Elohim (Hebrew) is a grammatically plural noun for "gods" or "Deity" in Biblical Hebrew. In the modern it is often times referred to in the singular despite the -im ending that denotes plural masculine nouns in Hebrew.
It is generally thought that Elohim is a formation from eloah, the latter being an expanded form of the Northwest Semitic noun il (???, ??l ). The related nouns eloah (????) and el (???) are used as proper names or as generics, in which case they are interchangeable with elohim. The notion of divinity underwent radical changes throughout the period of early Israelite identity. The ambiguity of the term elohim is the result of such changes, cast in terms of "vertical translatability", i.e. the re-interpretation of the gods of the earliest recalled period as the national god of monolatrism as it emerged in the 7th to 6th century BCE in the Kingdom of Judah and during the Babylonian captivity, and further in terms of monotheism by the emergence of Rabbinical Judaism in the 2nd century CE.
The word is identical to the usual plural of el meaning gods or magistrates, and is cognate to the 'l-h-m found in Ugaritic, where it is used for the pantheon of Canaanite gods, the children of El and conventionally vocalized as "Elohim". Most use of the term Elohim in the later Hebrew text imply a view that is at least monolatrist at the time of writing, and such usage (in the singular), as a proper title for the supreme deity, is generally not considered to . . . more