At the heart of Psalm 8 sits one of the best-known lines in the Psalter — and one of the most contested single words in it. The verse asks what humanity is that God should care for us, then answers: “And you caused him to lack being a heavenly being by a little, and you crowned him with honor and majesty.” The King James Version famously has “a little lower than the angels.” Others read “a little lower than God.” Which is right?

The trouble is that the Hebrew word elohim (אֱלֹהִים) can mean the one God (YHWH), a single divine being, or a plurality of gods or heavenly beings. Interpreters have landed in four camps: God (Aquila, Symmachus, Jerome; RSV, NASB, NLT), angels (the Septuagint, Syriac, Targum, Vulgate; KJV, NIV), heavenly beings as a whole class (ESV, NET), and the abstract divinity or godhead (a handful of older scholars).

Two of these can be set aside on the Hebrew’s own terms. The abstract “godhead” reading fails because elohim never functions elsewhere as an abstract noun. And “angels” in particular runs into the fact that the lexicons don’t list “angels” as a meaning of elohim at all — the Septuagint’s “angels” is best understood as an interpretive rendering rather than a literal one. Reading it as “God” (YHWH) is also unlikely here, because the psalmist addresses God directly in the second person throughout, and Hebrew poets don’t normally switch to speaking about God in the third person in the very same clause.

That leaves the broad sense: heavenly beings — the whole class of those who belong to the heavenly realm, God and the angelic host together. This fits the psalm’s clear echo of Genesis 1:26, where God says “let us make humanity in our image,” language most scholars take to include the heavenly court. Humanity, the psalm marvels, was made only slightly lower than the beings who occupy the heavens themselves.

There’s a fascinating continuation to this. Because the Septuagint rendered the word “angels,” and the letter to the Hebrews quotes the Septuagint (Hebrews 2:7), the New Testament’s citation of this verse reflects a different rendering than the preferred sense of the Hebrew. As Brevard Childs put it, the Greek “offered an interpretation, but one which does not in itself do an injustice to the Hebrew.” Either way, the point of the line stands: an earthly, mortal creature has been crowned with a dignity just short of heaven.