Eloah

ʾĕlôah · from the triliteral root ʾ-l-h

The singular form behind the familiar plural "Elohim" — a quieter, older name for God, spoken most often by a man losing everything.

Etymology

One root, several names

Eloah shares its root with El and, later, with Allah — a family of Semitic words that simply mean "god" or "the god," before any one tradition claimed the term.

Grammatical form

Eloah (אֱלוֹהַּ) is the singular. Elohim (אֱלֹהִים), the name used almost everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, is its plural — grammatically plural, though nearly always paired with singular verbs when referring to the God of Israel. Eloah strips that plurality away and returns to a single, unadorned name.

Shared root

The root ʾ-l-h (or its shorter cousin ʾ-l) sits underneath El, Elohim, Eloah, the Aramaic Elah, and the Arabic ilah — the generic word for "a god" that, prefixed with the definite article, becomes al-ilah: Allah, "the god." None of these are separate inventions; they are one Semitic word family branching through related languages.

ʾ-l-h (root)

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El / Eloah

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Elohim (plural)

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Elah (Aramaic)

On the Allah cognate — the linguistic relationship between Eloah and Allah is a matter of comparative Semitic philology, not theology: it describes a shared word family, not a shared theological claim. Scholars differ on the exact derivation of "Allah" (root ʾ-l-h plus the definite article, versus a contraction of al-ilāh), but the cognate relationship to Hebrew ʾĕlôah is uncontroversial among linguists.

Distribution

A name that belongs to Job

Eloah appears roughly 57 times across the Hebrew Bible — and more than 40 of those are packed into a single book.

~57Total occurrences (Tanakh)

40+Occurrences in Job alone

1Use in the Ten Commandments text (Deut. 32:15, 17)

Outside Job, Eloah surfaces mainly in poetry and elevated speech — the Song of Moses, the Psalms, later prophetic laments — contexts where the more common Elohim would have sounded routine. Concentrations by book:

JobBy far the densest use — Job and his companions reach for Eloah across nearly the entire book, especially in the poetic dialogues.
Deut. 32The Song of Moses uses Eloah twice, including the accusation that Israel "scoffed at the Eloah who made him."
PsalmsScattered use in the more archaic-styled psalms, e.g. Psalm 18 and Psalm 50.
Habakkuk 3Appears in the closing theophany, in the same elevated register as its use in Job.

Kabbalistic Placement

Eloah and Tiferet

In Hermetic and Golden Dawn correspondence tables, Eloah forms part of the compound divine name attached to Tiferet — the sphere of harmony, balance, and beauty at the center of the Tree of Life.

Tiferet sits directly beneath Kether, mediating between Chesed (mercy, expansion) and Gevurah (severity, restriction) — the two flanking pillars of the Tree of Life.

The compound name most often given to Tiferet is YHVH Eloah VaDaath — the Tetragrammaton joined to "Eloah" and "Da'ath" (knowledge) — drawn from Deuteronomy 4:39 and adapted into the Golden Dawn's Qabalistic correspondence tables, which built on but do not simply repeat classical rabbinic sources.

Sourcing note — this Tiferet attribution belongs to the Hermetic Qabalah of the Golden Dawn tradition (19th–20th century), not to a single unbroken lineage back to classical Jewish Kabbalah. Earlier Kabbalistic sources (e.g. Cordovero) associate similar but not identical names with Tiferet. No claim is made here that this correspondence is the only or the "original" one — traditions genuinely disagree, and that disagreement is worth naming rather than smoothing over.

Sources & Honesty

Where this comes from

Two different kinds of claim sit on this page, and they deserve different confidence levels.

Philological claims — the root ʾ-l-h, the Eloah/Elohim singular-plural relationship, the count and distribution of occurrences in the Masoretic Text — rest on standard Hebrew lexicography (e.g. Brown-Driver-Briggs, HALOT) and are broadly uncontroversial.

Kabbalistic claims — the Tiferet correspondence — belong specifically to the Golden Dawn's Hermetic Qabalah and its descendants. They are presented as one documented tradition, not as consensus or as older than they are.

No claim on this page is presented as independently verified beyond its tradition of origin. Where sources disagree, that disagreement is named rather than resolved in favor of the more dramatic reading.