Plurality of Gods

Plurality of Gods is the Wheel of Heaven reading that the Hebrew Bible — and, behind it, most of the world's religious and mythological traditions — describes many divine beings rather than one supreme deity. The reading rests on a philological fact the standard English translation hides: the word rendered "God" through most of Genesis is Elohim (Hebrew אֱלֹהִים), and Elohim is grammatically plural — the plural of the singular Eloah. Wheel of Heaven takes that plural at face value: the beings the text names Elohim are the actual, embodied Elohim, a physical creator civilization, not one incomprehensible abstraction.

Read this way, the plurality is not a residue to be explained away but the plainest datum in the text. The framework's specific contribution is to say what the plural refers to: not a pantheon of imagined gods, and not a poetic flourish of majesty, but the memory of the real makers — the plural teams that carried out the creation project the Genesis account compresses. The later Christian and Jewish habit of collapsing Elohim into a singular "God" is, on this reading, the point at which the record of a plurality of creators hardened into the doctrine of one supreme being.

A grammatically plural name

Hebrew builds masculine plurals with the ending -im, and Elohim carries it. It stands in the same morphological family as malakhim ("messengers"), sarim ("princes"), and adonim ("lords"). The singular forms exist and are used — Eloah (אֱלוֹהַּ) and the shorter El (אֵל) — but across the Hebrew Bible the plural Elohim is by far the more common word for the divine, appearing roughly 2,600 times. Grammatically, nothing marks it as a special case; it is an ordinary plural noun.

What makes the plurality more than a fossil is that the surrounding grammar frequently agrees with it. At the creation of humanity the verb is first-person plural: na'aseh adam (נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם), "let us make man" (Genesis 1:26), with the plural possessives be-tzalmenu ("in our image") and ki-dmutenu ("after our likeness"). After Eden the speaker says of the human, ke-achad mimenu (כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ), "as one of us" (Genesis 3:22). At Babel the plan is havah nerdah (הָבָה נֵרְדָה), "let us go down, and there confound their language" (Genesis 11:7). Isaiah hears the same first-person plural from the throne: "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" (Isaiah 6:8). These are the passages a strict singular reading has to work hardest to absorb.

Beyond the pronouns, the text names a class of plural beings outright: the benei ha-Elohim (בְּנֵי־הָאֱלֹהִים), "the sons of the Elohim." They appear before the flood taking human wives (Genesis 6:1–4), in the heavenly scenes of Job (1:6; 2:1; 38:7), and in the Psalms (29:1; 89:6), with an Aramaic cognate at Daniel 3:25. In each case the phrase denotes discrete individuals with their own agency, not attributes of a single deity — a category of beings, not a facet of one being.

The divine council

The plural name has a plural setting. Across the Hebrew Bible the divine is repeatedly shown deliberating as a body — an assembly the scholarship calls the divine council. In 1 Kings 22:19–22 the prophet Micaiah sees Yahweh enthroned "with all the host of heaven standing beside him," and the council debates how to entrap Ahab. In Job 1–2 the benei ha-Elohim "present themselves before Yahweh," and one member — ha-satan, "the adversary" — argues a case against Job. Isaiah's commissioning (Isaiah 6) sets the prophet before an enthroned Yahweh and the seraphim, who ask, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?"

The sharpest text is Psalm 82. It opens: "Elohim stands in the assembly of El; among the elohim he judges" (אֱלֹהִים נִצָּב בַּעֲדַת־אֵל בְּקֶרֶב אֱלֹהִים יִשְׁפֹּט) — a single verse that uses elohim both for the one who presides and for the many who are judged, a usage no plural-of-majesty can carry. It goes on: "I said, you are elohim, sons of the Most High, all of you" (82:6). Centuries later the Gospel of John has Jesus quote exactly this line — "Is it not written in your law, I said, ye are gods?" (John 10:34) — and treat it as authoritative scripture rather than as an embarrassment to be explained away.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

On the framework's reading the plurals are exactly what they appear to be. The Elohim who made humanity were many because the teams were many: the creation project was staffed by seven teams drawn from the seven provinces of the Elohim home world, and the "let us make man" of Genesis 1:26 is the ordinary grammar of a collaborative operation, not a theological riddle. The Elohim are not deities, not personified natural forces, and not a polytheistic residue that later editors failed to scrub out. They are a physical civilization of biological beings, and the Hebrew text names them in the plural because there were, in fact, many of them.

The consequential change came later, in translation. Rendering Elohim as a singular "God" is, in the Raëlian source, the Church's founding error. In Yahweh's own articulation:

"It replaced the term Elohim, which refers to the creators, with a singular term God, whereas in fact Elohim in Hebrew is the plural of Eloha. In this way, the Church transformed the creators into a single incomprehensible God."

The mechanism was gradual and cumulative. The Septuagint rendered Elohim with the Greek Theos, the Vulgate with the Latin Deus, and the vernacular Bibles that followed with "God," "Dieu," "Gott," "Dios." Each step was defensible on its own terms; together they effaced a company of named, embodied makers into one abstract absolute — and, with it, turned the recovery of who the creators actually were into the idolatry of an image the tradition could no longer identify. On this reading the corrective is not the rejection of monotheism so much as the recovery of its referent.

The plurality is political as well as numerical. The Elohim govern themselves through the Council of Eternals, and the Council contains standing factions that disagreed sharply over the human creation. Yahweh presides as its moderate president. Satan led the abolitionist faction, which held the making of beings in the creators' own image to have been a mistake and pressed, at each crisis, for humanity's destruction. Lucifer led the opposite faction — pro-human, and exiled to Earth for it — which wanted humanity told the truth about its origins and taught what its makers knew; the Serpent of Eden is this same faction in its disclosure role. The medieval fusion of Lucifer and Satan into a single figure of cosmic evil is, on the framework's reading, a costly confusion: it collapses two opposed political positions — one that wanted humanity destroyed, one that wanted it enlightened — into one, and erases the very plurality the divine-council texts preserve.

Finally, the plurality points forward as well as back. Through the Cosmic Chain the framework reads the divine-council texts as describing not a fixed hierarchy but an open process: the created are meant to become creators in their turn. "This means," the source glosses of the reversal in Matthew 19:30, "that the created shall become creators just as the creators were created." Psalm 82's "you are elohim, sons of the Most High," and Jesus's citation of it, are read in the same key — not as blasphemy but as the claim that humanity stands in the same category as its makers, an early link in a chain with no visible first term. Plurality of Gods, in this sense, describes not only how many divine beings exist but what humanity may yet join.

Comparative divine pluralities

A plural, deliberating company of divine beings is one of the most widely distributed patterns in the history of religion, and the framework reads its recurrence as meaningful without flattening the traditions into one another.

The Mesopotamian record is the closest neighbour: the high triad of Anu, Enlil, and Ea presides over the broader assembly of the Anunnaki , and the councils of the Enuma Elish and Atrahasis deliberate over creation and flood much as the Hebrew council deliberates over Ahab or Sodom. Egypt orders its gods into the Heliopolitan Ennead and the Hermopolitan Ogdoad; Greece into the Olympian twelve, who overthrow an older Titan generation; the Norse into the Aesir and the Vanir, two divine kindreds who war and then reconcile. The Vedic devas, the later Hindu Trimurti, the Chinese celestial bureaucracy under the Jade Emperor, and the Shinto yaoyorozu no kami — the "eight million kami" — each organise the divine as a populous, structured plurality rather than as a solitary sovereign.

The framework's reading of this distribution is offered as interpretation, not as proof: that the tightest of these parallels — councils that deliberate, factions that divide, makers who are many — preserve, in their own cultural idioms, the memory of the one creator civilization the corpus calls the Elohim. Mainstream comparative religion accounts for the same distribution through independent invention, shared cognitive tendencies, and cultural diffusion, and the framework does not claim those explanations are wrong so much as incomplete. It adds a historical referent beneath the structural commonality; it does not require that every pantheon descend from a single source, only that the closest cluster of parallels is better explained by shared memory than by coincidence.

Scholarly and critical perspectives

At the textual level the claim that the Hebrew Bible preserves a suppressed plurality is closer to mainstream scholarship than the framework's conclusions are. A generation of critical work has documented the polytheistic background of Israelite religion. Mark S. Smith (The Early History of God; The Origins of Biblical Monotheism) traces the emergence of biblical monotheism out of a West Semitic world in which El and Yahweh were originally distinct; Frank Moore Cross (Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic) established the Canaanite-council background, corroborated since 1928 by the Ugaritic tablets from Ras Shamra. Margaret Barker (The Great Angel) reconstructs a pre-exilic "two powers" theology later edited toward strict unity, and Michael Heiser (The Unseen Realm) reads the divine council as a structuring feature of the whole corpus, with elohim functioning as a category-term for the residents of the spiritual realm. Alan Segal's Two Powers in Heaven shows the rabbis still polemicizing, centuries on, against Jews who read two divine figures in the text. The Documentary Hypothesis's very division of sources rests in part on the alternation between Yahweh and Elohim. The framework accepts this scholarship at the philological level and parts from it only at the interpretive one: where the academy reads a literary and religious development, the framework reads the memory of an actual civilization.

Against the plural reading the mainstream marshals a set of long-standing objections, and they deserve to be stated fairly. The most common is the plural of majesty (pluralis majestatis): the claim that Elohim, like a royal "we," is plural in form but singular in sense, and that the verbs governing it are usually singular in any case. Close relatives are the plural of intensity (the plural form heightening a single divine fullness, as chayim, "life," is plural in form), the Christian reading of the plural as a Trinitarian foreshadowing, the heavenly-court reading (the plural gestures at God's attendant angels rather than at multiple gods), and the source-critical view that the plural is an archaic survival of an earlier polytheism within a text that is monotheistic in its final form. These are serious positions, and the majestic-plural reading in particular is the working default of most translators. The framework's rejoinders are that Biblical Hebrew does not otherwise use a majestic plural for God; that an intensive plural cannot account for the plural verbs and pronouns rather than the noun alone; that a Trinitarian reading is anachronistic to the Hebrew text; and that the "archaic survival" view already concedes the plurality and differs only on whether it records anything real. None of these rejoinders is decisive, and the framework does not pretend the question is closed. What it claims is narrower: that the plainest reading of the grammar is the plural one.

Two living theological traditions have independently built doctrine on the same plural. Mormon (Latter-day Saints) theology reads Elohim as a genuine plurality and teaches, in Joseph Smith's King Follett discourse (1844) and Lorenzo Snow's couplet — "as man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be" — a doctrine of exaltation in which humans may themselves become gods. It is the nearest mainstream-religious parallel to both the plurality reading and the Cosmic Chain. The Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis — "the Son of God became man that we might become God," in Athanasius's formula, elaborated by Gregory Palamas and the Philokalia and grounded in Psalm 82:6 and 2 Peter 1:4 — converges with the framework's dynamic dimension while remaining within a Christian metaphysics the framework does not share. Within the alternative-history literature, Jean Sendy, Mauro Biglino, and Paul Anthony Wallis each reach a plural-creators reading of Elohim by their own routes. These convergences are structural, not identities: each tradition keeps commitments the framework rejects, and the framework preserves the differences rather than absorbing them.

See also

• Elohim
• Yahweh
• Monotheism
• Idolatry
• Hebrew Bible
• Hebrew
• Genesis
• Council of Eternals
• Cosmic Chain
• Cosmic Competition
• Cosmic Pluralism
• Watchers
• Satan
• Lucifer
• Serpent
• Theomachy
• Doubled Signature
• Adam and Eve
• Eden
• Antediluvian
• Apocalypse
• Jean Sendy
• Mauro Biglino
• Paul Anthony Wallis
• Monotheism Is the Wrong Question
• The Translators' Wager (Biglino's plural-Elohim reading, and the Psalm 82 / Deuteronomy 32:8 divine-council data, audited)
• The Archdeacon and the Dragon (the redaction / monotheizing-edit argument)
• The Scrolls That Woke in Year One

References

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). The Book Which Tells the Truth (1974); collected in Message from the Designers. The foundational source for the framework's reading.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Extra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet (1975); collected in Message from the Designers.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Let's Welcome the Extra-Terrestrials (1979); collected in Message from the Designers. The "first mistake" passage on the Church's rendering of Elohim as a singular God appears in this volume.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005.

Sendy, Jean. Ces dieux qui firent le ciel et la terre. Robert Laffont, 1969.

Sendy, Jean. L'ère du Verseau. Robert Laffont, 1970.

Biglino, Mauro, and Giorgio Cattaneo. The Naked Bible: The Truth About the Most Famous Book in History. Uno, 2022.

Wallis, Paul Anthony. Escaping from Eden: Does Genesis Teach That the Human Race Was Created by God or Engineered by ETs?. 6th Books, 2020.

Wallis, Paul Anthony. The Eden Conspiracy. 6th Books, 2024.

Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. Harper & Row, 1990; revised ed. Eerdmans, 2002.

Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Smith, Mark S. God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World. Eerdmans, 2010.

Smith, Mark S. The Memoirs of God: An Historical Memoir of God in the Hebrew Bible. Augsburg Fortress, 2004.

Barker, Margaret. The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God. Westminster John Knox, 1992.

Barker, Margaret. The Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity. SPCK, 1987; revised ed. Sheffield Phoenix, 2005.

Barker, Margaret. The Mother of the Lord: Volume 1 — The Lady in the Temple. Bloomsbury, 2012.

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Lexham Press, 2015.

Heiser, Michael S. Supernatural: What the Bible Teaches About the Unseen World — and Why It Matters. Lexham Press, 2015.

Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Harvard University Press, 1973.

Day, John. Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan. Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.

Albertz, Rainer. A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period. 2 vols. Westminster John Knox, 1994.

Segal, Alan F. Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism. Brill, 1977; reprint Baylor University Press, 2002.

Boyarin, Daniel. The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. The New Press, 2012.

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Friedman, Richard Elliott. The Bible with Sources Revealed. HarperOne, 2003.

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Smith, Joseph. The King Follett Discourse (April 7, 1844). Various editions including LDS Church publications.

Snow, Lorenzo. Various sermons and writings. The Teachings of Lorenzo Snow, ed. Clyde J. Williams. Bookcraft, 1984.

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Peterson, Daniel C., and Stephen D. Ricks. Offenders for a Word: How Anti-Mormons Play Word Games to Attack the Latter-day Saints. Aspen Books, 1992.

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Givens, Terryl L., and Fiona Givens. The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life. Ensign Peak, 2012.

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Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. SVS Press, 1979; revised ed. 1995.

Palamas, Gregory. The Triads. Trans. Nicholas Gendle. Paulist Press, 1983.

The Philokalia. Trans. and ed. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. 4 vols. Faber and Faber, 1979-1995.

Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Sitchin, Zecharia. The 12th Planet. Stein and Day, 1976.

Sitchin, Zecharia. The Wars of Gods and Men. Avon, 1985.

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Olivelle, Patrick, trans. The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Birrell, Anne. Chinese Mythology: An Introduction. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Lambert, W. G. Babylonian Creation Myths. Eisenbrauns, 2013.

Pritchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Princeton University Press, 3rd ed., 1969.

Hornung, Erik. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Trans. John Baines. Cornell University Press, 1982.

Lincoln, Bruce. Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

"Plurality of Gods." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Mormonism#Plurality_of_Gods

"Theosis." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinization_(Christian)

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Plurality of Gods. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/plurality-of-gods/

"Plurality of Gods." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/plurality-of-gods/.

"Plurality of Gods." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/plurality-of-gods/.

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