Talk:El Shaddai

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)

Yes, "the Conqueror" is an epithet. The word "epithet" does not mean an insult. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 08:00, 7 March 2016 (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)

"Elohim" is not the plural of "El". It's the plural of "Eloah" (which occurs many times in Iob). The plural of "el" is "elim", which occurs once in Exodus, twice in the Psalms, and once in Daniel. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 08:00, 7 March 2016 (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)

There is a word meaning to harrow, but it's "sidded", with a sin not a shin. I don't see any words in my dictionary (Even Shoshan) coming from the root shin daleth daleth that have something to do with the formation of a cut or ridges, or would mean something like to rape a woman. A furrow is "telem", and to rape is "shagal", "pilgesh", "`inna", "kabash", or (in modern Hebrew) "`anas". Eric Kvaalen (talk) 08:00, 7 March 2016 (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)

I don’t know your edition, but I do know it is often translated as ‘God Almighty’; but I have no objection to the tag. --217/83 19:45, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

It's only often (indeed, ever) translated "Pantokrator" ("Almighty", or better "All-ruling") in one book of the LXX, namely Job. Other books use different translations. The statistics for the various sections are:

TORAH

my/thy/their God, 7 (6 times in Genesis and once in Exodus)

God, 2 (both in Numbers)

RUTH

Sufficient, 2

JOB

Almighty, 17

Lord, 9

Sufficient, 3

All-Creating, 1

"him", 1

not translated, 1

PSALMS

Heavenly, 2

PROPHETS

God, 1 (in Deutero-Isaiah)

Shaddai, transliterated, 1 (in Ezekiel)

Destroyer, 1 (in Joel)

not translated, 1 (in Ezekiel)

So basically, you get completely different translations depending on which book of the Bible you are in. This shows something about how the LXX was translated, but it isn't particularly helpful for making generalizations. As for "Pantokrator", it is overwhelmingly not Shaddai: every single instance outside the book of Job (and there are about 130 of these, not that I can be bothered to count them exactly) is not Shaddai, and tends to be YHWH Tsevaoth (some are just YHWH in the MT, but that is a textual issue). And we have fairly good evidence for even more instances of YHWH Tsevaoth being translated as "Pantokrator" — in our LXX, Tsevaoth is always transliterated in Isaiah, but Revelation 4:8 quotes a version of Isaiah 6:3 that uses "Pantokrator". I think we're giving undue weight to an oddball feature of the LXX version of the Book of Job here. 𝐨𝐱𝐲𝐩𝐡𝐞𝐧𝐵𝑈𝑇𝐴𝑍𝑂𝑁𝐸 ⓊⓉ 00:18, 13 September 2012 (UTC)