Elohim, Jehovah, the Father, the Son, AND The Trinity, AND John’s Logos: Getting Some Things Clear

As we begin to study the Old Testament again, this time with multiple translations, we Latter-day Saints tend to ask some of the same questions over and over. “Is it the Father or the Son speaking here? How can I tell them apart? Isn’t Jehovah the premortal Jesus, and so LORD or Jehovah always means Jesus?” Yes. But also… no. And to understand both why we keep asking those question and what the answers really are, we need to start with… the Nicene Creed.

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. 

Latter-day Saints tend to misunderstand what classical Trinitarianism and the creeds actually say, and we tend to use sloppy terminology.  The early Christians inherited scripture which asserted that God was One (e.g. the famous Deuteronomy 6:4, cited by Jesus in Matt 22:37-39), but the early Christians had a very different cultural setting for making sense of “oneness”  than the Israelites did. The New Testament asserted the divinity of the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit… which adds up to three.

So… how do you maintain that  rhetorical one-ness? The Nicene Creed, written in Greek,  asserted that these were one in ousia. That’s a philosophical term. Let’s sidestep a lot of history and philosophy, and just say, the fact that this word came into English as essence  or being led a lot of Latter-day Saints to believe that trinitarianism is one physical personage manifesting himself in three ways.

The problem is, that’s not what the creed says; what Latter-day Saints are critiquing with passages like the First Vision or Acts 7 or John 17 (“Was Jesus praying to himself?”) is not the Trinity, but a Christian heresy called modalism.  The Trinity of the creeds has three distinct personages; modalism has one. I often show this to my classes to make the point in a humorous way.

So “being” in the creeds does not indicate physical unity nor is it a synonym for “personage” and we make serious mistakes of communication when we use it that way. As BYU professor of Early Christianity Jason Combs points out in his excellent essay in this book,

Latter-day Saints and those Christians who affirm the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition share similar beliefs about God and Jesus Christ, but we often misunderstand each other because we Latter-day Saints can be less familiar with traditional Christian theological vocabulary.

Example 1: Many Christians, including Latter-day Saints, would agree that God is three distinct persons. Yet, if a Latter-day Saint were to describe this idea by saying, “God is three distinct beings (Greek ousia; Latin essentia) Nicene Christians might hear that statement as implying that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have three different natures and/or purposes, similar to the various pagan gods of antiquity-something we Latter-day Saints do not believe.

So far so good. Now, if we Latter-day Saints misunderstand traditional creedal Christianity as overemphasizing divine unity (i.e. only one personage), we then overcorrect by emphasizing divine three-ness. And I think that drives our instinct to want to parse out that distinctness in every passage, e.g. “Is this the Father or the Son speaking?” We seem to think we ought to be able to always distinguish Father from Son in the way we imagine creedal Christianity fails to. I’ve often asked, “help me know what difference that would make to you.” And I rarely get an answer.

LDS History

Enter the Hebrew language in LDS history. We use the Hebrew term Elohim (rhymes with “beam,” not “him”) and Jehovah (a pronunciation that never actually existed in Hebrew) to distinguish Father from Son. This is a convention that began in the early 20th century; it does not come directly from Joseph Smith’s teachings, nor can we derive it from the Hebrew of the Bible. 

The dedicatory prayer of the Kirtland Temple in D&C 109 is addressed to O Jehovah and O Holy Father because Jehovah  was the name of God. President McKay, born in 1873, did not grow up with our too-neat elohim/jehovah  distinction, which is why he could make a slip of the tongue in 1961 (!) and refer to “Jehovah and his son, Jesus Christ.”  For this and other examples and background, see these orthodox LDS resources:

•  BYU professor Barry R. Bickmore, “Of Simplicity, Oversimplification, and Monotheism,” FARMS Review 15, no. 1 (2003): 215–58;
• BYU professors Ryan Conrad Davis and Paul Y. Hoskisson, “Usage of the Title Elohim,” Religious Educator 14, no. 1 (2013): 109–27;
• Professional S&I teacher Brian W. Ricks, “James E. Talmage and the Doctrine of the Godhead,” Religious Educator 13, no. 2 (2012): 185–209.

Biblical Usage of Elohim/Jehovah

As it turns out, the Bible is wildly inconsistent in how it uses these two terms. Elohim comes from a generic noun ‘el meaning a deity or supernatural being, whether Israelite or pagan, high or low, good or bad. It  is technically a plural (that -īm is the masculine plural ending, also found in English with cherubim), but usually takes singular verbs and adjectives; when referring to the singular God of Israel, it is not a “plural of majesty” but a plural of abstraction. “Elohim” is used of dead people (1Sa 28:13) , pagan deities, and others which  what we might think of with more modern terminology as angels, demons, etc.

Yahweh is a proper name, as opposed to a general noun like elohim.  Often they’re used together, e.g. “LORD God” representing Hebrew yahweh ‘elohim. According to some (like Frank Moore Cross), this is a shortened version of the full name translated as “LORD of hosts” but which would mean, “he who brings the host into existence.” Regardless, sometimes Yahweh is equated with elohim, e.g. yahweh, your elohim in many many verses. And sometimes there seems to be more than one Yahweh, or the Angel of Yahweh IS Yahweh in some sense. And sometimes there seems to be a distinction between elohim and yahweh; set against a number of ancient near eastern parallels, the Bible sometimes portrays  elohim as a high or father god, and Yahweh was his son and vizier who ruled Israel (Deu 32:8-9). More on this later. There was a council of divinities in Israel, and this is probably who is addressed in the “we” passages of Genesis 1:26-27, Genesis 11:7, and so on.

The idea of a divine council is one of those bulls-eye’s of Joseph Smith, along with a number of other things in Genesis.

There is a LOT of work on this topic, both more popular, apologetic, and technical.

• E.g. Kevin Barney’s article on Joseph Smith and Genesis 1, highly recommended.
• The back-and-forth between several LDS scholars and Evangelical scholarMichael Heiser who did a lot of good work on the divine council.
  • Dan Peterson first on a famous divine council passage, Psalm 82:6, here.
  • Michael Heiser responds with “You’ve Seen One Elohim, You’ve Seen Them All? A Critique of Mormonism’s Use of Psalm 82.”
  • David Bokovoy responds to Heiser (and Heiser was graciously given the last word, but I can’t find that one.)
  • Dan McClellan summarizes.
• More technically, see e.g.
  • Theodore Mullen’s classic book, The Assembly of the Gods: the Divine council in Canaanite and early Hebrew literature
  • Mark S. Smith’s The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel
  • Jewish scholar Peter Hayman’s famous “Is monotheism a misused word in Jewish Studies?” (Hayman thinks it was.) Dan McLellan links to the original paper and a response, here.

Most good study Bibles will talk about this stuff.

So… if there were multiple divine beings in Israel, in just what sense was God “one”?  Sometimes, this is a translation issue. I and others would argue that Deu 6:4-5 should not read “Yahweh is our elohim, yahweh is one” but rather, “Yahweh is our elohim, yahweh alone.” Given its covenantal context, this declaration is about fidelity to the God of Israel, not a theological statement about other deities not existing.

Israelites recognized and worshipped one supreme power, but there were also lesser divine beings who served that one and thus posed no threat to  oneness. Most of the terms people like to use to try to categorize these ideas — monotheism, polytheism, monarchism, etc.— simply aren’t very useful. They’re also very post-biblical.  As Paula Fredriksen  says, illustrating the failure of imposing these modern terms, “In antiquity, all monotheists were polytheists.”

What did it mean, in ancient times, to “believe in” one god? Such belief did not entail doubting the existence of other gods.

Read her short accessible paper here.

In other words, Israelites had a practical monotheism; other supernatural things existed, but Israelites acted as if there was nothing but the one high God of Israel, who was incomparable. THAT is the nature of all the rhetoric in Isaiah and elsewhere about no other gods; these are not  philosophical statements about non-existence, but explaining that none of those deities compare to the God of Israel. They did not create, they do not run the universe or parts of it, they do not pose a challenge to God, and more importantly, they do not save.  In other words, those gods may exist, but they are no gods at all like the God of Israel. As sung in Prince of Egypt (and taken from the ancient Song of Miriam Exodus 15), mi chamochah ba’elim, adonai? Who is like you among the gods, O Yahweh?

As Evangelical scholar Michael Heiser says,

analysis of the Hebrew text demonstrates that several of the most common phrases in the Hebrew Bible allegedly used for denying the existence of other gods (e.g., Deut 4:35,39; 32:12,39) appear in passages that affirm the existence of other gods (Deut 4, 32). The result is that these phrases express the incomparability of Yahweh among the other elohim, not that the biblical writer contradicts himself, or that he is in the process of discovering monotheism.

New Testament Context

When we start reading the New Testament, we find already established a clear distinction between Father and Son. It’s not argued for or explained, it’s just… there. How did this happen? A number of study Bibles explain it well, drawing on some things we’ve already talked about.

In essence, that idea of a supreme deity (elohim?) and his divine representative to humanity (jehovah?) became common.  For example, the Jewish Annotated New Testament (Logos, Amazon link) has an excellent essay on the Jewish/Israelite background of John 1:1-18, the famous Word/logos passage. (I’ve made it available here.)  The Greek word logos means both “word” but also “reason, logic.” Logos and its Aramaic parallel memra had serious usage among Greek-speaking Jews as a secondary deity.

Remember that in Genesis 1, God creates by speaking, through his word, i.e. his logos or memra. John 1:1 is quoting the Greek translation of Genesis 1:1 and inserting the logos into the creative process.

There was a

Jewish belief in the existence of other supernatural beings who communicated the divine will to humans. The use of the Logos in John’s Gospel… is thus thoroughly Jewish. It is even possible that the idea of the Trinity began to develop precisely in pre-Christian Jewish conceptions of the second and visible divine being who played a mediating role between the heavenly and earthly sphere. Philo, writing in first-century CE Alexandria for a Jewish audience, presents the idea of the Logos as if it were a commonplace. His writings make apparent that at least for some pre-Christian Jews, there was nothing strange about a doctrine of a manifestation of God, even as a “second God”; the Logos did not conflict with Philo’s idea of monotheism…. Other versions of Logos theology, namely notions of the second god as the personified Word or Wisdom of God, also were present among Aramaic-, Hebrew-, and Syriac-speaking Jews.

David Bentley Hart’s New Testament similarly has an essay on the Logos.

There may perhaps be no passage in the New Testament more resistant to simple translation into another tongue than the first eighteen verses—the prologue—of the Gospel of John…. For the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, [Logos] referred to a kind of “secondary divinity,” a mediating principle standing between God the Most High and creation. In late antiquity it was assumed widely, in pagan, Jewish, and Christian circles, that God in his full transcendence did not come into direct contact with the world of limited and mutable things, and so had expressed himself in a subordinate and economically “reduced” form “through whom”  he created and governed the world. It was this Logos that many Jews and Christians believed to be the subject of all the divine theophanies of Hebrew scripture. 

It is in John 1:14— where the divine logos becomes flesh, the incarnation in Jesus— where it starts to deviate from Jewish ideas of the day.

But all of this makes good sense to us within a LDS doctrinal context; a council of the gods is clearly taught in LDS scripture, for example. And we teach that the Old Testament God people knew was pre-mortal Jesus; that’s right in tune with the Logos theology explained by the Jewish Annotated New Testament and David Bentley Hart!

Does that mean we can simply equate Elohim with God the Father and Jehovah with Jesus in the Old Testament? No.
To return to my first part of the essay, I think we try to over-distinguish the divine persons because we’re implicitly trying to correct creedal christians, whom we mistakenly think worship one personage in three forms. (“That’s MODALISM, Patrick!”)

Scripture simply doesn’t distinguish the vast majority of the time, and it doesn’t really matter.