El Shaddai

El Shaddai (Hebrew: אֵל שַׁדַּי, romanized: ʾĒl Šadday; IPA: [el ʃadːaj]) or just Shaddai is one of the names of the God of Israel. El Shaddai is conventionally translated into English as God Almighty. (Deus Omnipotens in Latin, Arabic: الله عز وجل, romanized: ʾAllāh ʿazza wajal)

This article is about the name of the Judaic god. For other uses, see El Shaddai (disambiguation).
"God Almighty" redirects here. For other uses, see God Almighty (disambiguation).

The translation of El as "God" in the Ugaritic and the Canaanite languages is straightforward. Shaddai may come from shad שד meaning mammary; shaddai שדי is a dual grammatical number shaddayim שדיים is the typical modern (grammatically plural) hebrew word for human breasts. The Deir Alla inscriptions contain shaddayin as well as elohin rather than elohim. Scholars translate this as "shadday-gods," taken to mean unspecified fertility, mountain or wilderness gods. Discomfort over this is sometimes interpreted as controversy, leaving room for other suggestions, like a relation to the Destroyer aspect of God mentioned et alia during the Egypt affair from shaddad שדד, though such an etymology appears less direct, or even "fanciful and without support."

The form of the phrase "El Shaddai" fits the pattern of the divine names in the Ancient Near East, exactly as is the case with names like ʾĒl ʿOlām, ʾĒl ʿElyon and ʾĒl Bēṯ-ʾĒl. As such, El Shaddai can convey several different semantic relations between the two words, among them: the deity of a place called Shaddai, a deity possessing the quality of shaddai and a deity who is also known by the name Shaddai.

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