from the blog, The Faith of Jesus:I am not so sure about what kind of authority this writer is. I think he was a graduate student in theology and threw up a lot of stuff that he was studying. He seems to have gone through the whole question about the trinity pretty throughly, over very many articles. In this particular one, he is aiming at a belief held by followers of H. Armstrong who share with locoman the idea of a two person godhead.
The recognized facts of the Hebrew language will not support the theory that Elohim tells us that the God of Israel is more than one Person. It is wise for us all to “prove all things” and consider the lexical fact that Elohim is probably a “plural of majesty,” or, as others think, an honorific plural, a “plural of fullness,” or of “intensity.” Elohim cannot possibly mean that two beings (or three) make up the one God.
Many have not been told of other Hebrew plural forms which certainly do not tell us of more than one person:
Can the word “Lord,” also found in the plural form in Hebrew, refer to a single individual?
The word for Lord (adon) regularly appears with a plural ending when its meaning is singular. So it is with Elohim when it refers to God. God in the Hebrew Bible is described thousands upon thousands of times by singular personal pronouns. Yahweh, His personal name, is invariably accompanied by singular pronouns and verbs. On each of these occasions we have a testimony to the grand truth that there is One and only One Person in the eternal Godhead. Grasping this foundational truth and holding it fast will bring a new and brilliant light to Bible study — and to an understanding of the human Messiah, Son of God. It also frees the brain from the contortions involved in trying to make two or three into one!
Try this: If you were on a trip alone in the mountains what would you say to describe the fact that you were all by yourself? You would say, “I was alone, the only person on the trip. There was no one besides me.” You would continue with personal pronouns in the singular, “I” and “me.” That is exactly the language constantly used by the God of the Bible. He could not have done more to ensure His identity as a single divine Person. Isaiah 44:24: “Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer and He who formed you from the womb, ‘I am the LORD who makes everything, who stretched forth the heavens alone and by Myself. Who was with Me?’”
This and thousands of other verses were meant to build a hedge against anyone ever imagining that God was two or three! Language has no other way of expressing that great defining fact of the universe — that God is a single Person. (If, of course, one introduces into the discussion non-Biblical meanings for concepts like “person,” or unbiblical terms such as ousia [being, essence] the result is a considerable muddle and loss of revealed truth.)
We get words like "academic" from the language of Akkad. This was a very ancient city in Mesopotamia that had developed a very complex set of laws and a lot of science. For centuries in that part of the world, they continued using this language when discussing such things, much like we use Latin today. It is this concept of a dead but very concise language that was set in stone. We should probably think of Hebrew like this, that the Jews used it in the same sort of way, for their theology and history. There is a problem with this because we are left with very little in the way of other Hebrew texts, to make direct comparisons to find the real meanings to a lot of it, and are left to do a lot of conjecture.I do not think it is wise policy to take one obscure passage and use it to confound all the others, and come up with something that better duplicates a religion foreign to the old Hebrew people and their God.
[edit on 23-1-2009 by jmdewey60]
