a contemptuous word for a false god or idol: a so-called god branded as a powerless nothing
This is the Hebrew Bible's sharpest insult for the gods of other nations. It is a noun that names an idol or a foreign deity, but it never names one neutrally: built into the word is the charge that the thing is feeble and worthless, a nobody dressed up as a god. The underlying sense scholars reconstruct is "a weak, worthless thing," and that charge of impotence rides along every time the word is used of a god.
What makes the word unique among Hebrew terms for idols is that it sounds almost like the ordinary words for God and god (el and elohim), and very like the word for "not" (al). Prophets and psalmists used that near-rhyme as a weapon. The most famous example reads "all the gods of the peoples are nothings" (Psalm 96:5), where the words for "gods" and "nothings" chime against each other so that the line itself performs the put-down. Habakkuk piles on a second pun, calling them "mute nothings" (Habakkuk 2:18), where the sound of the word for idol blurs into the word for "speechless."
Because the word is fundamentally an evaluation ("worthless") and not just a label, it can also drop the religious target entirely and work as a plain adjective for anything useless: worthless doctors, worthless prophecy, a worthless leader. That second use is grouped here as a related sense. Most occurrences, though, cluster in the Holiness laws of Leviticus, in the first part of Isaiah, and in the Psalms, where the word brands rival objects of worship as ontological zeroes.
The single best one-word English rendering is debated. "Idol" makes it sound like a mere object; "non-entity" or "nothing" loses the cultic sneer; "worthless thing" drops the religious target. The force of the word lies in doing all of these at once.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the worthless or the idol sense came first, and where the word came from. The traditional view derives it from a root meaning "be weak" so that "worthless thing" is original and the idol use is a later put-down; a recent reassessment argues the idol sense came first as a foreign loanword echoing the Mesopotamian high god Enlil, with the worthless sense a later inner-Hebrew reinterpretation playing on its sound; a mediating view holds that by the classical period both senses were heard at once.
- majorityFrom a root meaning weak or worthless; the adjectival sense is primary and the idol application is a polemical specialization.; BDB, s.v. אֱלִיל; HALOT, s.v. אֱלִיל; H. D. Preuss, TDOT 1:285-87
- minorityA Neo-Assyrian-era loanword from Akkadian Illil (Enlil); the idol sense is original and the worthless sense a later inner-Hebrew reanalysis on the homophony with el and al.; Christopher B. Hays, "Enlil, Isaiah, and the Origins of the ʾĕlîlîm," ZAW 132/2 (2020): 224-235; Mark W. Hamilton, "What are ʾElilim?" Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 19 (2019), art. 9
- contestedBy the classical period genuinely polysemic: every use was heard at once as worthless thing and as impotent idol, and writers exploited the double hearing.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22, AB 3A (2000); Carol L. Meyers and Eric M. Meyers, Zechariah 9-14, AB 25C (1993)