In Genesis 1:26-27 we find the answer. God said “Let us make man in our image, our likeness..”

Then in verse 27, we see how many images God made in their image. They made male and female. Therefore, God must have a male and a female image.

How can God say that they made mankind in their image, male and female, if God didn’t exist in the male and female form?

Can you make a copy of something without the original?

We call the male image of God, God the Father. We are also called the children of God. Then what should we call the female image of God? God the Mother of course.

God the Mother is the last secret of the Bible that has been revealed in these last days by our Father, second coming Christ.

My wife had an interesting thought on this topic. She suggested that perhaps the Holy Ghost is the “firstborn” spirit daughter of God the Father, just as Christ is the firstborn spirit son.

Of course, this may seem a bit alien to us when we remember scriptures about how Mary conceived Jesus through the Holy Ghost in some fashion.

Pure speculation.

Hi again, Petra! Thanks for giving me a linguist’s perspective. I think we’re basically in agreement–like you, I think a grammatical morpheme (in this case the plural ending “-im”) is far too slender a thread from which to hang a theological proposition. (Sumerian, for example, apparently like Indonesian, has no grammatical gender whatever, and no basic plural morpheme, although this surely did not inhibit speakers’ ability to observe sex differences or to count higher than one.)

But I do think it’s significant to our discussion of ancient Israelite religion that, in verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and nouns in apposition to “Elohim,” God is almost always masculine and singular. Everyone else in the Bible who is animate, masculine, and singular is an individual male creature, so this seems at least like a good starting point in attempting to understand how ancient Israelites conceived of their God, even though it does not entirely take the unexpected plural morpheme into account. I’m also suspicious of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in rigid formulation, but obviously language bears some relation to thought or it’s not meaningful; it’s surely of significance whether we refer to a baby as a “she” or an “it,” for example. Israel’s God is a “he” and not a “they.”

Of course, it’s much easier to argue what it does not indicate, as I’ve done here, than what it actually does indicate! As to extrapolating theological conclusions: I’m already convinced most of our beliefs do not flow naturally from our scriptures, least of all the OT. Certainly what the OT claims about God doesn’t preclude a Heavenly Mother; I just don’t think it provides solid evidence for it. (I’m setting aside for the moment textual and archaeological evidence of goddess worship, which problably deserves a post of its own, simply because I don’t think on the linguistic level Elohim includes a goddess.)

(Hmm–I don’t know enough to be sure when the dual morpheme stopped being productive in the history of Hebrew. What little I know: our earliest epigraphic Hebrew dates to about 1000 BCE, and the earliest texts of the Bible like Exodus 15 might date slightly earlier–to 1200 BCE or so. Proto-Northwest Semitic definitely had a productive dual, as did Ugaritic in about 1300-1200 BCE. Of course, these languages don’t indicate vowels for the most part, so the evidence might not be entirely clear?–in unpointed biblical Hebrew the dual and plural look the same. But the dual in Hebrew is a triphthongization of a Proto-Semitic diphthong that monophthongized in the northern dialect, resulting in characteristic spellings without a mater lectionis, so potentially a northern spelling might indicate a distinction between plural and dual (or not)? That of course wouldn’t give us unequivocal evidence for what was happening in the south. Drat–I wish I were taking epigraphic Hebrew.)

This is why I think verbs are important evidence, but even for those who reject their significance (thus disqualifying the name of Israel’s God as evidence, since it looks like a verb form), what about pronouns? “You” masculine singular is virtually always a form of address to a masculine singular being. So when the term is used and we don’t know the gender or number of the addressee in question, I think it’s safe to assume masculine singular, no?

All right, this is fun, I’m clarifying my position to myself: I don’t think theological interpretation should hinge on grammar, at least not grammatical features intrinsic to a certain language. Yes, the Hebrew second person singular masculine pronoun does seem to suggest that ancient Hebrew speakers, at least, saw best fit to address God as if he were both singular and masculine, but that doesn’t mean he is. Modern-day English speakers address God in a second person form that is not marked for gender or number, but refer to him with a masculine singular form; does that mean there is some conflict in his nature? Modern-day Indonesian speakers both address and refer to God with pronouns that are not marked for gender (Indonesian makes no distinction between “he” and “she”), but does that mean that he is necessarily without gender?

Now, I’m kind of a fan of the Saipr-Whorfian idea that language affects thought (shhh–don’t tell the other linguists!) so I would be willing to believe that, in some sense, the grammatical structure of the language with which we talk about God affects our idea of God—that is, the fact that the Israelites referred to God as masculine singular might have led them towards a masculine singular interpretation. (Though I’m for a weak version of this hypothesis, in which thought is not determined, but only possibly influenced–Indonesian speakers still conceive of people as having gender, even if their pronouns do not.) I am not willing to believe, however, that the grammar of the language with which we talk about God determines absolutely who or what God is–if that were the case, it seems to me that we’d either be forced to believe in a different sort of God for each language or be forced to believe that there is one language which is intrinsically better suited to talking about God than other languages. Now, while some people do believe the latter–the refusal of Muslims to translate the Qur’an springs to mind–I don’t think that’s the Mormon position, and it’s certainly not my position. After all, the assumption that there are sacred texts other than the Bible should mean that there are other grammatical ways of referring to God, ways that maybe don’t mark gender or number. If we were all taking as our basis a sacred text written in Indonesian, we might be debating whether God has gender at all.

(Not to say, of course, that such a debate wouldn’t be fun, only that a grammatical argument in that case wouldn’t be productive, pun intended.)

I guess all this only supports your main point, that the plural nature of the word “Elohim” doesn’t necessarily prove anything. I just don’t think it necessarily disproves anything, either; I’d rather see and debate theology as independent from the finer points of morphology and syntax. (Much as I love those finer points!)