Mauro Biglino

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Mauro Biglino

Mauro Biglino
Born 1950 (age 75–76)Italy
Occupations Translator, author, biblical scholar
Known for Philological reading of Elohim in the Hebrew Bible as plural physical beings; ancient astronaut interpretation of biblical texts
Notable work The Book That Will Forever Change Our Ideas About the Bible (2010); The Naked Bible (2013); The Alien God of the Bible (2020)

Mauro Biglino (born 1950) is an Italian scholar, author, and former professional translator of ancient Hebrew who worked for the Italian Catholic publisher Edizioni San Paolo (St. Paul's Editions) translating books of the Old Testament directly from the Masoretic text. On the basis of his close reading of the original Hebrew — without the theological overlays of standard translations — Biglino arrived at the controversial conclusion that the Elohim described in the Hebrew scriptures are not a monotheistic God but a plurality of physical beings, identified by some researchers with the Anunnaki of Sumerian mythology, who interacted with early human populations in a material, embodied way.

Background and Vatican connection

Biglino spent approximately fifteen years as a professional Hebrew scholar and translator, during which time he produced seventeen interlinear translations of Old Testament books for Edizioni San Paolo, a publishing house authorized by the Vatican. His translations included books of the Hebrew Prophets and the Psalms. Working from the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia — the standard critical edition of the Masoretic text — Biglino developed an increasingly dissonant reading of the source material, finding that the original Hebrew described events and beings in ways that standard theological translations systematically transformed or euphemized.

After years of producing these authorized translations, Biglino began publishing popular books presenting his unmediated readings of the Hebrew text, leading to a break with his previous publishing relationship. He has described his approach as strictly philological rather than theological: he reads only what the text says, word by word, without importing doctrinal assumptions about the nature of God or the supernatural.

The Elohim thesis

The central argument of Biglino's scholarship is that the Hebrew word Elohim — conventionally translated as "God" in English Bibles — is a grammatically plural noun meaning "gods" or "the powerful ones," and that the ancient Israelites understood it as referring to a plurality of distinct beings rather than a single omnipotent deity.

This linguistic argument, which Biglino shares with earlier researchers including Zecharia Sitchin and with later scholars such as Paul Wallis, holds that the shift to strict monotheism in Israelite religion was a late theological development — occurring roughly in the sixth century BCE during and after the Babylonian exile — that retroactively reinterpreted earlier polytheistic or henotheistic texts as referring to a single supreme being.

Dr. Michael Salla, in discussion with researcher Ella Laban, addressed Biglino's contribution to this question directly: "Paul Wallis and Mauro Biglino have looked at some of these ancient texts and identified a point in the history of the Jewish religion where around 600 BCE there was a kind of reinterpretation of the texts which originally talked about the polytheistic gods, the multiplicity of gods, the multiplicity of him, and then it went to this emphasis on one supreme God."

Linguistic analysis

Biglino places particular emphasis on the grammatical mechanics of biblical Hebrew as a guide to original meaning. In his analysis, the Bible's Elohim consistently behave as a corporate plural: they deliberate collectively ("Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" — Genesis 1:26), they have physical bodies, they eat, they travel, they have emotional states, and they are explicitly described as more than one entity in numerous passages where standard translations impose a singular reading.

Similarly, Biglino analyzes the Hebrew term nephilim (often translated "giants" or "fallen angels") as potentially indicating a class of beings of non-human origin who intermixed with human populations, consistent with the interpretation offered by Sitchin and others that these were members of the Anunnaki pantheon who took human partners.

The term YHWH (the Tetragrammaton, conventionally translated "Lord" or "God") is analyzed by Biglino not as an abstract philosophical concept but as a personal name — potentially the name of one specific member of the Elohim collective rather than a title for an omnipotent creator deity.

Major works

Biglino has also given numerous public lectures across Italy and internationally, many of which are available in recorded form and have reached large audiences across YouTube and alternative research platforms.

Relationship to Sitchin and the Anunnaki tradition

Biglino has explicitly acknowledged Zecharia Sitchin as a forerunner, though he distinguishes his own approach: while Sitchin drew primarily on Sumerian cuneiform texts to reconstruct the Anunnaki narrative, Biglino works from within the Hebrew biblical corpus itself, treating the text as a record of the same beings under different names. Both researchers converge on the conclusion that the Elohim/Anunnaki were physical, technologically advanced beings who intervened in human history and left their traces in the religious texts of multiple ancient civilizations.

Ella Laban, presenting to Exopolitics Today, made the same linguistic point independently: "The word Elohim in Hebrew is plural for gods with an S... Hebrew, it's either singular, plural, masculine or feminine. That's it... This is something I studied with Zecharia Sitchin and this is something I agree with him on, because he was a linguist, he knew five languages fluently."

Influence and citation

Biglino's work has achieved wide popularity in the Italian-speaking world and has been translated into English, Spanish, and several other languages. Mainstream biblical scholarship and the Catholic Church have not engaged substantively with his philological claims, while the alternative and exopolitics research community has embraced his analysis as independent philological confirmation of the ancient astronaut hypothesis. He has been cited approvingly by researchers including Michael Salla, Giorgio Tsoukalos, and Paul Wallis.

Citation within exopolitics research

Michael Salla has repeatedly cited Biglino's linguistic findings as independent philological corroboration of the ancient astronaut thesis. In a 2022 discussion of ET prophecy and second-coming traditions, Salla summarized the joint contribution of Biglino and Paul Wallis: "Biglino and Wallis clearly point out that this is a distortion of the earlier beliefs of the Hebrews of this multiplicity of gods or Elohim that we're all part of this creation that goes back much further to the Sumerian texts, because ancient Israeli culture was a derivative of the Sumerian texts." Salla further argued that the Jewish theological conclave of approximately 600 BCE, followed by the Christian Council of Nicaea around 350 CE, represented two distinct historical moments at which the original plural Elohim were reinterpreted as a singular omnipotent deity — a reinterpretation Biglino's philological analysis identifies as a departure from the literal Hebrew text.

Salla's discussion with Timothy Alberino in May 2023 expanded this framework to situate Biglino's reading within debates on the "divine council" model of early Israelite religion. Alberino noted that Hebrew scholar Michael Heiser had independently developed the concept of a divine council — a king and his court of subordinate beings — as the structural referent of the Elohim, a position that partly converges with Biglino's reading even while Heiser rejected the extraterrestrial interpretation.

Jorjani and the convergent Elohim reading

Philosopher Jason Jorjani, speaking in 2025 on the American Alchemy with Jesse Michels podcast, independently articulated a convergent reading of the Elohim that parallels Biglino's philological conclusions, situating the same biblical data within a broader cross-cultural framework. Jorjani argued that the Elohim, the Anunnaki, the Hindu Devas, and the Olympian gods are different cultural names for the same population of advanced beings who have interacted with humanity throughout recorded history, and that their traces survive in religious texts across civilizations: "the UFO phenomenon extends through all of recorded human history and most likely into prehistory. And it's absolutely inseparable from both revealed religious systems like Judeo-Christianity and Islam and also more archaic, polytheistic, ritualistic religions like the religion of ancient Egypt or the Vedic religion."

Jorjani specifically analyzed the Garden of Eden narrative in terms that closely parallel Biglino's reading: that the humans in Eden were slave laborers who "didn't know we were naked, meaning we didn't know we were slaves," and that the Elohim chief (YHWH) explicitly deliberated with fellow Elohim in the plural — "Let us exile them from the garden before they also eat of the tree of life and become like unto us" — expressing fear of human parity with the Elohim rather than a monotheistic deity's concern for human welfare. This reading — that the Elohim's suppression of human knowledge was motivated by self-interest rather than benevolent moral concern — aligns closely with Biglino's own interpretation of the same passage.

Jorjani also drew attention to the excision of the Book of Enoch from the Hebrew canon as evidence that the original biblical narrative was deliberately edited to remove elements — specifically the story of the Watchers' interbreeding with humans — that made the plural, physical character of the Elohim unmistakable: "the story makes no sense without it."

See also

References