YHWH Is God’s Everlasting Name
(This article is my reflection on weekly Torah reading. The original article is written in Chinese (中文) . The English version is translated by Philip Liu and edited by Teresa Chen.) At the very beginning of the book of Genesis and the Bible, it is written: “ In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth ” (Genesis 1:1 ESV). In the Biblical language of Hebrew, the word that is used here is אֱלֹהִים ("elohim"), which is the plural form of the word אֵל ("el"), which means “god”. In other words, the wor d אֱלֹהִים is the equivalent of the English word “gods.” However, we know that the Bible is not saying, “ In the beginning, gods created the heavens and the earth ” because the verb that follows (or rather, proceeds): בָּרָא ("bara", created), is singular. Therefore, we know that אֱלֹהִים is referring to the Creator of the Universe and not to “gods”. However, while אֱלֹהִים is often used to refer to God in the Bible, it is not, in f