Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Psalm 82:1
God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods. One Hebrew word, both times.
Psalm 82:1, in every translation this tool compares.
Animal covers a whale and a mouse. It tells you what kind of thing something is, not how big or important. Now imagine your only word for person worked that way too, so a king and a newborn got the same label and rank had to come from somewhere else in the sentence.
Because the verse uses elohim twice in one sentence for two different referents, which is the clearest possible demonstration that the word is a category and not a rank. Every argument about this psalm runs through that one fact.
God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.
All versions print God for the first and gods or divine beings for the second. The NET reads the great assembly and the divine assembly. Nobody renders both the same way, because the sentence would stop making sense.
אֱלֹהִים elohim · H430
Elohim appears twice here for two different referents, and it is plural in form both times. The word marks which realm a being belongs to, not where it stands in a hierarchy, which is why the same word covers Yahweh, the beings He judges, and a dead prophet at 1 Samuel 28:13.
English has God with a capital and god with a small one, and the distinction is one of identity. Hebrew has one word making a distinction of realm. The capital letter is a translator's decision that Hebrew never had to make, because Hebrew had no capitals.
When one word is rendered two different ways in a single sentence, the translator has made an interpretive decision you cannot see. That is the place to stop and look.
There is no way to print both as gods without sounding polytheistic, and no way to print both as God without nonsense. Every version takes the same route. The interpretive question of who the second group is belongs to the Divine Council Index, not here.
- elohim of a dead prophet at 1 Samuel 28:13
- elohim plural in form with singular predication throughout Genesis 1
- Heiser, “Should elohim with Plural Predication be Translated ‘Gods’?” Bible Translator 61:3 (2010): 123-136
- The interpretive argument is worked in full at jayms.com, the Divine Council Index
