This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
It is requested that an image or photograph of El Shaddai be included in this article to improve its quality. Please replace this template with a more specific media request template where possible.
Wikipedians in Israel may be able to help! The Free Image Search Tool or Openverse Creative Commons Search may be able to locate suitable images on Flickr and other web sites. |
I have cleaned up this page. I have removed the text referring to the catholic organisation as it was of poor grammar and out of place - they have a separate entry which is referenced here, and also removed the disambiguation tag as I didn't think it was strictly correct.
More importantly, I have deleted a line that said "El Shaddai International Christian Center, a sect of The Church of Scientology". This was added by an unregistered user and had no supporting references. The only El Shaddai International Christian Centre (note English spelling of centre) I am aware of is a group of black pentecostal churches that began in Bradford, England. I am going to create a new entry for them as they are notable. Checking all hits on Google (using both spellings of centre) reveals no other organisation of this name. The Church of Scientology has beliefs that have no relation to traditional christian theology and is regarded by many as a cult. I can only assume that this line was added maliciously by someone with a grudge against the El Shaddai churches, and it was potentially libellous. Sidefall 08:34, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
I was curious as to why the term being related to a word meaning "to overpower" or "to destroy" would indicate that it an epithet? In the culture of the time, a powerful god, a god who was able to destroy would have been a good thing, not a bad thing. Is William the Conqueror an epithet? thehararite (talk) 18:09, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
El was the name of the chief Caananite god, as the Ugaritic texts evidence. El supposedly had 70 children, and by some accounts, Yahweh was one of them. In any case, as the Yahweh culture evolved as a separate identity from Caananite culture, El had to be dealt with. The Book of Genesis contains (at least) two story threads, one using the name El or its plural Elohim, the other using Yahweh, from what are known as the E and J sources. Somewhere around the time of the exile, the separate texts were edited together to form the basis of the current book. The first step was to identify El and Yahweh as the same god. The second was to stop using El or Elohim at all. See Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (Little Brown 2009). FAMiniter (talk) 00:30, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
The section Shaddai in the Midrash, says Shaddai
“is often paraphrased in English translations as ‘Almighty’ although this is an interpretive element.”
But this comment appears uninformed, as if the author is unaware that the previous section, Shaddai in the Hebrew Bible, said:
“In the Septuagint and other early translations, Shaddai was translated with the meaning ‘Almighty’.”
A translation is not the same as a paraphrase. The translators of the Septuagint did not produce a paraphrase.
The author of the Shaddai in the Midrash section is over-reaching to make his point. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.27.72.128 (talk) 21:09, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
The word Shaddai has a meaning that is debatable. It should be noted that the Assyrian tern Shaddu really has a semantic emphasis of a ridge, more than a mountain promontory or peak. In Hebrew there are other more common and thus less theorized terms that come from the same root as Shaddai, they all refer either literally or figuratively to the formation of a cut or crevasse and the ridge or ridges that are formed. Literal examples would be the words for plowing and the furrow in a field, or a rut. A more figurative example would e the term for rape, which semantically would be akin to "plowing her open." This suggests that the word Shaddai refers to the unstoppable nature of in this case God. As a noun it probably has the semantic associations of a sharp cutting, an unstoppable blade, a rapacious zeal or force, or that which opens the way by plowing on through.
I bring this up because translation is always a can of worms. Idiom don't always directly translate and we don't really have a good cognate of Shaddai in Western European languages. Almighty is a pretty weak translation, because it lacks the sense of vulnerability in the opposition and inevitability of success. The urgency is lost. To complicate this is the (in my opinion) superstitious fear of speaking the names that caused the loss of the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton. It causes people to be more tentative and shy about rigorous caparison and criticism of the names of God. That's why finding good scholarship with regard to this word, sadly even in the voices of the five rabbis, is not likely. That makes this article doomed to a whole lot of confusing conjecture. We just have to live with that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.166.164.161 (talk) 16:47, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
W. F. Albright. “The Names Shaddai and Abraham,” Journal of Biblical Literature 54 (1935): 173-204.
Harriet Lutzky. “Shadday as a Goddess Epithet.” Vetus Testamentum 48 (1998): 15-36.
A useful article: http://claudemariottini.org/2011/04/25/el-shaddai-part-2/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.133.245.239 (talk) 12:19, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
This section should really include current sections 3, 4, and 5 as subpoints. i.e.
2 - Shaddai as a Theonym
2.a-2.? - different interpretations, to include the sections listed above.
Kennstphn (talk) 14:57, 28 July 2011 (UTC)kennstphn
I have just taken a look into the Septuagint (admittedly, a church edition from Greece, not a critical edition); there, all the cited places use a translation that means simply "my God" (ὁ Θεός μου) or "your God" (ὁ Θεός σου), depending on who is speaking. The epithet "Almighty" (Παντοκράτωρ) is used as a translation for "Sabaoth", not for "Shaddai". Thus I have marked the sentence in the article as "citation needed", though I assume that at least for the Septuagint it is in fact false. -- 92.226.100.18 (talk) 17:18, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Please cite references for the claim, "Shaddai was one of the many gods in Canaanite religion." As far as I know there is no Ugaritic(Canaanite) god named, "Shaddai". There is a speculation that the Ugaritic word for mountain, "dada" might be related to the Akkadian "sadu" but there is no mention of a god by the name of "Shaddai" in the Ugaritic religious texts or any other West Semetic text. "No Ugaritic equivalent of ʾEl Shaddai has yet been found."[1] [2]
We do see the term "Shaddayin" in the Deir Alla fragment but not "Shaddai". It is written in Aramaic and dated to ca. 840-760 BCE.
TruthCkr (talk) 21:38, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
In the Deir Alla text, he [Bal`am] is associated with a god bearing the name Shgr, "Shadday" gods and goddesses, and with the goddess Ashtar.
References
Stephen Harris is clearly someone of some reputation but given that the citation gives no page numbers and I cannot see inside what is a six hundred page textbook, I see considerable reason to doubt that he's being cited accurately. As a real scholar I would assume that, in such a work, he is largely repeating the opinions of others; or at the very least, he is repeating claims he published elsewhere. But for example when I looked for the claim about the "patriarchal name", what I invariably found was some close variant of the phrase "El Shaddai was the patriarchal name of God," meaning "the name used by the Hebrew patriarchs". I could find no claim that it was so used across Mesopotamia, nor (except perhaps in one or two cases from around 1900) that "Shaddai" itself was that name. At this point I'm inclined to strike the whole passage until we can get it better cited, as this isn't the only questionable or lacking citation. Mangoe (talk) 14:27, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
...Almighty," this term probably means "God of the Mountain," referring to the Mesopotamian cosmic "mountain" inhabited by divine beings. One of the patriarchal names for the Mesopotamian tribal god, it is identified with Yahweh in the Mosaic revelation (Exod. 6:3)
@Editor2020: The other day I edited the article, and left the edit comment
The LXX never translated "El Shaddai" as "God Almighty". "Shaddai" is often translated as "God", "my God", or "Lord" in the LXX. "God Almighty" is only used for "El Shaddai", not for "Shaddai".
You have now reverted my edit with the comment "needsreferences". It doesn't need references. Saying what was there before would need references, because it couldn't be shown by looking at the Septuagint! All I did was look up the places in the Septuagint where "El Shaddai" is used in the Hebrew:
(These are taken from my Hebrew concordance.) As for it being translated "Lord", take for example Iob 6:4, and there are quite a few more. I also checked English translations and found, as I said, that Shaddai is translated Almighty and El Shaddai as God Almighty. This apparently comes from the Vulgate, which uses "Omnipotens" for Shaddai, and Deus Omnipotens for El Shaddai. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 08:33, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 11:36, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=God_Almighty&diff=1206026511&oldid=1206015848 El Shaddai does not have a monopoly on the term God_Almighty. Tiny Particle (talk) 01:42, 11 February 2024 (UTC)