Why Do We Refer to God in the Plural?
For those of us who have read our Bible in Hebrew, it doesn’t take long in reading the Torah before we come across something of a puzzle. It makes for an interesting study. Right in the opening verse of Genesis, we find: בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” Here, Elohim means “God”, yet it's grammatically plural not singular. Yet the verb it takes, bara, means “he created”, and it is a singular form. Right from the start, we have a plural word acting as a singular, which should give any careful reader pause for thought.