El Shaddai

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El Shaddai (Hebrew: אל שדי‎) is one of the Judaic names of God. El Shaddai is translated as God Almighty.The term may mean "God of the mountains," referring to the Mesopotamian divine mountain.^[1] The term was one of the patriarchal names for the tribal god of the Mesopotamians^[1] In Exodus 6:3, El Shaddai is identified with Yahweh.^[1] The term appears chiefly in the Torah. This could also refer to the Israelite camp's stay at Mount Sinai where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.
Shaddai was a late Bronze Age Amorite city on the banks of the Euphrates river, in northern Syria. The site of its ruin-mound is called Tel eth-Thadyen: "Thadyen" being the modern Arabic rendering of the original West Semitic "Shaddai". It has been conjectured that El Shaddai was therefore the "god of Shaddai" and associated in tradition with Abraham, and the inclusion of the Abrahamic stories into the Hebrew Bible may have brought the northern name with them (see Documentary hypothesis).
Balaam's vision described in the Book of Numbers 24:4 and 16, is explained as coming from Shaddai along with El. In the fragmentary inscriptions at Deir Alla, though Shaddai is not, or not fully, present,[6] shaddayin, lesser representations of Shaddai.[7] These have been tentatively identified with the ŝedim of Deuteronomy 34:17 and Psalm 106:37-38,[8], which are Canaanite deities.
According to Exodus 6:2, 3, Shaddai (Hebrew: שַׁדַּי) is the name by which God was known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The name Shaddai is again used as a name of God later in the Book of Job.
The root word "shadad" (שדד) means "to overpower" or "to destroy". This would give Shaddai the meaning of "destroyer", representing one of the aspects of God, and in this context it is essentially an epithet.
Another theory is that Shaddai is a derivation of a Semitic stem that appears in the Akkadian shadû ("mountain") and shaddā`û or shaddû`a ("mountain-dweller"), one of the names of Amurru. This theory was popularized by W. F. Albright^{[citation needed]} but was somewhat weakened when it was noticed^{[by whom?]} that the doubling of the medial d is first documented only in the Neo-Assyrian period. However, the doubling in Hebrew might possibly be secondary. According to this theory, God is seen as inhabiting a mythical holy mountain, a concept not unknown in ancient West Asian mythology (see El), and also evident in the Syriac Christian writings of Ephrem the Syrian, who places Eden on an inaccessible mountaintop.
The Septuagint and other early translations usually translate El Shaddai as "God Almighty". However in the Greek of the Septuagint translation of Psalm 91.1, Shaddai is translated as "the God of heaven"^[2].
'God Almighty' is the translation followed by most modern English translations of the Hebrew scriptures, including the popular New International Version^[3] and Good News Bible.
The translation team behind the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) however maintain that the meaning is uncertain, and that translating El Shaddai as 'Almighty God' is inaccurate. The NJB leaves it untranslated as Shaddai, and makes footnote suggestions that it should perhaps be understood as 'God of the Mountain' from the Accadian shadu, or 'God of the open wastes' from the Hebrew sadeh and the secondary meaning of the Accadian word.^[2]
Harriet Lutzky has presented evidence that Shaddai was an attribute of a Semitic goddess, linking the epithet Shaddai with the Hebrew šad meaning "breast", giving the meaning "the one of the Breast", as Asherah at Ugarit is "the one of the Womb".[9] A similar theory proposed by Albright is that the name Shaddai is connected to shadayim, the Hebrew word for "breasts". It may thus be connected to the notion of God’s gifts of fertility to human race. In several instances in the Torah the name is connected with fruitfulness: "May God Almighty [El Shaddai] bless you and make you fruitful and increase your numbers…" (Gen. 28:3). "I am God Almighty [El Shaddai]: be fruitful and increase in number" (Gen. 35:11). "By the Almighty [El Shaddai] who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts [shadayim] and of the womb [racham]" (Gen. 49:25).