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124-458: Morphologically , the word is the plural form of the word אֱלוֹהַּ ( eloah ) and related to el . It is cognate to the word ' l-h-m which is found in Ugaritic , where it is used as the pantheon for Canaanite gods , the children of El , and conventionally vocalized as "Elohim". Most uses of the term Elohim in the later Hebrew text imply a view that is at least monolatrist at

248-581: A sacred text accepted by some branches of the Latter Day Saint movement, contains a paraphrase of the first chapter of Genesis which explicitly translates Elohim as "the Gods" multiple times; this is suggested by Mormon apostle James E. Talmage to indicate a "plurality of excellence or intensity, rather than distinctively of number," in contrast to his contemporary apostle Orson F. Whitney 's explanation that, while to "the modern Jew [Elohim] means

372-404: A "protective genius" (font?) for her in her temple. Though it is accepted that Ashratum's name is cognate to that of Asherah, the two goddesses are not actually identified with one another, given that they occupied different positions within their pantheons, despite sharing their status as consort to the supreme deity. In Akkadian texts , Asherah appears as Aširatu ; though her exact role in

496-547: A bit abstractly) from the pubic triangle. Remarking on the Lachish ewer , Hestrin noted that in a group of other pottery vessels found in situ , the usual depiction of the sacred tree flanked by ibexes or birds is in one goblet replaced by a pubic triangle flanked by ibexes. The interchange between the tree and the pubic triangle prove, according to Hestrin, that the tree symbolizes the fertility goddess Asherah. Hestrin draws parallels between this and representations of Hathor as

620-511: A connection to Asherah in 1941. Subsequent studies tried to find further evidence for equivalence of Qetesh and Asherah, although Wiggins does not. His hesitance did not dissuade subsequent scholars from equating Asherah with Qetesh. As ʾAṯirat ( Qatabanian : 𐩱𐩻𐩧𐩩 ʾṯrt ) she was attested in pre-Islamic south Arabia as the consort of the moon-god ʿAmm . One of the Tema stones (CIS II 113) discovered by Charles Huber in 1883 in

744-685: A few cases in the Greek Septuagint (LXX), Hebrew elohim with a plural verb, or with implied plural context, was rendered either angeloi ("angels") or to kriterion tou Theou ("the judgement of God"). These passages then entered first the Latin Vulgate , then the English King James Version (KJV) as "angels" and "judges", respectively. From this came the result that James Strong , for example, listed "angels" and "judges" as possible meanings for elohim with

868-456: A king of the Amorites by the 14th-century name of Abdi-Ashirta , "servant of Asherah". Each is on line ii within the letter's opening or greeting sentiment. Some may transcribe Aširatu or Ašratu . In Ugaritic texts , Asherah appears as ʾṯrt ( Ugaritic : 𐎀𐎘𐎗𐎚), anglicised ʾAṯirat or Athirat . She is called ʾElat , "goddess", the feminine form of ʾEl (compare Allāt ); she

992-752: A large and small bovine. This "oral fixation" motif has diverse examples, see figs 413–419 in Winter. In fact, already Flinders Petrie in the 1930s was referring to Davies on the memorable stereotype. It's such a common motif in Syrian and Phoenician ivories that the Arslan Tash horde had at least four; they can be seen in the Louvre. Early scholarship emphasized somewhat mutually-negating possibilities of holy prostitution , hieros gamos , and orgiastic rites. It has been suggested by several scholars that there

1116-548: A larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching . Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech , and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number , tense , and aspect . Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over

1240-530: A less generous estimation nonetheless supported by D ULAT 's use of the Ugaritian word in an ordinary sense. Binger finds some of these risibly imaginative, and unhappily falls back on the still-problematic interpretation that Ym may also mean day, so "Lady Asherah of the day", or, more simply, "Lady Day". The common Semitic root ywm (for reconstructed Proto-Semitic * yawm- ), from which derives ( Hebrew : יוֹם ), meaning "day", appears in several instances in

1364-643: A numerical but also as an abstract plural (corresponding to the Latin numen , and our Godhead ), and, like other abstracts of the same kind, have been transferred to a concrete single god (even of the heathen). To the same class (and probably formed on the analogy of אֱלֹהִים ) belong the plurals קְדשִׁים ( kadoshim ), meaning the Most Holy (only of Yahweh, Hosea 12:1 , Proverbs 9:10 , 30:3 – cf. אֱלֹהִים קְדשִׁים elohiym kadoshim in Joshua 24:19 and

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1488-444: A numerical plural) is at least highly improbable, and, moreover, would not explain the analogous plurals (see below). That the language has entirely rejected the idea of numerical plurality in אֱלֹהִים (whenever it denotes one God), is proved especially by its being almost invariably joined with a singular attribute (cf. §132h), e.g. אֱלֹהִים צַדִּיק Psalms 7:10 , &c. Hence אֱלֹהִים may have been used originally not only as

1612-558: A numerical plural. There are a number of notable exceptions to the rule that Elohim is treated as singular when referring to the God of Israel, including Genesis 20:13 , Genesis 35:7 , 2 Samuel 7:23 and Psalms 58:11 , and notably the epithet of the "Living God" ( Deuteronomy 5:26 etc.), which is constructed with the plural adjective, Elohim ḥayyim ( אלהים חיים ) but still takes singular verbs. The treatment of Elohim as both singular and plural is, according to Mark Sameth, consistent with

1736-876: A pattern different from the one that has been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival comparatives ) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation). In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. Some languages are isolating , and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative whose words tend to have many easily separable morphemes (such as Turkic languages ); others yet are inflectional or fusional because their inflectional morphemes are "fused" together (like some Indo-European languages such as Pashto and Russian ). That leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. A standard example of an isolating language

1860-493: A person or deity betwixt two confronted animals . According to Beaulieu, depictions of a divine " mistress of lions " motif are "almost undoubtedly depictions of the goddess Asherah." The lioness made a ubiquitous symbol for goddesses of the ancient Middle East that was similar to the dove and the tree. Lionesses figure prominently in Asherah's iconography, including the tenth-century BC Ta'anach cult stand , which also includes

1984-561: A plural verb in his Strong's Concordance , and the same is true of many other 17th–20th century reference works. Both Gesenius' Hebrew Lexicon and the Brown–Driver–Briggs Lexicon list both "angels" and "judges" as possible alternative meanings of elohim with plural verbs and adjectives. Gesenius and Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg have questioned the reliability of the Septuagint translation in this matter. Gesenius lists

2108-761: A possession relation, would consist of two words or even one word in many languages. Unlike most other languages, Kwak'wala semantic affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwak'wala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb): kwixʔid-i-da clubbed- PIVOT - DETERMINER bəgwanəma i -χ-a man- ACCUSATIVE - DETERMINER q'asa-s-is i otter- INSTRUMENTAL - 3SG - POSSESSIVE t'alwagwayu club kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəma i -χ-a q'asa-s-is i t'alwagwayu clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3SG-POSSESSIVE club "the man clubbed

2232-602: A singular and plural verb). Regarding this, the Jerusalem Talmud states: "All Names written regarding our father Abraham are holy [i.e., referring to the one God] except one which is profane, it was when the gods made me err from my father's house. But some say this one also is holy, [i.e.,] 'were it not for God, they [humans] already would have made me err'." The same disagreement appears in Tractate Soferim , where Haninah ben Ahi R. Joshua maintained that

2356-399: A speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words: kwixʔid clubbed i-da-bəgwanəma PIVOT -the-man i χ-a-q'asa hit-the-otter s-is i -t'alwagwayu with-his i -club kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q'asa s-is i -t'alwagwayu clubbed PIVOT-the-man i hit-the-otter with-his i -club A central publication on this topic is

2480-526: A theory put forth by Guillaume Postel (16th century) and Michelangelo Lanci  [ it ] (19th century) that the God of Israel was understood by the ancient priests to be a singular, dual-gendered deity. In the Septuagint and New Testament translations, Elohim has the singular ὁ θεός even in these cases, and modern translations follow suit in giving " God " in the singular. The Samaritan Torah has edited out some of these exceptions. In

2604-666: A version of the Greek Septuagint. In the KJV, elohim (Strong's number H430) is translated as "angels" only in Psalm 8:5. The KJV translates elohim as "judges" in Exodus 21:6 ; Exodus 22:8 ; twice in Exodus 22:9 as "judge" in 1 Samuel 2:25 , and as "gods" in Exodus 22:28 , Psalm 82:1 , Psalm 82:6 , Psalm 95:3 , Psalm 96:4 , Psalm 97:9 , and Psalm 138:1 . Angels cited in the Hebrew Bible and external literature often contain

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2728-690: A wood. From the Vulgate, the King James translation of the Bible uses grove or groves instead of Asherah's name. Non-scholarly English language readers of the Bible would not have read her name for more than 400 years afterward. The association of Asherah with trees in the Hebrew Bible is very strong. For example, she is found under trees (1 Kings 14:23; 2 Kings 17:10) and is made of wood by human beings (1 Kings 14:15, 2 Kings 16:3–4). The farther from

2852-418: A word form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word-form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem. Word-based morphology

2976-480: Is Chinese . An agglutinative language is Turkish (and practically all Turkic languages). Latin and Greek are prototypical inflectional or fusional languages. Asherah This is an accepted version of this page Asherah ( / ˈ æ ʃ ər ə / ; Hebrew : אֲשֵׁרָה , romanized :  ʾĂšērā ; Ugaritic : 𐎀𐎘𐎗𐎚 , romanized:  ʾAṯiratu ; Akkadian : 𒀀𒅆𒋥 , romanized:  Aširat ; Qatabanian : 𐩱𐩻𐩧𐩩 ʾṯrt )

3100-549: Is (usually) a word-and-paradigm approach. The theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms or to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. Word-and-paradigm approaches are also well-suited to capturing purely morphological phenomena, such as morphomes . Examples to show

3224-418: Is a morpheme plural using allomorphs such as -s , -en and -ren . Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, the two views are mixed in unsystematic ways so a writer may refer to "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme -s " in the same sentence. Lexeme-based morphology usually takes what is called an item-and-process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence,

3348-408: Is a relationship between the position of the gəḇīrā in the royal court and the worship (orthodox or not) of Asherah. The Hebrew Bible frequently and graphically associates goddess worship with prostitution ("whoredom") in material written after the reforms of Josiah . Jeremiah , and Ezekiel blame the goddess religion for making Yahweh "jealous", and cite his jealousy as the reason Yahweh allowed

3472-484: Is also called Qodeš , "holiness". There is reference to a šr. ‘ṯtrt. Gibson says sources from before 1200 BC almost always credit Athirat with her full title rbt ʾṯrt ym (or rbt ʾṯrt ). However, Rahmouni's indexing of Ugaritic epithets states the phrase occurs in only the Baʿal Epic . Apparently of Akkadian origin, rabat means "lady" (literally "female great one"). She appears to champion her son, Yam , god of

3596-465: Is called "morphosyntax"; the term is also used to underline the fact that syntax and morphology are interrelated. The study of morphosyntax concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, and some approaches to morphosyntax exclude from its domain the phenomena of word formation, compounding, and derivation. Within morphosyntax fall the study of agreement and government . Above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog

3720-522: Is cognate to ḥawwat , an attested epithet of Tanit in the first millennium BCE, though other scholars dispute a connection between Tanit and Asherah, and between Asherah and Eve. A Phoenician deity Ḥawwat is attested in the Punica tabella defixionis . There is further speculation that the Shekhinah as a feminine aspect of Yahweh may be a cultural memory or devolution of Asherah. Another such aspect

3844-508: Is commonly translated as "God", and capitalised. For example, in Genesis 1:26 , it is written: "Then Elohim (translated as God) said (singular verb), 'Let us (plural) make (plural verb) man in our (plural) image, after our (plural) likeness ' ". In the traditional Jewish understanding of the verse, the plural refers to God taking council with His angels (who He had created by this point) before creating Adam . It should also be noted that in

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3968-599: Is found three times in the Tanakh , with -im "Asherim" making up the great majority. The significance is unclear, as the interaction of gender and number in Hebrew is not robustly understood. Not all scholars find HB references with final t plural. Archaic suffixes like –atu/a/i became Northwest Semitic -at or -ā latter written -ah in transcription. That is, merely terminally alternate spellings like Asherat and Asherah reflect contextual rather than existential variation. Her name

4092-638: Is no genuine Asherah iconography". An Amorite goddess named Ashratum is known to have been worshipped in Sumer. Her Amorite provenance is further supported by her status as the wife of Mardu/Amurrum , the supreme deity of the Amorites. A limestone slab inscribed with a dedication made by Hammurabi to Ashratum is known from Sippar . In it, he complements her as "lord of the mountain" ( bel shadī ), and presages similar use with words like voluptuousness, joy, tender, patient, mercy to commemorate setting up

4216-418: Is not at all clear-cut. There are many examples for which linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The next section will attempt to clarify the distinction. Word formation includes a process in which one combines two complete words, but inflection allows the combination of a suffix with a verb to change the latter's form to that of the subject of the sentence. For example: in

4340-521: Is otherwise implicated. Park suggested in 2010 that the name Athirat might be derived from a passive participle form, referring to the "one followed by (the gods)", that is, "progenitress or originatress", which would correspond to Asherah's image as the "mother of the gods" in Ugaritic literature. This solution was a response to and variation of B. Margalit's of her following in Yahweh's literal footsteps,

4464-443: Is plural, even though one would expect the singular. This is one of several instances where the Bible uses plural verbs with the name elohim . Some Jewish sources (e.g., Targum Jonathan , Ibn Ezra , add Chizkuni ), seeking to explain the plural language of Genesis 35:7, translate elohim here as "angels", noting that in the story being referenced Jacob experiences a vision of malakhei elohim (angels of God) ascending and descending

4588-510: Is seen in the feminine (grammatically or otherwise) treatment of the Holy Spirit or Sophia . Goddess "aspect creep" can even lap upon male figures like Jacob or Jesus. A variety of symbols have been associated with Asherah. The most common by far is that of the tree, an equivalence seen as early as Neolithic times. Cultic objects dedicated to Asherah frequently depict trees, and the terms asherim and asheroth , regularly invoked by

4712-437: Is sometimes ’lt "Elat", the feminine equivalent of El . Her titles often include qdš "holy" and baʽlat , or rbt "lady", and qnyt ỉlm , "creator of the gods." Due to certain ambiguities in surviving attestations of Asherah, whether she is to be considered a deity or a symbol is not universally agreed upon. While some consider Asherah to be a defined deity, others call her a "mere cultic object ". de Vaux says Asherah

4836-436: Is the study of words , including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language . Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes , which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning . Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of

4960-434: Is the word achoth , meaning sister, with the irregular plural form achioth. Alternatively, there are several other frequently used words in the Hebrew language that contain a masculine plural ending but also maintain this form in singular concept. The major examples are: Sky/Heavens ( שמים shamayim ), Face ( פנים panim ), Life ( חיים - chayyim ), Water ( מים mayim ). Of these four nouns, three appear in

5084-399: Is to dogs as cat is to cats and dish is to dishes . In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning. In each pair, the first word means "one of X", and the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -s (or -es ) affixed to the second word, which signals the key distinction between singular and plural entities. One of

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5208-424: The pluralis excellentiae (plural of excellence), which is similar to the pluralis majestatis (plural of majesty, or "Royal we"). Gesenius comments that the singular Hebrew term Elohim is to be distinguished from elohim used to refer to plural gods, and remarks that: The supposition that אֱלֹהִים ( elohim ) is to be regarded as merely a remnant of earlier polytheistic views (i.e. as originally only

5332-487: The -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats , and in plurals such as dishes , a vowel is added before the -s . Those cases, in which the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", constitute allomorphy . Phonological rules constrain the sounds that can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in

5456-513: The Baal Cycle . But a homophone's meaning to an Ugaritian doesn't equate an etymon, especially if the name is older than the Ugaritic language. There is no hypothesis for rabat athirat yam without significant issues, and if Asherah were a word from Ugarit it would be pronounced differently. The common NW Semitic meaning of šr is "king, prince, ruler." The NW Semitic root ʾṯr (Arabic أثر ‎) means "tread". The -ot ending "Asherot"

5580-531: The Gnostic text known as the Secret Book of John , Elohim is another name for Abel , whose parents are Eve and Yaldabaoth . He rules over the elements of water and earth, alongside Cain , who is seen as Yahweh ruling over the elements of fire and wind. However, the 2nd century Gnostic teacher Justin proposed a cosmological model with three original divinities. The first is a transcendental being called

5704-485: The Marāḥ Al-Arwāḥ of Aḥmad b. 'Alī Mas'ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE. The term "morphology" was introduced into linguistics by August Schleicher in 1859. The term "word" has no well-defined meaning. Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form . Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals . For instance,

5828-588: The biconsonantal root . Discussions of the etymology of elohim essentially concern this expansion. An exact cognate outside of Hebrew is found in Ugaritic ʾlhm , the family of El, the creator god and chief deity of the Canaanite pantheon , in Biblical Aramaic ʼĔlāhā and later Syriac Alaha ("God"), and in Arabic ʾilāh ("god, deity") (or Allah as "The [single] God"). "El" (the basis for

5952-658: The conjugations of verbs and the declensions of nouns. Also, arranging the word forms of a lexeme into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense , aspect , mood , number , gender or case , organizes such. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables by using the categories of person (first, second, third); number (singular vs. plural); gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); and case (nominative, oblique, genitive). The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily but must be categories that are relevant to stating

6076-429: The prosodic -phonological lack of freedom of bound morphemes . The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory. Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme, but other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are inflectional rules, but those of

6200-439: The syntactic rules of the language. Person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English because the language has grammatical agreement rules, which require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. Therefore, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs because the choice between both forms determines

6324-416: The "elohim" of Israel), to seraphim , and other supernatural beings, to the spirits of the dead brought up at the behest of King Saul in 1 Samuel 28:13 , and even to kings and prophets (e.g., Exodus 4:16 ). The phrase bene elohim , translated "sons of the Gods", has an exact parallel in Ugaritic and Phoenician texts, referring to the council of the gods. Elohim occupy the seventh rank of ten in

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6448-454: The 2nd century CE. Another theory, building on an idea by Gesenius, argues that even before Hebrew became a distinct language, the plural elohim had both a plural meaning of "gods" and an abstract meaning of "godhood" or "divinity", much as the plural of "father", avot , can mean either "fathers" or "fatherhood". Elohim then came to be used so frequently in reference to specific deities, both male and female, domestic and foreign (for instance,

6572-610: The 5th century BCE which sometimes makes it difficult to determine whether a given passage is "Elohist" in origin, or the result of a later editor. In the Latter Day Saint movement and Mormonism , Elohim refers to God the Father . Elohim is the father of Jesus in both the physical and the spiritual realms, whose name before birth is said to be Jehovah . In the belief system held by the Christian churches that adhere to

6696-515: The Elohist version of the tale of Jacob's Ladder , in which there is a ladder to the clouds, with angels climbing up and down, with Elohim at the top. In the Jahwist version of the tale, Yahweh is simply stationed in the sky, above the clouds without the ladder or angels. Likewise, the Elohist source describes Jacob wrestling with an angel. The classical documentary hypothesis, first developed in

6820-594: The God of Israel. According to the documentary hypothesis , these variations are the products of different source texts and narratives that constitute the composition of the Torah : Elohim is the name of God used in the Elohist (E) and Priestly (P) sources, while Yahweh is the name of God used in the Jahwist (J) source. Form criticism postulates the differences of names may be the result of geographical origins;

6944-500: The Good, the second is Elohim, appearing here as an intermediate male figure, and the third is an Earth-mother called Eden . The world along with the first humans are created from the love between Elohim and Eden, but when Elohim learns about the existence of the Good above him and ascends trying to reach it, he causes evil to enter the universe. Morphology (linguistics) In linguistics , morphology ( mor- FOL -ə-jee )

7068-548: The Hebrew Bible in the context of Asherah worship, are traditionally understood to refer to sacred trees called " Asherah poles ". An especially common Asherah tree in visual art is the date palm, a reliable producer of nutrition through the year. Some expect living trees, but Olyan sees a stylized, non-living palm or pole. The remains of a juniper tree discovered in a 7,500 year old gravesite in Eilat has been considered an Asherah tree by some. Asherah's association with fertility

7192-456: The Hebrew Bible, but it is much reduced in English translations. The word ʾăšērâ is translated in Greek as Greek : ἄλσος ( grove ; plural: ἄλση) in every instance apart from Isaiah 17:8; 27:9 and 2 Chronicles 15:16; 24:18, with Greek : δένδρα (trees) being used for the former, and, peculiarly, Ἀστάρτη ( Astarte ) for the latter. The Vulgate in Latin provided lucus or nemus , a grove or

7316-658: The Israelite court. William Dever's book discusses female pillar figurines , the queen of heaven name, and the cakes. Dever also points to the temple at Tel Arad , the famous archaeological site with cannabanoids and massebot. Dever notes: "The only goddess whose name is well attested in the Hebrew Bible (or in ancient Israel generally) is Asherah." Various partial inscriptions found on destroyed seventh century BCE jars in Ekron contain words like šmn "oil", dbl "fig cake", qdš "holy," l'šrt "to Asherah", and lmqm "for

7440-726: The Jewish God, Elohim is usually understood to be grammatically singular (i.e., it governs a singular verb or adjective). In Modern Hebrew , it is often referred to in the singular despite the -im ending that denotes plural masculine nouns in Hebrew. It is generally thought that Elohim is derived from eloah , the latter being an expanded form of the Northwest Semitic noun ' il . The related nouns eloah ( אלוה ) and el ( אֵל ) are used as proper names or as generics, in which case they are interchangeable with elohim . The term contains an added heh as third radical to

7564-735: The Latter Day Saint movement and most Mormon denominations , including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), the term God refers to Elohim (the Eternal Father), whereas Godhead means a council of three distinct gods: Elohim (God the Father), Jehovah (the Son of God, Jesus Christ), and the Holy Ghost , in a non-trinitarian conception of the Godhead . In Mormonism,

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7688-521: The Masoretic Texts with the second-root letter ( - w - ) having been dropped, and in a select few cases, replaced with an A-class vowel of the Niqqud , resulting in the word becoming y(a)m . Such occurrences, as well as the fact that the plural, "days", can be read as both yōmîm and yāmîm ( Hebrew : יָמִים ), gives credence to this alternate translation. Another primary epithet of Athirat

7812-681: The P and E sources coming from the North and J from the South. There may be a theological point, that God did not reveal his name, Yahweh , before the time of Moses , though Hans Heinrich Schmid showed that the Jahwist was aware of the prophetic books from the 7th and 8th centuries BCE. The Jahwist source presents Yahweh anthropomorphically : for example, walking through the Garden of Eden looking for Adam and Eve. The Elohist source often presents Elohim as more distant and frequently involves angels , as in

7936-399: The Ugaritic ʾAṯirat or a later borrowing of the Hebrew ʾĂšērāh or similar form. In any event, Watkins says the root of both names is a Proto-Semitic *ʾṯrt . Pritchard excerpts the mention wšnglʔ wʔšyrʔ ʔlhy tymʔ and differs on the root's meaning. The Arabic root ʾṯr (as in أثر ‎ ʾaṯar , "trace") is similar in meaning to the Hebrew ʾāšar , indicating "to tread", used as

8060-427: The addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. The word independent , for example, is derived from the word dependent by using the prefix in- , and dependent itself is derived from the verb depend . There is also word formation in the processes of clipping in which a portion of a word is removed to create a new one, blending in which two parts of different words are blended into one, acronyms in which each letter of

8184-522: The ambiguity of the term elohim is the result of such changes, cast in terms of "vertical translatability", i.e. the re-interpretation of the gods of the earliest recalled period as the national god of monolatrism as it emerged in the 7th to 6th century BCE in the Kingdom of Judah and during the Babylonian captivity , and further in terms of monotheism by the emergence of Rabbinical Judaism in

8308-511: The ancient oasis of Tema , northwestern Arabia, and now located at the Louvre , believed to date to the time of Nabonidus 's retirement there in 549 BC, bears an inscription in Aramaic that mentions Ṣelem of Maḥram ( צלם זי מחרמ ‎), Šingalāʾ ( שנגלא ‎), and ʾAšîrāʾ ( אשירא ‎) as the deities of Tema. It is unclear whether the name would be an Aramaic vocalisation of

8432-407: The associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list are very strong, they are not absolute. In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes . A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word such as independently , the morphemes are said to be in- , de- , pend , -ent , and -ly ; pend is the (bound) root and

8556-510: The charge of blasphemy Jesus replied:) "Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods. If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?" – "Now what is the force of this quotation 'I said ye are gods.' It is from the Asaph Psalm which begins 'Elohim hath taken His place in

8680-651: The concept of ' NOUN-PHRASE 1 and NOUN-PHRASE 2 ' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and". An extreme level of the theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language. In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes , instead of by independent "words". The three-word English phrase, "with his club", in which 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes

8804-531: The destruction of Jerusalem. Although their nature remains uncertain, sexual rites typically revolved around women of power and influence, such as Maacah . The Hebrew term qadishtu , formerly translated as " temple prostitutes " or "shrine prostitutes", literally means "priestesses" or "consecrated women", from the Semitic root qdš , meaning "holy". However, there is a shrinking scholarly consensus that sacred prostitution existed, and some argue that sex acts within

8928-554: The earth when she summoned the spirit of the Prophet Samuel at Saul's request. The word elohim , in this context, can refer to spirits as well as deities. Some traditional Jewish sources say that the spirits of deceased human beings are being referred to. The Babylonian Talmud states: " olim indicates that there were two of them. One of them was Samuel, but the other, who was he? – Samuel went and brought Moses with him." Rashi gives this interpretation in his commentary on

9052-435: The effectiveness of word-based approaches are usually drawn from fusional languages , where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third-person plural". Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation since one says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-process theories, on

9176-553: The extended root ʾlh ) is usually derived from a root meaning "to be strong" and/or "to be in front". The word el (singular) is a standard term for "god" in Aramaic, paleo-Hebrew, and other related Semitic languages including Ugaritic. The Canaanite pantheon of gods was known as 'ilhm , the Ugaritic equivalent to elohim . For instance, the Ugaritic Baal Cycle mentions "seventy sons of Asherah ". Each "son of god"

9300-456: The first sentence of Genesis (along with elohim ). Three of them also appear in the first sentence of the Eden creation story (also along with elohim ). Instead of "honorific plural" these other plural nouns terms represent something which is constantly changing. Water, sky, face, life are "things which are never bound to one form". God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among

9424-526: The following verse of Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in his [own] image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them"; the singular verb בָּרָא (bārāʾ), meaning "He created" is used as it is elsewhere in all the acts of creation featured in Genesis. This shows us that the actual creation of man (and everything else) in Genesis was a singular act by God alone. Wilhelm Gesenius and other Hebrew grammarians traditionally described this as

9548-545: The form of the verb that is used. However, no syntactic rule shows the difference between dog and dog catcher , or dependent and independent . The first two are nouns, and the other two are adjectives. An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms that are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, and there are no corresponding syntactic rules for word formation. The relationship between syntax and morphology, as well as how they interact,

9672-551: The goddess of the Sidonians in 1 Kings 11:33), that it came to be concretized from meaning "divinity" to meaning "deity", though still occasionally used adjectivally as "divine". The word elohim or 'elohiym ( ʼĕlôhîym ) is a grammatically plural noun for " gods " or "deities" or various other words in Biblical Hebrew . In Hebrew, the ending -im normally indicates a masculine plural. However, when referring to

9796-551: The gods. ... I have said, Ye [are] gods; and all of you [are] children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. Marti Steussy, in Chalice Introduction to the Old Testament , discusses: "The first verse of Psalm 82: 'Elohim has taken his place in the divine council.' Here elohim has a singular verb and clearly refers to God. But in verse 6 of the Psalm, God says to

9920-401: The history of a language. The basic fields of linguistics broadly focus on language structure at different "scales". Morphology is considered to operate at a scale larger than phonology , which investigates the categories of speech sounds that are distinguished within a spoken language, and thus may constitute the difference between a morpheme and another. Conversely, syntax is concerned with

10044-513: The idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenated, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for item-and-arrangement theories and similar approaches. Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms: Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one Hockettian . For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but did not have meaning itself. For Hockett, morphemes are "meaning elements", not "form elements". For him, there

10168-478: The ladder. Radak agrees that this is a reference to angels but also presents the alternative view that the plural form in the verse is a majestic plural , as seen in other verses such as Psalms 149:2 and Job 35:10 . Elohim can be seen used in reference to the angels in a variety of other cases, such as in Psalms 8:6 and 82:1–6 . Elohim , when meaning the God of Israel, is mostly grammatically singular, and

10292-411: The language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs] , which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. To "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃɪz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats : it depends on

10416-449: The largest sources of complexity in morphology is that the one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, there are word form pairs like ox/oxen , goose/geese , and sheep/sheep whose difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern or is not signaled at all. Even cases regarded as regular, such as -s , are not so simple;

10540-471: The late 19th century among biblical scholars and textual critics , holds that the Jahwist portions of the Torah were composed in the 10th-9th century BCE and the Elohist portions in the 9th-8th century BCE, i.e. during the early period of the Kingdom of Judah . This, however, is not universally accepted as later literary scholarship seems to show evidence of a later "Elohist redaction" ( post-exilic ) during

10664-417: The latter, a jar shows bovid-anthropomorphic figures and several inscriptions that refer to "Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah" and "Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah." However, a number of scholars hold that the "asherah" mentioned in the inscriptions refers to some kind of cultic object or symbol, rather than a goddess. For instance, some scholars have argued that since cognate forms of "asherah" are used with

10788-438: The lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate . Eat and eats are thus considered different word-forms belonging to the same lexeme eat . Eat and Eater , on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different concepts. Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin , one way to express

10912-511: The meaning of "sanctuary" in Phoenician and Aramaic inscriptions from the same period, this may also be the meaning of the term in the two Hebrew inscriptions. Others argue that the term "asherah" may refer to a sacred tree or grove used for the worship of Yahweh as this is the meaning that the Hebrew term has in the Hebrew Bible and in the Mishnah . In one potsherd there appear

11036-598: The meaning without agreeing with it. Hengstenberg stated that the Hebrew Bible text never uses elohim to refer to "angels", but that the Septuagint translators refused the references to "gods" in the verses they amended to "angels". The Greek New Testament (NT) quotes Psalms 8:4–6 in Hebrews 2:6b-8a, where the Greek NT has ἀγγέλους ( angelous ) in vs. 7, quoting Psalms 8:5 (8:6 in the LXX), which also has ἀγγέλους in

11160-424: The medieval rabbinic scholar Maimonides ' Jewish angelic hierarchy . Maimonides wrote: "I must premise that every Hebrew [now] knows that the term Elohim is a homonym, and denotes God, angels, judges, and the rulers of countries ..." In the Hebrew Bible, 1 Samuel 28:13 , elohim is used with a plural verb. The witch of Endor tells Saul that she saw elohim ascending ( olim עֹלִים , plural verb) out of

11284-572: The mighty assembly. In the midst of the Elohim He is judging. ' " The Hebrew word for "son" is ben ; plural is bānim (with the construct state form being "benei"). The Hebrew term benei elohim ("sons of God" or "sons of the gods") in Genesis 6:2 compares to the use of "sons of gods" (Ugaritic: b'n il ) sons of El in Ugaritic mythology . Karel van der Toorn states that gods can be referred to collectively as bene elim , bene elyon , or bene elohim . The Hebrew Bible uses various names for

11408-405: The new word represents a specific word in the representation (NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organization ), borrowing in which words from one language are taken and used in another, and coinage in which a new word is created to represent a new object or concept. A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are

11532-534: The next-largest scale, and studies how words in turn form phrases and sentences. Morphological typology is a distinct field that categorises languages based on the morphological features they exhibit. The history of ancient Indian morphological analysis dates back to the linguist Pāṇini , who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a constituency grammar . The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, including

11656-462: The other hand, often break down in cases like these because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. The approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of

11780-636: The other members of the council, 'You [plural] are elohim.' Here elohim has to mean gods." Mark Smith, referring to this same Psalm, states in God in Translation : "This psalm presents a scene of the gods meeting together in divine council ... Elohim stands in the council of El. Among the elohim he pronounces judgment: ..." In Hulsean Lectures for... , H. M. Stephenson discussed Jesus' argument in John 10:34-36 9 concerning Psalm 82:6-7 . (In answer to

11904-452: The other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes. In words such as dogs , dog is the root and the -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest and most naïve form, this way of analyzing word forms, called "item-and-arrangement", treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other (" concatenated ") like beads on a string. More recent and sophisticated approaches, such as distributed morphology , seek to maintain

12028-408: The otter with his club." That is, to a speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers - i-da ( PIVOT -'the'), referring to "man", attaches not to the noun bəgwanəma ("man") but to the verb; the markers - χ-a ( ACCUSATIVE -'the'), referring to otter , attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q'asa ('otter'), etc. In other words,

12152-519: The pantheon is unclear; as a separate goddess, Antu , was considered the wife of Anu , the god of Heaven . In contrast, ʿAshtart is believed to be linked to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar who is sometimes portrayed as the daughter of Anu. Points of reference in Akkadian epigraphy are collocated and heterographic Amarna Letters 60 and 61's Asheratic personal name. Within them is found

12276-410: The partner of Yahweh has stirred a lot of debate. Many have written about it, and most scholars have argued that Yahweh and Asherah were indeed a consort pair among the ancient Israelites. Possible evidence for her worship includes an iconography and inscriptions at two locations in use circa the 9th century. The first was in a cave at Khirbet el-Qom . The second was at Kuntillet Ajrud . In

12400-598: The plural of majesty, not of number...to the Latter-day Saint it signifies both." The new religious movement and UFO religion International Raëlian Movement , founded by the French journalist Claude Vorilhon (who later became known as "Raël") in 1974, claims that the Hebrew word Elohim from the Book of Genesis actually means “those who came from the sky” and refers to a species of extraterrestrial aliens . In

12524-418: The present indefinite, 'go' is used with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, but third-person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns causes 'goes' to be used. The '-es' is therefore an inflectional marker that is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word's grammatical category , but in the process of inflection,

12648-441: The quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme . Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon that, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding. There are three principal approaches to morphology and each tries to capture the distinctions above in different ways: While

12772-475: The related noun ʾĒl ( אֵל ) in their theophoric names such as Michael and Gabriel . The Hebrew language has several nouns with -im (masculine plural) and -oth (feminine plural) endings which nevertheless take singular verbs, adjectives and pronouns. For example, Baalim , Adonim , Behemoth . This form is known as the "honorific plural", in which the pluralization is a sign of power or honor. A very common singular Hebrew word with plural ending

12896-533: The sea, in his struggle against Baʾal. (Yam's ascription as god of the sea may mislead; Yam is the deified sea itself rather than a deity who holds dominion over it.) So some say Athirat's title can be translated as "Lady ʾAṯirat of the Sea", alternatively, "she who walks on the sea", or even "the Great Lady-who-tramples-Yam." This invites relation to a Chaoskampf in which neither she nor Yam

13020-433: The second kind are rules of word formation . The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). The distinction between inflection and word formation

13144-608: The shrine". This has been taken as evidence that Asherah was worshipped in Philistia . Attempts to identify Asherah within the pantheon of ancient Egypt have been met with both limited acceptance and controversy. Beginning during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt , a Semitic goddess named Qetesh ("holiness", sometimes reconstructed as Qudshu ) appears prominently. That dynasty follows expulsion of occupying foreigners from an intermediary period . René Dussard suggested

13268-522: The singular Aramaic עֶלְיוֹנִין the Most High , Daniel 7:18 , 7:22 , 7:25 ); and probably תְּרָפִים ( teraphim ) (usually taken in the sense of penates ), the image of a god, used especially for obtaining oracles. Certainly in 1 Samuel 19:13 , 19:16 only one image is intended; in most other places a single image may be intended; in Zechariah 10:2 alone is it most naturally taken as

13392-462: The so-called Revadim Asherah is rife with potent, striking sexual imagery, depicting Asherah suckling two smaller figures and using both of her hands to fully expose her vagina. Many times, Asherah's pubis area was marked by a concentration of dots, indicating pubic hair, though this figure is sometimes polysemically understood as a grape cluster . The womb was also sometimes used as a nutrix symbol, as animals are often shown feeding directly (if

13516-620: The sycamore tree goddess in Egypt, and suggests that during the period of Egyptian rule in Palestine the Hathor cult penetrated the region so extensively that Hathor became identified with Asherah. Other motifs in the ewer such as a lion, fallow deer and ibexes seem to have a close relationship with the iconography associated with her. Asherah may also have been associated with the ancient pan- Near Eastern " Master of animals " motif, which depicted

13640-516: The temple were limited to yearly sacred fertility rites aimed at assuring an abundant harvest. There are references to the worship of numerous deities throughout the Books of Kings: Solomon builds temples to many deities and Josiah is reported as cutting down the statues of Asherah in the temple Solomon built for Yahweh (2 Kings 23:14). Josiah's grandfather Manasseh had erected one such statue (2 Kings 21:7). The name Asherah appears forty times in

13764-472: The three persons are considered to be physically separate beings, or personages, but united in will and purpose; this conception differs significantly from mainline Christian trinitarianism . As such, the term Godhead differs from how it is used in mainstream Christianity. This description of God represents the orthodoxy of the LDS Church, established early in the 19th century. The Book of Abraham ,

13888-518: The time of Josiah's reforms, the broader the perception of an Asherah became. Trees described in later Jewish texts as being an asherah or part of an asherah include grapevines , pomegranates , walnuts , myrtles , and willows . Eventually, monotheistic leaders would suppress the tree due to its association with Asherah. Deuteronomy 12 has Yahweh commanding the destruction of her shrines so as to maintain purity of his worship. Jezebel brought hundreds of prophets for Baal and Asherah with her into

14012-470: The time of writing, and such usage (in the singular), as a proper title for Deity, is distinct from generic usage as elohim , "gods" (plural, simple noun). Rabbinic scholar Maimonides wrote that Elohim "Divinity" and elohim "gods" are commonly understood to be homonyms . One modern theory suggests that the notion of divinity underwent radical changes in the early period of Israelite identity and development of Ancient Hebrew religion . In this view,

14136-463: The tree motif. A Hebrew arrowhead from the eleventh century BC bears the inscription "Servant of the Lion Lady". The symbols around Asherah are so many (8+ pointed star, caprids and the like, along with lunisolar, arboreal, florid, serpentine) that a listing would approach meaninglessness as it neared exhaustiveness. Frevel's 1000-page dissertation ends enigmatically with the pronouncement "There

14260-590: The verse. Regarding this, Sforno states that "every disembodied creature is known as elohim; this includes the soul of human beings known as [the] 'Image of God'." In Genesis 20:13 , Abraham , before the polytheistic Philistine king Abimelech , says that "Elohim (translated as 'God') caused ( התעו , plural verb) me to wander". Whereas the Greek Septuagint (LXX) has a singular verb form (ἐξήγαγε(ν), aorist II), most English versions usually translate this as "God caused" (which does not distinguish between

14384-426: The volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of "word" in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic , possessing the grammatical features of independent words but

14508-409: The word eloah and refers to the polytheistic notion of multiple gods (for example, Exodus 20:3 , "You shall have no other gods before me"). The word Elohim occurs more than two thousand five hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, with meanings ranging from "gods" in a general sense (as in Exodus 12:12 , where it describes "the gods of Egypt"), to specific gods (the frequent references to Yahweh as

14632-592: The word is "holy". An alternative view (held by Onkelos , Bahya ben Asher , Jacob ben Asher , Sforno , and Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg ) is that the word means "gods" and the verse means that Abraham's distaste for the idolatry of his father Terah led him to decide to wander far from home. Others, such as Chizkuni , interpret elohim as a reference to wicked rulers like Amraphel (often equated with Nimrod ). In Genesis 35:7 , Jacob builds an altar at El-Bethel "because there elohim revealed himself [plural verb] to [Jacob]". The verb niglu ("revealed himself")

14756-534: The word never changes its grammatical category. There is a further distinction between two primary kinds of morphological word formation: derivation and compounding . The latter is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form. Dog catcher , therefore, is a compound, as both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right but are subsequently treated as parts of one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, but

14880-536: Was qnyt ʾilm , which may be translated as "the creator of the deities ". In those texts, Athirat is the consort of the god ʾEl ; there is one reference to the 70 sons of Athirat, presumably the same as the 70 sons of ʾEl. Among the Hittites this goddess appears as Ašerdu(s) or Ašertu(s) , the consort of Elkunirsa ("El, the Creator of Earth ") and mother of either 77 or 88 sons. The conception of Asherah as

15004-534: Was "both," and Winter says the goddess and her symbol should not be distinguished altogether. Beside the obvious connections between goddesses who sometimes cannot be distinguished, some scholars have found an early link between Asherah and Eve , based upon the coincidence of their common title as "the mother of all living" in Genesis 3:20 through the identification with the Hurrian mother goddess , Hebat . Olyan notes that Eve's original Hebrew name, ḥawwā ,

15128-570: Was a goddess in ancient Semitic religions . She also appears in Hittite writings as Ašerdu(s) or Ašertu(s) ( Hittite : 𒀀𒊺𒅕𒌈 , romanized:  a-še-ir-tu 4 ), and as Athirat in Ugarit . Some scholars hold that Yahweh and Asherah were a consort pair in ancient Israel and Judah , while others disagree. Some have sought a common-noun meaning of her name, especially in Ugaritic appellation rabat athirat yam , only found in

15252-408: Was held to be the originating deity for a particular people ( KTU 2 1.4.VI.46). Elohim occurs frequently throughout the Torah. In some cases (e.g., Exodus 3:4 , " Elohim called unto him out of the midst of the bush ..."), it behaves like a singular noun in Hebrew grammar and is then generally understood to denote the single God of Israel. In other cases, elohim acts as an ordinary plural of

15376-456: Was not limited to her association with trees; she was often depicted with pronounced sexual features. Idols of Asherah, often called ’Astarte figurines’, are representative of Asherah as a tree in that they have bodies which resemble tree trunks, while also further extenuating the goddess' connection to fertility in line with her status as a "mother goddess". The " Judean pillar figures " universally depict Asherah with protruding breasts. Likewise,

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