 If Elohah is singular for God, and it's used for God at times, why wasn't it used in Genesis 1? And what is the significance then for using a plural noun with a singular verb? Well, from the way the question is worded, I assume that the questioner is referring to the Hebrew word Elohah. It's not pronounced Elohah, it's Eloah. And that is used for God at times in the Hebrew Bible. But it's also in the back of my mind that he might be getting the pronunciation from just taking off im at the end, Elohim plural, and then pronouncing what's left as Elohah, but regardless the answer is basically the same. The short answer is that's just the way they did it. And that isn't sort of a cop out or a contrivance. Let me read you just a paragraph from DDD, the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible about this, and then I'll talk about it a little bit. DDD has this, the Hebrew word Eloah, again, if I'll just pause here and say, if you know Hebrew or transliteration, this is alif, lamed, hay. Okay, the Hebrew word Eloah is derived from a base ilah, alif, lamed, hay. Perhaps a secondary form of the common Semitic word il or el, God, cognate terms are known from Ugaritic, Aramaic, and Arabic or Arabian. The relationship between the common noun and the divine name is complicated, and it varies considerably from one language to another. In Aramaic and in epigraphic Arabian dialects, it is primarily a common noun. While in Ugaritic, Hebrew, and Arabic, alah is the Arabic example, alif, lamed, hay. Okay, which means the God. Okay, al-aliha, just a little rabbit trail here. The definite article in Arabic, al-aliha, is the God, and that's where alah comes from, because they're militantly monotheistic, so that's how they refer to the deity. But anyway, in Ugaritic, Hebrew, and Arabic, the usage as a divine name is clearly attested. There can be no doubt that the more common biblical and Jewish designation of God as Elohim represents an expansion of Eloah, in other words, a longer spelling, pluralize it, though there is debate both as to the meaning of Eloah and as to the origin of the expanded form Elohim. Now, that's the end of the quote. Basically, what that's saying is, hey, that's just the way it is. We know where it comes from. We don't really know why any given language did it that way. In other words, why you had alif, lamed, hay, expanded into eam. Well, it's obviously a plural form, but why that expansion came to be just as good of a reference for the singular God of Israel, just like Eloah. Nobody really knows why. Now, the interesting thing here, and this is a very old PDF on my old website. If you went up to trying to think here, where else you might find this, I mean, I can append it to the Q&A here if people are interested. Probably, you could probably go up to mysitchiniswrong.com website, where I am debunking the ancient alien ideas of Zechariah's Sitchin, underneath the, or on the page that deals with Elohim. What you have in other languages is sometimes you have the plural for gods used of a single human being, the king. Best example here is pharaoh in the Amarna texts. The El Amarna texts are a correspondence, the Amarna tablets between Egypt and people in Palestine, because Palestine is under the overlordship of Egypt at the time, and the language they use to converse is Akkadian. That was the international language of correspondence. And you actually have pharaoh, again, who's conceived as a deity, but everybody knows there's only one pharaoh. It's pharaoh. Pharaoh is referred to as Ilanu in the Amarna texts a number of times, and Ilanu is the Akkadian plural for El, gods. That's just the way they did. Why do they do that? Nobody really knows why they did that. Now, probably, I think it's a useful illustration that the answer may be as simple as this is a device we are using to convey honor. In other words, it's an honorific, what philologists call an honorific feature of a language. Why else would you refer to pharaoh as a plural, as a deity, as opposed to a single divine being? Well, you want to make sure that he knows, that you know or you think he's just awesome. And so, you sort of up the ante rhetorically by using the plural. Well, again, that happens. Ilanu of pharaoh is a very good example, very well-known example to people in Semitic languages. And so, you know, some say, well, that's probably what's going on with Elohim. But the honest answer is nobody really knows for sure why this is done. Now, let me illustrate why that sort of is what it is. Why do we use capital letters mixed with lower case letters? Why do we do that? The answer is because we do. Somebody somewhere at some time decided on that convention and it stuck. So that's what we do. Why did Greek scribes move away from unseal spelling? That's all capitals, to use menuscules. Well, there may have been some pragmatic reason. Maybe menuscules are faster since it's kind of a cursive. Okay. But somebody had to decide to just do that. And then the old way just went away. And this is what happens with languages. People decide to do things for a particular reason that may not be discoverable to us with any certainty at all. Now, we can look at it and scholars look at this one. They know where it comes from. They know what happened. But we don't really know what went off in somebody's head to start that process. Now, Elohim, let's go back to the question about Genesis 1. Elohim would not have been confusing to any Israelite able to read Hebrew. So proposing another form would make it better or make it simpler or make it more comprehensible. It's just not true. It's not coherent because it would not have been complicated or fuzzy or unusual for an Israelite. It's only not clear to modern people because we're moderns. Again, they're very used to the convention. There's no ambiguity about the term. There's no ambiguity about the grammar. Everybody who, again, would have been a reader of Barah Sheet, you know, Barah Elohim, you know, in the beginning God created it. Everybody knows what that means. So there's no point to talking about, well, it would have been clearer if it would have been Eloah. No, it wouldn't have. It was just as clear with Elohim. Again, clear to them, but not clear to us.