Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
El Shaddai
An old title for Israel's God, translated Almighty, whose actual meaning is disputed.
Genesis 17:1, in every translation this tool compares.
Almighty is a guess that stuck. The Hebrew behind it, Shadday, has two serious explanations competing: a word for mountain, and a word for the wild country past the edge of the farmland. Greek translators chose a word meaning all-powerful, and English has followed them ever since.
Rendered "Almighty" on the strength of the Septuagint, which uses pantokrator throughout Job, and not on the strength of the Hebrew. Two real etymologies compete. The older one derives Shadday from Akkadian shadu, "mountain" (Albright, Cross); Knauf argues for a root tied to Akkadian shadi and Hebrew sadeh, "the uncultivated wilderness," which makes El Shadday a god of the wild country and fits the iconography of a lord of wild animals. DDD treats "breast" as no etymology at all, only a pun the text makes in Genesis 49:25, where Shadday sits beside "blessings of breasts and womb." Walton reads Abraham's devotion to El Shadday through the Mesopotamian pattern of a personal god, a patron attached to an individual or a clan rather than a whole people, which fits the Priestly claim in Exodus 6:3 that the patriarchs knew God by this name before Yahweh was revealed.
H7706 (שַׁדַּי), 48 occ
The devotional gloss "the God of more than enough" has no lexical basis.
- Genesis 17:1
- Genesis 35:11
- Exodus 6:3
- Job 5:17
- Ruth 1:20-21
- Genesis 28:3
- Genesis 49:25
- Ezekiel 10:5
- DDD s.v. "Shadday," 749-752
- Walton, *Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament*, ch. 6 ("State and Family Religion")
