch — takes the heavenly host as populated and active. Enoch's Watchers descend from heaven, take human wives, and teach humanity arts and sciences. Whether or not the Watchers map onto the Raëlian Elohim, the Second Temple texts are evidence that Jews in the centuries around the turn of the era read the Hebrew Bible's plural passages as genuinely populated and did not yet flatten them into a singular God.

Scholarship

The plural taken seriously

Michael Heiser's work (see The Naked Bible in the cited sources) argues, from within conservative Protestant scholarship, that the Hebrew Bible's "divine council" is not a metaphor. Heiser reads Elohim in Psalm 82 as a real assembly of lesser divine beings under the supreme God, and reads Genesis 1:26 and 3:22 as genuinely plural speech within that council. Heiser explicitly rejects the ancient-astronaut reading — for him the divine council is supernatural, not extraterrestrial — but his philological defense of taking the plural seriously is the mainstream-adjacent version of the same move the Raëlian canon makes.

Neo-Euhemerism: the Sendy line

Jean Sendy, a mid-twentieth-century French author, proposed reading the Bible "à la Schliemann" — treating it the way Heinrich Schliemann treated Homer, as a compressed record of concrete events. His book Those Gods Who Made Heaven and Earth argues that the Hebrew word usually translated "God" is a plural and should be read as "the Celestials" or "those who came from the sky." Stefano Bigliardi's academic paper A Gentleman's Joyous Esotericism (cited) places Sendy carefully in the history of ancient-astronaut thought and documents his nuanced reading of the different factions of "Theosites" (his term for the Elohim).

Etymology and the sky sign

The linguistic chain is documented in lexicons and Akkadian grammars: Hebrew 'ēl ← Akkadian ilum ← Proto-Semitic *ʔil-, written in cuneiform with the logogram 𒀭 (dingir) that also means "sky." The etymological core of the word for "god" in this language family is entangled with the word for "sky." This is not a Raëlian claim — it is in the standard academic lexicons — and it is compatible with both the mainstream "sky as metaphor for transcendence" reading and the Raëlian "sky as literal origin" reading.

Limits and challenges

Every concept hub on this site is required to expose its best objections (editorial guardrail, Strategy 2). For the Elohim reading:

  1. Grammar of majesty. Hebrew does use plural nouns for singular referents of dignity (the word adonai, "my lord", is already plural). Mainstream Jewish and Christian interpretation reads Elohim the same way. The plural form by itself does not force a literal plural reading.

  2. Selective literalism. Reading Elohim literally while reading other passages metaphorically is a choice. A consistent literalism would also commit the reader to flat earths, talking serpents, and a flood geology that does not match the sedimentary record. The Raëlian frame handles this with a compression theory — ancient people wrote down what they could understand, in the genre available to them — but the choice of which layers to decompress is still editorial.

  3. Absent physical evidence. There is no direct archaeological or genetic evidence of an extraterrestrial engineering event at the origin of Homo sapiens that mainstream genetics or paleontology accepts. The genetic evidence of anatomically modern humans is consistent with terrestrial evolution under normal conditions. The canon frame answers this by pointing to the specific timeline around 25,000 years ago and asking what evidence would falsify the claim — a good epistemological move, but the positive evidence has not yet arrived.

  4. Skeptical framing of design arguments. The broader intellectual tradition of design-based readings of origins — from Paley through modern Intelligent Design to the Raëlian canon — has been criticized at book length (see The Devil's Delusion in the cited sources, for a measured critique of the New Atheist counter-move; and the broader skeptical literature on ancient-astronaut theory). The WoH frame is in conversation with these critiques, not outside them.

This hub is a pilot. It is the first concept hub built under the Strategy 3 / Phase 3 rollout, intended to validate the concept-hub.html template, the six-source citation pattern, and the editorial tone. Future expansions: more citations from within the Raëlian corpus, a direct treatment of the Second Temple Enochic literature, a genomics section when a suitable source lands in data-library, and translations to the other eight supported languages.