The Names of God

God is the term for the Supreme Being believed by the majority to be the creator, ruler and/or the sum total of, existence. Conceptions of God can vary widely, despite the common use of the same term for them all.

The God of monotheism, or the supreme deity in the pantheist, panentheist and henotheistic religions, is not always thought of by believers in the same terms as are deities in many other religions — as a powerful, human-like, supernatural being — but rather, becomes esoteric, the deification of a philosophical category — the Ultimate, the Absolute Infinite, the Transcendent, the One, the All, Existence or Being itself, the ground of being, the monistic substrate, etc.

Theologians and philosophers have studied countless conceptions of God since the dawn of civilization. The question of the existence of God classically falls under the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, but is also one of the key discussions taking place within the field of the philosophy of religion.

The development of English orthography was dominated by Christian texts. Capitalized "God" was first used to refer to the Judeo-Christian concept, and may now signify any monotheistic conception of God, including the translations of the Arabic Allāh and the African Masai Engai.

• Adonay YHWH as "Lord God"
• YHWH Elohim as "Lord God"
• κυριος ο θεος as "Lord God" (in the New Testament)

The use of capitalization, as for a proper noun, has persisted to disambiguate the concept of a singular God from pagan deities for which lower case god has continued to be applied, mirroring the use of Latin deus.

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El Shaddai

El Shaddai (Hebrew: אל שדי) is one of the Judaic names of God.

The name Shaddai (Hebrew: שַׁדַּי), which occurs both independently and in combination with El, is used as a name of God chiefly in the Book of Job. According to Exodus 6:2, 3, this is the name by which God was known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In the Septuagint and other early translation it was translated with words meaning 'Almighty'.

The root word "shadad" (שדד) means "to overpower" or "to destroy". This would give Shaddai the meaning of "destroyer" as one of the aspects of God. Compare to "Shiva," the destroyer in the Hindu trinity, "creator, preserver, destroyer".

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'. This theory was popularized by W. F. Albright but was somewhat weakened when it was noticed 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. In this theory God is seen as inhabiting a mythical holy mountain: a concept not unknown in ancient near eastern mythology, and also evident in the Syriac Christian writings of Ephrem the Syrian, who places Eden on an inaccessible mountaintop.

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