Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 17:1
I am the Almighty God. El Shaddai, a title whose root meaning is genuinely uncertain.
Genesis 17:1, in every translation this tool compares.
Almighty is confident, clear English. Shaddai's own root is not confident or clear at all; serious scholars have proposed it comes from words for a mountain, for a breast, and for violent overpowering, three pictures of God's power that would each shape the sentence differently if any one were certain.
Because the divine title God reveals at the covenant of circumcision, El Shaddai, has an etymology genuinely unknown, with real scholarly candidates ranging from a mountain-god to a nourishing, breast-associated God, to a God of overpowering destruction, three pictures of God that could hardly be more different.
Every version reads Almighty God, a strong, confident English translation supplying a settled sense the Hebrew word's own etymology does not actually have.
אֵל שַׁדַּי El Shaddai · H410 + H7706
Shaddai's derivation is disputed among three live proposals: from Akkadian shadu, mountain, giving God of the mountain, ancient imagery of strength and permanence; from Hebrew shad, breast, giving a nourishing, sustaining God, an image some scholars connect to Jacob's later blessing at Genesis 49:25, blessings of the breasts and of the womb; or from the root shadad, to overpower or destroy, giving a God of overwhelming might. A later Jewish tradition reads it instead as a compound, sha, who, plus dai, is sufficient, giving the all-sufficient one, but this is a homiletical reading of the sound rather than a linguistic derivation.
English Almighty commits to one general sense, overwhelming power, that happens to fit the shadad proposal reasonably well but flattens the genuinely live possibility that the name instead pictures God as a mountain or as a nurturing, breast-like source of sustenance, pictures Almighty does not evoke at all.
When a divine name's etymology is genuinely disputed among proposals that shape entirely different pictures of God, translating it with one confident English word settles a question scholarship has not settled. Hold the translation more loosely than its confident sound suggests.
Almighty is the traditional and functional English rendering, generically capturing power without committing to any one etymology. Each specific proposal, mountain, breast, or overpowering, produces a genuinely different mental picture of what this particular covenant scene is emphasizing about God's character.
- The shadu, mountain, proposal: comparative Akkadian philology
- The shad, breast, proposal, connected to Genesis 49:25's 'blessings of the breasts and of the womb'
- The shadad, overpower/destroy, proposal: standard Hebrew lexicons note this as a live option
