God — A Misunderstood Title

Almost everyone reads the word “God” as a personal name. The Hebrew scriptures never use it that way, and once you see what the word actually is, a dozen puzzling verses become plain.

Ask most Christians what God’s name is and you will get the answer “God.” It is an easy habit. Nobody taught it on purpose. English capitalizes the word, we address Him with it in prayer, and the King James Bible prints it thousands of times without ever pausing to explain it. So the word slides quietly from a description into a name, and hardly anyone notices the substitution happening.

The Hebrew scriptures never treat it that way. The word behind it is elohim, and it behaves in the text the way king and judge and lord behave. It is a title. He has a name too, and He gave it to Moses at the burning bush, but the name is not this word.

What the Hebrew Word Does

Hebrew handles proper names carefully. A name does not take a possessive ending, it does not take the definite article, and it does not sit at the head of a chain of possession. Nobody in the Old Testament says “my Abraham,” or “the Abraham,” or “Abraham of the Abrahams.” Those phrases are not odd. They are ungrammatical.

Now watch what the text does with elohim. Jacob wakes at Bethel and vows that the Lord shall be elohai, “my God” (Genesis 28:21). Israel falls on their faces at Carmel and shouts ha-elohim, “the God” (1 Kings 18:39). And Moses, gathering up every superlative he can find for the God of Israel, calls Him elohei ha-elohim, “God of gods” (Deuteronomy 10:17).

That last phrase is the one worth sitting with. What could “God of gods” possibly mean if the word were a personal name? Hebrew builds that construction over and over for exactly one purpose, which is to mark the supreme member of a class: king of kings, lord of lords, song of songs, holy of holies. The repetition only works because the word names a category. Moses was not confused about who he worshipped. He is saying that within everything the word covers, the God of Israel stands first.

The grammar answers the question before a single doctrinal argument is raised. It is a TITLE.

Who Else the Word Is Used Of

A name attaches to one person and stays there. This word will not stay put. Scripture applies it to the gods of the nations (Judges 11:24; Exodus 12:12), to Israelite judges hearing cases in God’s stead (Exodus 21:6; 22:8–9), to Moses himself when the Lord sends him to Pharaoh (Exodus 7:1), to Samuel rising at Endor (1 Samuel 28:13), and to the heavenly beings assembled in council (Psalm 82:1; 97:7).

The word is even counted, which is the detail people walk past. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3), and “new gods that came newly up” (Deuteronomy 32:17). Has anyone ever spoken of other Jehovahs? Of course not. You can count the holders of an office, and you cannot count a name, and the first commandment is not arithmetic anyway. It is a command about worship. About who gets ours.

Paul says the same thing in one careful sentence, and he says it to a congregation surrounded by temples: “For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) but to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him” (1 Corinthians 8:5–6). Many are called by the word. One is ours.

The Name He Actually Gave

Moses asked for a name at the burning bush. He was given one.

Exodus 3:15

“The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.”

Wherever the King James Bible prints Lord in small capitals, the Hebrew underneath reads YHWH, the name we render as Jehovah. So the verse says: Jehovah, the elohim of your fathers, sent me, and this — Jehovah — is my name forever. A few chapters later the same distinction is repeated, where the Lord tells Moses that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob knew Him as God Almighty, “but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them” (Exodus 6:3).

This is why Carmel ends the way it does. Fire falls, the people fall down, and the words they cry are YHWH hu ha-Elohim — Jehovah, He is the God. The name is the subject of the sentence. The title is what is being said about Him. The whole day’s contest was over which person truly holds the office, and the answer came down in fire.

Why This Matters for Understanding Christ

The distinction stops being a point of Hebrew grammar right here. What does it actually change? It changes what we can say about the Son. The New Testament makes a pair of statements about Jesus Christ that most of Christendom has spent seventeen centuries trying to hold together.

Jesus is God. “The Word was God” (John 1:1). Thomas, seeing the wounds, says “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). Jesus also has a God, and He said so Himself that same morning, before Thomas ever spoke: “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17). Both sentences sit in one chapter of one gospel. Eleven verses apart.

Read the word as a name and those two verses cannot both stand, because no person possesses his own name. Read it as a title and there is no difficulty at all. The Son holds that office in its fulness. He also worships and obeys His Father. Hebrews puts both halves in consecutive lines, quoting Psalm 45:7: “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever… therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee” (Hebrews 1:8–9).

And this is not something that ended at the empty tomb. The risen and glorified Christ, speaking from His throne, says “my God” four times in a single verse (Revelation 3:12). Paul writes of “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:17) and states the order plainly: “the head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthians 11:3).

The Savior Himself reasoned from this word. When they took up stones and charged Him with blasphemy for making Himself God, He answered by quoting a psalm: “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” (John 10:34–36, quoting Psalm 82:6). That answer only carries weight if the word describes a standing that the word of God can confer. He rested His defense on the plain sense of the term, and He told them the scripture could not be broken.

Why Latter-day Saints Say Elohim and Jehovah

Members of the Church commonly use Elohim for the Father and Jehovah for the Son, a usage the First Presidency set out formally in its 1916 doctrinal exposition on the Father and the Son. That convention is useful, and it is worth understanding what it is and what it is not. Why use it at all? English blurs the Father and the Son together, and this keeps two distinct Persons distinct. It is not a claim that Elohim is the Father’s private name in Hebrew, because the word is a title in the text and always was.

The restored scriptures use the word the same way the Hebrew does. Abraham’s account of the creation says that “the Gods organized and formed the heavens and the earth” (Abraham 4:1). The Lord speaks from Liberty Jail of a decree passed “in the grand council of heaven before this world was” by “the Eternal God of all other gods” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:32). That is Deuteronomy’s phrase again, in a revelation given in Missouri in 1839.

Does any of that make us worshippers of many gods? No. We worship the Father, in the name of the Son, by the power of the Holy Ghost, and we worship no one else. Knowing that other beings bear the title changes nothing about where our allegiance goes, any more than knowing that other nations have kings would change a subject’s loyalty to his own.

What the Title Means for You

There is a reason this looks like a technical point and is not one. If “God” were a proper name, then the distance between Him and you would be a difference of identity, and identity is the one thing that can never be shared. A title is different. It describes a condition, and a condition can be grown into.

The Inheritance Promised

Romans 8:16–17 — children of God, and “joint-heirs with Christ.”

Hebrews 12:9 — He is called the Father of spirits, and the title is meant literally.

Revelation 3:21 — the overcomer is promised a seat on the throne itself.

1 John 3:2 — “we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.”

None of that is a claim to be equal with the Father, and none of it is a threat to His supremacy. He remains the God of gods, first in the order of heaven, and our worship belongs to Him. It always will. What the title tells us is what kind of relationship we are actually in. He is not an unreachable category of being who happened to make us. He is our Father. He wants His children to grow up, and He has said so in language plain enough that a child can follow it.

So the next time you read the word in scripture, read it as the writers wrote it. Ask what is being said, and about whom. The name of the God of Israel is Jehovah, and Jehovah is the Christ who came and died and rose. “God” is what He is, what His Father is, and what He has invited His brothers and sisters to become through Him.