"This is proof that more than ever, we are getting destroyed in the battle for the hearts and minds of our children," he told the publication. "Publicly funded libraries are green-lighting 'gender marker and name change clinics' while denying a story time that would involve the reading of a book that teaches biblical wisdom. How much more clear can it get?"

Doesn't a guy change his gender to "bread" in your book?

Pipe down, weirdo.

Dr Dreidel: "This is proof that more than ever, we are getting destroyed in the battle for the hearts and minds of our children," he told the publication. "Publicly funded libraries are green-lighting 'gender marker and name change clinics' while denying a story time that would involve the reading of a book that teaches biblical wisdom. How much more clear can it get?"

Doesn't a guy change his gender to "bread" in your book?

Pipe down, weirdo.

OH - moreover, I can think of at least three name changes in Genesis alone: Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, and Jacob becomes Israel.

// and god's gender marker changes a few times as well

syrynxx: Dr Dreidel: // and god's gender marker changes a few times as well

IIRC, the LORD changes from "Elohim" (the Mighty Ones) to singular "El" as well.  And then mysteriously later to "Yahweh" (mistranslated as Jehovah because they used the consonants for Yahweh with the vowel diacritics for "Adonai" to avoid committing blasphemy and being smothered with a giant rock).  Wikipedia says Yahweh was one of a pantheon including El back when the Hebrews were polytheistic.

I could be wrong about any of that since I became an agnostic atheist.

Well. There is a metric assload of symbolism in Biblical God Names that I probably cannot fit into one post. Without getting extremely esoteric and basically starting with lessons in Hebrew language, I'll just say that the Divine Names are used to denote* specific Divine attributes - judgement, mercy, omnipotence, etc.

You're right that "elohim" is the plural of "el", but that name is used to denote the attribute of judgement (where IIRC the singular form is used to denote "power", but I don't care to look that up). There's an interesting bit of trivia, that it's the first Divine Name used in the Bible ("In the beginning, God [The Judge] created the world") so it's kind of fitting that it uses the royal "we".

The Tetragrammaton (hi, Equilibrium fans!) denotes the attribute mercy and is the "unpronounceable" one generally rendered in English as "Yahweh" - there's also supposedly a 72-letter name that's been lost in the sands of time - and there are traditional conventions to avoid rendering it "as pronounced" (so, using the "wrong" diacritics).

The name "adonai" just means "master" or "lord" (as old-timey folks would have used it to address those of nobility or higher social class), and I think all the times it's actually used in the Bible it's part of a longer phrase (adonai tzeva'ot - "lord of hosts"). Using adonai as the catch-all Name is a convention adopted later (not sure when, but I'd guess in the Talmudic era).

All that is beside my original point, though - that sometimes the GENDER marker used for god (which we do not have in English, as our verbs are the same whether the person doing them is male or female or neither or both) is generally the male, but sometimes the female. That did not make it over to the King James version, curiously.

HTH :)

// not that god is ever called "she" directly, but there are words rendered in the traditional text that seem to match the female gender marker, or are traditionally pronounced that way
// it's all very confusing, and like I said, without considerable grounding in some of the traditions it'll lose a LOT in translation
// and yeah, there's some considerable scholarship behind the idea that (early?) Jews/Judaism united a bunch of different cults into one monotheistic entity with many names
// I am also an agnostic, FWIW
* or "have been interpreted as denoting"