1. The translation problem: why using only the word "God" isn't enough

Most Christians get confused because our Bibles translate the Hebrew word elohim as "God" (capital G) when referring to the Creator. This can often make someone think that elohim means "Supreme Being", but the other common situation that it appears it when translated as "gods" (lowercase g) when referring to idols.

However, Scripture uses elohim in ways that break that definition. The clearest example is the "Witch of Endor" story in 1 Samuel 28:13 (in the ancient-Hebrew Masoretic Text [MT] and the ancient-Greek Septuagint [LXX]). When the medium sees the soul of the prophet Samuel rising from the dead, she screams, "I see elohim coming up out of the earth!"

• The Problem: Samuel isn't God. He isn't a pagan idol or fallen angel either. He is a dead human believer. Yet the text calls him elohim.
• The Textual Evidence: Both the original Hebrew (Masoretic Text) and the ancient Greek translation (Septuagint) use the divine word here (elohim / theous). Later Jewish translations in Aramaic (Targums) tried to change it to "angel" because it was too controversial, but the original text stands.

This proves that elohim doesn't mean "Creator." It refers to more than that. Various kinds of beings who live in an unseen realm.

2. The proper definition of "Elohim/elohim"

If the word covers God, angels, fallen angels, and the souls of the human dead (like Samuel); we need a better definition than "gods."

Through my reasoning and research, I arrived at this definition that is more precise than “God/gods”:

Elohim = A being with knowledge of good and evil whose home is in a spiritual realm.

This definition works because:

• "Home in a Spiritual Realm": This explains why Samuel became an elohim when he died. He lost his earth-body ("Adam" status) and left the “natural” realm of “earth” (”natural” according to the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15) and emigrated to the realm of the dead (Sheol). It’s about residence, not just power.
• "Knowledge of Good and Evil": This connects back to Genesis 3:22. Humans acquired this "moral awareness" (the “soul software”) in Eden, but we were stuck in dirt bodies (the non-ideal “soul hardware”). Elohim are beings who have both the spiritual hardware and the moral software. Lots of definitions I found online did not include this part, but I find it to be a valuable addition to the definition because in Genesis the serpent says that Adam and Eve will “become like the elohim” implying that they weren’t elohim before; and later when God says that “man has become like one of us”, man now shared a trait with the elohim including God: knowing good and evil. Man is never called elohim anywhere in Scripture or any other Jewish pre-Rabbinic text except after death, so this implies that while we are in our natural bodies, we are not elohim. And!… we don’t know if there are any non-morally-knowledgeable beings (like their equivalents of animals or flora and fauna) in the spiritual realms or not (Scripture and other Judeo-Christian texts never specify), so that is another reason we shouldn’t assume that elohim covers all living beings in the spiritual realms.

3. Trying to describe the “physics” of the spiritual realms

Many Christians can think "spiritual" means "imaginary" or "ghostly" or “you can’t see it”, but the Scriptures teach it differently.

• Paul's logic: In 1 Corinthians 15:44–46, Paul says there is a "Natural Body" (soma psuchikon), which are our current bodies on earth that run on natural things; and a "Spiritual Body" (soma pneumatikon), which runs on the Holy Spirit Himself. He doesn't say "bodiless” anywhere and even before we have these new glorified bodies, Samuel could still be seen as a human looking form.
• The realms: We shouldn't think of the spiritual realm as "non-physical," but rather as a Parallel Universe/Dimension (very similar to how in modern theoretical physics there is the concept of multiple 3D places [our universe, “earth”, being one of them] on a 4D plane) that is just as real as—or even, realer than—ours, and which can overlap with our 3D earth in various “places” that can only be directly observed from a higher plane.
• Resurrection: When Jesus resurrected, He could eat fish (Luke 24:42) but also come and stand with the disciples when the doors were shut. He didn't become a ghost; He became the prototype of the final form of elohim body—one that can interact with both types of realms (natural and spiritual) in ways that are very compatible with both.

4. A strategy of replacement

This brings us to the biggest realization: Why does this matter for us?