El Shaddai

deity mountain Amorites single tradition · 3

El Shaddai is a divine name (Biblical Hebrew: אֵל שַׁדַּי, romanized: ʾĒl Šadday), a potential reference to God as the "god of the steppe". It may also derive from the cultural beliefs of Upper Mesopotamian immigrants (i.e., Amorites)—who may have been ancestors of the Israelites.

↻ synthesized from 3 sources

When

First attested
3000 BCE
Attested period
-3000 – 2020
Historical notes
Attested in Bronze Age Mesopotamia.

Relationships

syncretized with
Esaldaios
equivalent to
Yahweh

Expand to full subgraph →

Sources

Source passages

“The divine name El Shaddai (Biblical Hebrew: אֵל שַׁדַּי, romanized: ʾĒl Šadday), a potential reference to God as the "god of the steppe", may also derive from the cultural beliefs of Upper Mesopotamian immigrants (i.e., Amorites)—who may have been ancestors of the Israelites.”

#11664 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001

“W. F. Albright, for example, says that El 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. Philo of Byblos states that Atlas was one of the elohim, which would clearly fit into the story of El Shaddai as "God of the Mountain(s)".”

#22647 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001

“According to the biblical chronology it is El Shaddai who ordains the custom of circumcision in Genesis 17:1 and, as is apparent in midrash Tanhuma Tzav 14 (cf. a parallel passages in Tazri‘a 5 and Shemini 5) the brit milah itself is the inscription of the part of the name on the body”

#25931 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001