Names of God in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

The Hebrew Bible presents Israel and Judah as having only one legitimate deity, a god whose proper name is Yahweh, but one also finds a variety of names and epithets for this deity within the Bible. The generic word Elohim, “god” or “gods” (Hebrew ʾĕlōhîm), comes to serve as something of an alternate name for Yahweh in its own right. In addition, the Hebrew word El (ʾēl) can be either the common noun “god” or the name of El/Ilu, a deity known from non-Israelite West Semitic sources—for instance as the head of the pantheon in the mythological texts from Ugarit. Each of these names may take further descriptors, such as “Yahweh of Hosts” (yhwh ṣəbāʾôt) or “El Shaddai” (ʾēl šadday). In the case of compound names that include El, such as the latter, it is possible that the name originally belonged to a local manifestation of El and was secondarily attached to Yahweh, either in the course of Israelite religious development or, more artificially, by the biblical authors (see Compound El Names). This ambiguity about the origins of compound El names occupies much of the literature on the names of God in the Hebrew Bible, implicating as it does larger issues relating to the historical origins of Yahweh religion, particularly whether Yahweh arose as an independent deity or developed from a manifestation of El. Here, the idea of a sort of “convergence” of two or more deities into a single deity has been a common model for explaining how the biblical Yahweh came to bear his various names. Since “origins” have long been inexorably attractive to antiquarians and philologists alike, the majority of work on these divine names and epithets has been devoted to etymological investigations. Such studies often operate under the assumption, whether implicit or explicit, that the linguistic significance of each divine name reveals something important about the original nature and provenance of the deity who bore it.