God, or a god: any being that belongs to the divine realm. Most often it names the one God of Israel, but the same word also names foreign gods, members of the heavenly court, and even the spirits of the dead.
The word has a plural ending, but when it names the God of Israel it is paired with singular verbs and singular adjectives, so the writers plainly have one God in view. The plural shape is best understood the way Hebrew forms words like "life" or "old age," which are plural in form yet name a single thing. So the word names the quality of being divine, godhood itself, and then points to whoever has it.
That is why one word can point to so many different beings. Read the surrounding words and you can tell which: singular verbs and the covenant story signal the true God; a foreign nation's worship signals their gods; a scene in the heavenly court signals the lesser beings around God's throne. The word itself only says that the one in view stands on the divine side of the line between heaven and earth.
This wide use was not unique to Israel. Across the older Near East the ordinary plural word for "god" could already point to a single deity, and the Bible inherits that way of speaking. What changes over the course of the Hebrew Bible is not the word but the claim made with it: of all the beings this word can name, the writers come to insist, only the God of Israel is truly God.
Because it is the common word rather than a personal name, it does work the loftier divine names do not. It can be possessed (your God, the gods of Egypt), set against rival claims, and counted as one or many, which is why the same word carries both the highest use in the Bible and some of the lowest.
Nuances
Who the gods are that God judges among in Psalm 82.
- majorityLesser heavenly beings, a divine assembly God presides over and condemns for ruling the nations unjustly.; E. Theodore Mullen, The Divine Council in Canaanite and Early Hebrew Literature (HSM 24, 1980); Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God, 2nd ed. (2002); HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. אלהים
- minorityHuman rulers or judges of Israel, addressed as gods because they wield God-given authority. This was the traditional reading but has been largely set aside in critical scholarship.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. אלהים
What the elohim are in the legal verses of Exodus 21 and 22, where a case or oath is brought before them.
- majorityThe deity (or sacred images) at the sanctuary before whom oaths were sworn and cases settled, not human officials. Comparative legal texts from the wider region support this.; Cyrus H. Gordon, "אלהים in its Reputed Meaning of Rulers, Judges," JBL 54 (1935): 139-144
- minorityHuman judges or magistrates who decide the case, the traditional rendering carried by older English versions.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. אלהים
Whether the dead were genuinely reckoned as elohim in Israel.
- contestedYes: the departed could be called elohim, reflecting a real Israelite reverence for the dead later suppressed by reform.; Theodore J. Lewis, Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit (HSM 39, 1989); Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel (1996)
- contestedNo: the Israelite dead were not truly deified; the term here names a summoned underworld being or reflects a later, polemical retelling.; Brian B. Schmidt, Israel's Beneficent Dead (FAT 11, 1994)