Elohim

Elohim is the commonest word for God in the Hebrew Bible, and it is grammatically plural. Used of the God of Israel it takes singular verbs, and the plural form is generally read as one of magnitude rather than of number. Used of other beings it takes plural verbs and means gods, or divine beings, or in a few passages something closer to powers: the assembly of Psalm 82 has God standing in the congregation of El and judging in the midst of elohim, and whatever those elohim are, they are not the speaker.

Taking that word as the name of one angelic rank among ten is a strong move. It applies to a class of subordinate beings a term that elsewhere names the God they serve, and it does so without any of the qualification a later theology would want. The ranked lists do not explain the choice, and the older material they draw on does not explain it either.

The ambiguity was already ancient when the ranking was made, and the ranking does not resolve it. That is the useful thing to know about this order: what the elohim of Psalm 82 and of the divine council passages actually are is a live question in biblical scholarship, with readings that run from gods of the nations to human judges to members of a heavenly court, and none of that argument is settled by the word being given a fixed place in a medieval hierarchy. The rank inherits the position without inheriting an answer.

Maimonides ranks the elohim seventh of ten in the Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 2:7, and the Golden Dawn table assigns them to Netzach, the seventh sephirah, whose name means victory or endurance and which stands at the foot of the pillar of mercy.

Two things about this placement repay attention. The first is that it is low. A rank carrying a name of God sits seventh of ten, below ranks named for wheels and for a substance seen in a fire, and the sequence offers no reason for it. Hierarchies assembled out of existing vocabulary produce results like this, where the dignity of a name and the dignity of its position do not track each other, and that mismatch is a useful sign that the list was compiled rather than deduced.

The second is that the Dionysian scheme has nothing to set beside it. There is no Greek or Latin choir named from a divine name, so the equations that pair the Hebrew orders with the nine choirs run out at this point, and a table that supplies a match here is matching by position. The atlas records no such equation for this rank.

Netzach itself carries a large set of associations in Golden Dawn material, and none of them derive from the passages in which the word elohim actually occurs. Reading the rank through them is interpretation rather than transmission, and the pairing underneath remains a pairing of two sequences.