It has been supposed by Christians that the variety of God’s names in the Old Testament—i.e., “El”, “Elyon”, and “Elohim”—is actually textual evidence for the Trinity.

The issue with this explanation is that ‘El,’ ‘Elohim,’ and ‘Elyon’ are not uniquely Hebrew words, so to understand their meaning requires a broader contextual understanding and cannot be constrained to theological developments in interpretation. This is especially necessary when considering the fact trinitarianism is a much later development relative to Judaism, trinitarianism not being even certainly a belief of early Christianity and definitely not a belief of Judaism.

The Ugaritic texts are a number of poems written in a Semitic language directly related to Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic and Hebrew sharing many words in common due to their common linguistic root (Northwest Semitic). It’s also dated by scholars to be more or less authored contemporaneously with the Book of Genesis, so use of words in the Ugaritic texts is relevant to their use in Genesis due to the proximity of their use in time. Although we lack more sources of equal antiquity and locality to the Book of Genesis and Ugaritic texts, we do have other, more recent, ancient sources in other Canaanite languages that also make use of these same words, and so it is worthwhile to also account for their use.

The word “elohim” used in the way it is within Judaic monotheism is completely unique. This meaning parallels no other Semitic cognate – all other cognates use the word to mean a plural of gods, i.e., a pantheon, and not one sole god. That Hebrew originally intended this meaning is clear in the grammar: “elohim” is a plural declension of “eloah” from “el”, and in Hebrew, plurals modify the verbs relating to it into plural forms, and often – especially in the Bible’s earliest texts – verbs describing “elohim” are modified into their plural forms.

This evidence both found from Semitic cognates and in the Hebrew’s grammatical structure makes it doubtless that the original meaning of “elohim”, even in Hebrew, was equivalent to pantheon. Furthermore, there are mythic parallels within Genesis and broader Semitic myth entailing thematic similarities. In Genesis 10, the table of nations describes the origins of supposedly all the nations in the world. There were 70 nations, numbered according to the 70 sons of Noah who were said to have founded them.

In Deuteronomy 32:8-9, it says that the nations of the world were divided according to the number of the “sons of God” (both terms “bene elohim” and “bene el” being used to refer to the “sons of God”). This term was also used prior in Genesis 6 in the form “bene ha elohim”, describing the “sons of the Elohim” that descended and bred with the “daughters of men”, their offspring becoming “mighty men who were of old, the men of renown” (Gen 6:4).

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