Elohim

Within the depth-psychology corpus, Elohim functions not as a simple synonym for the biblical God but as a theologically and psychologically charged term whose multiplicity is itself the point. The Hebrew plural form — gods — becomes a site of contestation that runs through biblical scholarship, Gnostic studies, and Jungian amplification alike. Armstrong traces the term’s polytheistic roots, noting that Yahweh was once prepared to accept the other gods as elohim, sons of El Elyon, before prophetic monotheism progressively delegitimized them. In the Gnostic material surveyed by Meyer, Elohim becomes an individualized divine person — paired with Eden in an erotic cosmogony — whose abandonment of creation precipitates the drama of human ensoulment. Edinger’s alchemical reading, following Jung, locates Ruach Elohim as the animating pneumatic spark dispersed through matter, linking Jewish pneumatology to Stoic World-Soul doctrine. Hillman’s depth-mythological analysis reads Elohim as the daemonic wrestler with Jacob, a night-figure who must retreat before dawn — connecting the divine name to the nightmare complex. What unites these very different deployments is a shared insistence that Elohim names not a simple unity but a dynamic, internally differentiated divine field whose tensions mirror the tensions of the psyche itself.

In the library 11 passages

In the beginning there are three powers of the universe: the highest God, called the Good, and Elohim and Eden. Elohim is male and Eden is female, and Eden has, in part, a wild, serpent-like nature.

The Book of Baruch posits Elohim as a distinct masculine divine power paired erotically with the feminine Eden, subordinate to the highest Good, and co-responsible for the creation of humanity.

Marvin W. Meyer, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

paradise came to be from the love of Elohim and Eden… Adam became a kind of seal and token of their love, and an eternal symbol of the marriage of Eden and Elohim.

In the Gnostic Book of Baruch, the human being is constituted as a coniunctio symbol — a living seal of the sacred marriage between Elohim (spirit) and Eden (soul) — grounding anthropology in divine eros.

Marvin W. Meyer, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The Son of the Great World… is filled… with a fiery spark of Ruach Elohim, the spirit, breath, wind or blowing of the triune God, from… the Body, Spirit, and Soul of the World.

Edinger, following Khunrath and Jung, identifies Ruach Elohim as the alchemical scintilla — the divine spark scattered through matter — amalgamating Jewish pneumatology, Christian Trinity, and Stoic World-Soul into a unified depth-psychological image.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In the old days, Yahweh had been prepared to accept them as elohim, the sons of El Elyon (‘God Most High’), but now the gods had proved that they were obsolete.

Armstrong demonstrates that elohim originally designated a council of divine beings presided over by El, and that Yahweh’s rise to supremacy entailed the programmatic demotion and eventual death-sentence of his fellow gods.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the request of Elohim to the victorious Jacob to release him because dawn is breaking; for it is one of the characteristics of night demons and specters that they are linked with night and darkness.

Hillman’s nightmare analysis identifies Elohim as the wrestling night-figure who, like a daemon, must flee at daybreak, aligning the divine name with the chthonic, liminal powers of the unconscious.

Hillman, James; Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Compared with Yahweh, the Elohim of Israel, they were elilim — nothings, nonentities — mere manufactured objects that had no real divine content.

Armstrong traces the prophetic polemical reduction of elohim from a class of genuine divine beings to mere idols, marking the ideological boundary-drawing that produced Israelite monotheism.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

P makes Yahweh explain that he really was the same God as the God of Abraham, as though this were a rather controversial notion: he tells Moses that Abraham had called him El Shaddai and did not know the divine name Yahweh.

Armstrong’s source-critical analysis reveals that the relationship between Yahweh and the earlier El-Elohim tradition was historically contested, with priestly editors working to assert continuity across originally distinct divine identities.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Jacob dreamed that he saw El, who blessed him and repeated the promises that he had made to Abraham: Jacob’s descendants would become a mighty nation and possess the land of Canaan.

Armstrong’s account of the Bethel epiphany establishes El — the Canaanite high god whose name underlies Elohim — as the original deity of the patriarchal tradition, later identified with Yahweh.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the idea of the covenant tells us that the Israelites were not yet monotheists, since it only made sense in a polytheistic setting. The Israelites did not believe that Yahweh, the God of Sinai, was the only God.

Armstrong argues that the covenant presupposes a world of multiple elohim, confirming that early Israelite religion was monolatrous rather than strictly monotheistic.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

An obvious nightmare or nightmare vision is portrayed in Genesis. Here it is written: That same night [Jacob] got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed t[he ford].

Hillman introduces the Jacob-at-the-ford narrative as a paradigm case of the nightmare vision, contextualizing the Elohim encounter within a phenomenology of nocturnal demonic assault.

Hillman, James; Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms