Why FHB Says 'Father' in Genesis 1

By Kevin White — founder of Spirit Media Publishing and lead steward of the Father's Heart Bible. Updated May 10, 2026.

As a new translation of the Bible, FHB surfaces old questions asked with each translation. We take each question seriously. For example, this one: Isn't calling God ‘our Father’ in Genesis 1 interpretation, not translation?

It's a fair question. We hear it often, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one. The short answer is yes, it is interpretive — and the apostles modeled the same move long before we did. Every English Bible has been doing it for five hundred years. The disagreement is one of degree, not category.

Key takeaway: FHB renders Elohim as ‘our Father’ in Genesis 1 by an interpretive choice rooted in apostolic precedent — Hebrews 1:2, John 1:3, Colossians 1:16. The choice is rule-governed, version-controlled, and publicly declared. Every English translation makes interpretive choices; FHB's are openly stated rather than buried in footnotes.

Jump to: The honest concession · A word about translation history · The questions you'd reasonably ask next · The genre matters · What we own · Try the test

The honest concession

The Father's Heart Bible does render Elohim as "our Father" in Genesis 1 and elsewhere. That is an interpretive identification, not a lexical equivalence. The Hebrew word Elohim is plural in form but takes singular verbs; the grammar by itself does not prove three Persons or identify which Person of the Trinity is in view. We grant that fully. Bible Hub and Blue Letter Bible carry the lexical entries in full — go look. We have nothing to hide on the Hebrew.

Every translator faces interpretive choices on every page. The question is not whether interpretation happens — it always does — but which choices a translator makes and whether the methodology is declared. Ours is. Our methodology is rule-governed: every "God" or "LORD" in the text is identified as Father, Son, Spirit, or Trinity according to context, and we let the New Testament clarify the Old — what we call Bible-Clarifies-Bible. Both principles are applied chapter by chapter, version-controlled, and publicly documented. When you pick up the FHB, you know exactly what we're doing and why.

A word about translation history

Almost every English Bible since William Tyndale's work in the 1520s and 30s renders the divine name YHWH as "the LORD" in small caps. That's a substitution Hebrew never makes. The convention came from a Jewish reading practice — saying Adonai aloud rather than pronouncing the divine name — and translators chose to preserve it.

For five hundred years, every major English Bible — the KJV, the NIV, the ESV, the NASB, the NLT — has carried that interpretive convention straight into the text without so much as a footnote. By a strict "stay inside the original wording" standard, no English Bible would qualify as translation. The disagreement between FHB and other Bibles is one of degree, not category.

We made the same observation about Genesis 3 in “The Oldest Lie.” The flattening of YHWH and Elohim into one English God hides distinctions the Hebrew makes. Translation has been making interpretive moves on every page since the 1500s — we just made ours visible.

Read the chapter for yourself. Open the Father's Heart Bible sample chapters and read the rendering for yourself, side by side with the translation you grew up on. The page tells the story better than any blog post can.

The questions you'd reasonably ask next

But Moses didn't know about the Trinity. Aren't you projecting later revelation backward?

Yes, we are reading Genesis through the New Testament. So did the apostles. Hebrews 1:2 says our Father "made the worlds" through the Son. John 1:3 says "all things were made through Him." Colossians 1:16 says "in Him all things were created." Paul tells the Corinthians the rock that followed Israel in the wilderness "was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:4). The New Testament writers themselves read the Old Testament backward through Christ — and they rendered the result as their primary teaching, not as a marginal note. FHB follows the apostolic pattern.

Jewish readers don't see the Trinity in Genesis. Why should we?

Correct — and that's exactly where Christianity and Judaism part ways. We believe the New Testament is the authoritative completion of the Old Testament's story. FHB is openly a Christian translation, reading the Old Testament through its New Testament fulfillment. We don't claim Genesis 1 teaches the Trinity on grammatical grounds. We claim that when the apostles read Genesis 1, they read it as the work of the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. We render accordingly.

Why not just footnote it the way study Bibles do?

Because the apostles didn't footnote it either. Hebrews 1:2 doesn't say, "and from a later perspective, the Son was involved." It says our Father made the worlds through the Son, full stop, as primary teaching. FHB renders what the New Testament renders.

A note on study editions: once the base FHB is published, we will be releasing multiple FHB Study Bible versions. The footnote work — the Hebrew, the rabbinic readings, the apostolic cross-references — has a home. It just doesn't crowd out the primary reading in the base text.

The genre matters

FHB is a clarifying translation, not a formal-equivalence one. It sits in the same family as the Amplified Bible, The Voice, and The Passion Translation — Bibles that render later understanding inline rather than burying it in footnotes most readers never see. Compare a single verse across NASB, NIV, and FHB on

BibleGateway's parallel reader for a quick demonstration of how every translation already makes the same kind of interpretive moves we make explicit.

What sets FHB apart in that family is discipline. Our interpretive moves are rule-governed and version-controlled. Every Person identification cites a specific published rule. The methodology is public. The limits are documented. Nothing is improvised. If a sentence in FHB renders "Father" where the Hebrew says Elohim, there's a rule behind it that anyone can read.

What we own

We don't hide the interpretive frame. We publish it.

Translation, like reading itself, always carries a frame. The question is never whether to have one — every translator has one whether they say so or not. The question is whether to declare it. FHB's frame is the apostolic frame: we read the Old Testament with the New Testament in our hand, and we render the result so that the Father's heart and the Son's role are unmistakable to a son or daughter making their way through the whole Bible for the first time.

If you've never read Genesis 1 with that frame in view, I'd invite you to read it once in the FHB and ask honestly whether the apostolic reading clarifies the text or distorts it. Read it as a son. Read it as a daughter. Notice whose voice is speaking the world into being and whose hands are holding it together. We unpack the speaking Voice in detail in “Who Turned On the Light?”

We trust the reading the apostles modeled. We trust the discipline of public rules. And we trust that our Father has a heart you can feel — even on the very first page of the story.

Try the test

Three steps to test the rendering for yourself:

1. Read Genesis 1 in your current translation. Whatever you have on the shelf — KJV, NIV, ESV. Notice your default sense of who is speaking.

2. Read the same chapter in FHB. Open the FHB sample chapters. Ask: does the rendering clarify or distort?

3. Check the Hebrew. Cross-reference at Bible Hub's interlinear or Blue Letter Bible's lexicon. Both are free.

If the apostolic reading distorts the text, you'll see it. If it clarifies it, you'll feel it — and you'll have a Bible that lets the Father speak in his own voice from page one.