The Elohim
or the ancient Hebrews "divinities (elohim) dwelt in nature and in the sky. Different tribes each had particular deities who were especially concerned with their affairs."
- Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind"...The geologist Christian O'Brien argued that these [ancient Hebrew and Sumerian] texts describe a race of beings called Shining Ones - his translation of the Hebrew word Elohim. These beings created modern humans from earlier human forms by genetic manipulation. Some of these beings, called Watchers, mated with humans, and this was considered a crime by the Shining Ones. One of the Watchers was named Shemjaza, and Yahweh was one of the Shining Ones. O'Brien argued that the Shining Ones were superior but mortal beings of unknown origin."
- Richard L. Thompson, Alien Identities
"When the gods created Mankind
Death for Mankind they allotted,
Life they retained in their own keeping."
- The Epic of Gilgamesh"The Elohim originally included not only foreign superstitious forms, but also all that host of Heaven which was revealed in poetry to the shepherds of the desert, now as an encampment of warriors, nor as careering in chariots of fire, and now as winged messengers, ascending and descending the vault of Heaven, to communicate the will of God to mankind."
- General Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...."
- Genesis 1:26"In the clay god and Man shall be bound, to a unity brought together;
So that to the end of days
the Flesh and the Soul
which in a god have ripened -
that Soul in a blood-kinship be bound."
- Sumerian creation story, Encyclopedia BritannicaThe creators (Elohim) outline in the second hour 'the shape of a more corporeal form of man. They separate it into two and prepare the sexes to become distinct from each other. Such is the way the Elohim proceeded in reference to every created thing."
- Eliphas Levi, The Nuctameron of the Hebrews"...The androgynous constitution of the Elohim is disclosed in the next verse, where he (referring to God) is said to have created man in his own image, male and female; or, more properly, as the division of the sexes had not yet taken place, male-female....This definitive reference to a humanity existing prior to the 'creation of man' described in Genesis must be evident to the most casual reader of Scripture."
- Manly P. Hall, Masonic, Hermetic, Quabbalistic & Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy
"...The sons of gods (bene ha-elohim) saw the daughters of men that they were fair..."
- Genesis 6:2a
"Other Elohim are occasionally mentioned throughout the older parts of the Old Testament. The most important of them is Baal, usually translated as the Owner. In the Canaan of the times, there were many Owners, one to each village, in the same way that many Catholic cities today have their own Virgin Marys, and yet they are all the same one."
- Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral MindNot all scholars accept the plural nature of the Elohim.
"Biblical Hebrew occasionally employs something scholars call the 'majestic plural'. In effect it is a plural ending added to a deity's name to confer status or majesty. In the Old Testament the best example is Elohim which does not mean 'the gods' but is rather the god El with the majestic plural im appended."
- David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1993), p. 228