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El Shaddai, or simply Shaddai, is one of the oldest names for God in the Hebrew Bible. Most English Bibles turn it into “God Almighty” or “the Almighty”, and that translation hides a question I keep returning to across this site: who was the being behind the name? These are the pages where I followed it.
The name of the patriarchs
On God led Abraham to the ancient land of Ham, a pre-flood region I note that El Shaddai is one of the early names for the God of Abraham, and that it appears when the covenants are made with the patriarchs:
And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.
Genesis 17:1 (KJV)
Isaac uses the same name when he sends Jacob away to find a wife and blesses him in the name of El Shaddai, as I discuss on Genesis 28 – Sullām, the Heavenly Ladder of Malʾāḵîm of Elohim.
A name older than Yahweh
Exodus 6 is the key text. Here the speaker says the patriarchs knew him by another name:
And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.
Exodus 6:3 (KJV)
On Yahweh deliberately woven throughout the Hebrew Scriptures during the Babylonian Exile. I read this as a sign that the patriarchs originally worshipped El Shaddai rather than Yahweh, and that equating the two was an editorial effort to unify older traditions. The Book of Job points the same way: it uses El, Eloah and Shaddai for God and hardly uses Yahweh at all. Who Is Yahweh? places El Shaddai beside El Elyon and El Olam as the El titles the Hebrew text still carries from before exclusive YHWH worship. Trinity: El, YHWH, Asherah lists El Shaddai among the El names.
“Almighty” or “destroyer”?
The translation is the real puzzle. On The Bible: Blend and unify ‘the Gods’ into One I quote Paul Wallis:
“El Shaddai – an ancient divine name of the patriarchal period, rarely used outside the Pentateuch. [It is] preserved mainly in the priestly tradition…The usual translation ‘Almighty God’ is inaccurate…”
Paul Wallis, The Eden Conspiracy
In the video What Happened at Sodom and Gomorrah?, Wallis says that more authoritative lexicons suggest “the powerful one of the mountains” or “the destroyer”, and he argues that the second fits El Shaddai’s role in the destruction of cities. He makes the same point in Non-Human Governors Harvesting Energy from Human Fear?, where some scholars also suggest “the Powerful One of the Plains”. Mauro Biglino reaches a similar reading in “The Governor of the Elohim is Not Who You Think!”: “Lord of the steppe” or “destroyer” rather than “Almighty”.
Wallis lists Shaddai among the beings remembered in the oldest layer of the text. I quote him on The Divine Council: Yahweh is not alone in the spiritual realm.:
The Book of the Laws of YHWH included undisguised narratives of elohim, Elyon the Captain, Shaddai the Destroyer, CH-CH the Dragon, Asherah, Baal, Dagon, the moloch child-sacrifices, and the whole kaleidoscopic memory of the seba hassamayim. Far from Judaic monotheism it was the memory of the whole array of sky armies, otherwise known as elohim, who governed humanity in the deep past.
Paul Wallis, The Eden Conspiracy
Who Is Yahweh? also has Wallis’s retelling of the battle against the Syrians, where El Shaddai shows he can win on the plains as well as in the mountains. In Uncovered Beings of The Bible – Documentary Wallis argues that names like Elohim, El Shaddai and Yahweh should be left untranslated, so readers can see how each being behaves in the stories.
Related pages
- The Bible: Blend and unify ‘the Gods’ into One
- Yahweh deliberately woven throughout the Hebrew Scriptures during the Babylonian Exile.
- Who Is Yahweh?
- The Divine Council: Yahweh is not alone in the spiritual realm.
- God led Abraham to the ancient land of Ham, a pre-flood region
- Trinity: El, YHWH, Asherah
- What Happened at Sodom and Gomorrah?
- Non-Human Governors Harvesting Energy from Human Fear?
For every page I tagged with El Shaddai, see the El Shaddai tag archive.
