El Shaddai
El Shaddai or just Shaddai is one of the God in Judaism">god (word)">God in Judaism. El Shaddai is conventionally translated into English as God Almighty, as Deus Omnipotens in Latin, and in.
El means "God" in the Ugaritic and the Canaanite languages. The literal meaning of Shaddai, however, is the subject of debate. Some scholars have argued that it came from Akkadian shadû. The Deir Alla Inscription contains shaddayin as well as elohin rather than elohim. Francesca Stavrakopoulou suggested translating this as "shadday-gods," taken to mean unspecified fertility, mountain or wilderness gods.
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. Other deities are attested in various cultures. One is Ammonite Šd-Yrḥ.
Occurrence
Third in frequency among divine names, the name Shaddai appears 48 times in the Bible, seven times as El Shaddai.The first occurrence of the name comes in, "When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, 'I am El Shaddai; walk before me, and be blameless,' Similarly, in God says to Jacob, "I am El Shaddai: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins." According to Shaddai was the name by which God was known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
In the vision of Balaam recorded in the Book of Numbers 24:4 and 16, the vision comes from Shaddai, who is also referred to as El and Elyon. In the fragmentary inscriptions at Deir Alla, shaddayin appear, perhaps lesser figurations of Shaddai. These have been tentatively identified with the šēdim "demons" of Deuteronomy 32:17 and Psalm 106: 37–38, who are Canaanite deities.
The name Shaddai is often used in parallel to El later in the Book of Job, once thought to be one of the oldest books of the Bible, though now more commonly dated to a later period.
The Septuagint often translates Shaddai or El Shaddai just as "God" or "my God", and in at least one passage it is transliterated. In other places it appears as "Almighty", and this word features in other translations as well, such as the 1611 King James Version.
Etymology
Shaddai related to wilderness or mountains
According to Ernst Knauf, El Shaddai means "God of the Wilderness" and originally would not have had a doubled d. He argues that it is a loanword from Israelian Hebrew, where the word had a sh sound, into Judean Hebrew and hence, Biblical Hebrew, where it would have been śaday with the sound śin. In this theory, the word is related to the word śadé "the field", the area of hunting. He points out that the name is found in Thamudic inscriptions, in a personal name Śaday ʾammī used in Egypt from the Late Bronze Age until Achaemenid times, and even in the Punic language name ʿbdšd "Servant of Shadé or Shada".Another theory is that Shaddai is a derivation of a Semitic root that appears in the Akkadian language shadû and shaddāʾû or shaddûʾa "mountain-dweller", one of the names of Amurru. 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 Empire. However, the doubling in Hebrew might possibly be secondary. According to this theory, God is seen as inhabiting a holy mountain, a concept not unknown in ancient West Asian religion, and also evident in the Syriac Christianity writings of Ephrem the Syrian, who places the Garden of Eden on an inaccessible mountaintop.
The term El Shaddai may mean "god of the mountains", referring to the Mesopotamian religion|Mesopotamian] divine mountain. This could also refer to the Israelite camp's stay at biblical Mount Sinai where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. According to Stephen L. Harris, the term was "one of the patriarchal names for the Mesopotamian tribal god". In Exodus 6:3, El Shaddai is identified explicitly with the God of Abraham and with Yahweh. The term El Shaddai appears chiefly in Genesis, only with a fertility association.
Shaddai meaning destroyer
The root word shadad means to plunder, overpower, or make desolate. This would give Shaddai the meaning of "destroyer", representing one of the aspects of God, and in this context it is essentially an epithet. The meaning may go back to an original sense which was "to be strong" as in the Arabic shadid "strong", although normally the Arabic letter pronounced sh corresponds to the Hebrew letter sin, not to shin. The termination ai, typically signifying the first person possessive plural, functions as a pluralis excellentiae like other titles for the Hebrew deity, Elohim and Adonai "my lords". The possessive quality of the termination had lost its sense and become the lexical form of both Shaddai and Adonai, similar to how the connotation of the French word Monsieur changed from "my lord" to being an honorific title. There are a couple of verses in the Bible where there seems to be word play with Shadday and this root meaning to destroy, but Knauf maintains that this is re-etymologization.Shaddai as a toponym
It has been speculated that the tell in Syria called Tell eth-Thadeyn was called Shaddai in the Amorite language. There was a Bronze-Age city in the region called Tuttul, which means "three breasts" in the Sumerian language.Shaddai meaning breasts
The Hebrew noun šād, šādayim, šōd means breast, breasts mother's breast.The Afrasian to pre-proto-Semitic source meant "to extend ". This led to soundalikes to the Hebrew in Ugaritic, Judaeo-, Syriac, and standard Aramaic, Harari, Jibbali, Soqotri, Mehri, and more. while means a plain in Canaanite but a mountain in Sumerian. The reconstructed common root in Semitic Etymological disctionary is "*ṯVdy- / *čVdy-".
Shaddai in Jewish tradition
God that said "enough"
A popular interpretation of the name Shaddai is that it is composed of the Hebrew relative particle she-, or, as in this case, as sha-. The noun containing the dagesh is the Hebrew word dai meaning "enough, sufficient, sufficiency". This is the same word used in the Passover Haggadah, Dayeinu, which means "It would have been enough for us." The song Dayeinu celebrates the various miracles God performed while liberating the Israelites from Egyptian servitude. The Talmud explains it this way, but says that Shaddai stands for Mi she'Amar Dai L'olamo – "He who said 'Enough' to His world." When he was forming the earth, he stopped the process at a certain point, withholding creation from reaching its full completion, and thus the name embodies God's power to stop creation. The passage appears in the tractate Hagigah 12a.There is early support for this interpretation, in that the Septuagint translates Shadday in several places as, the "Sufficient One".
Apotropaic usage of the name ''Shaddai''
The name Shaddai often appears on the devices such as amulets or dedicatory plaques. More importantly, however, it is associated with the traditional Jewish customs which could be understood as apotropaic: male circumcision, mezuzah, and tefillin. The connections of the first one with the name Shaddai are twofold: 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 the brit milah itself is the inscription of the part of the name on the body:
The Holy One, blessed be He, has put His name on them so they would enter the garden of Eden. And what is the name and the seal that He had put on them? It is Shaddai. shin He put in the nose, dalet – on the hand, whereas yod on the . Accordingly, He goes to , there is an angel in the garden of Eden who picks up every son of which is circumcised and brings him. And those who are not circumcised? Although there are two letters of the name Shaddai present on them, shin from the nose and dalet from the hand, the yod is. Therefore it hints at a demon, which brings him down to Gehenna.
Analogous is the case with mezuzah – a piece of parchment with two passages from the Book of Deuteronomy, curled up in a small encasement and affixed to a doorframe. At least since the Geonic times, the name Shaddai is often written on the back of the parchment containing the shema‘ and sometimes also on the casing itself. The name is traditionally interpreted as being an acronym of shomer daltot Yisrael or shomer dirot Yisrael. However, this notarikon itself has its source most probably in Zohar Va’ethanan where it explains the meaning of the word Shaddai and connects it to mezuzah.
The name Shadday can also be found on tefillin – a set of two black leather boxes strapped to head and arm during the prayers. The binding of particular knots of tefillin is supposed to resemble the shape of the letters: the leather strap of the tefillah shel rosh is knotted at the back of the head thus forming the letter dalet whereas the one that is passed through the tefillah shel yad forms a yod-shaped knot. In addition to this, the box itself is inscribed with the letter shin on two of its sides.
Biblical translations
The Septuagint translate Shaddai as "παντοκράτωρ", which means "ruler over everything", not "The Almighty". However, in the Greek of the Septuagint translation of Psalm 91:1, Shaddai is translated as "the God of heaven".The Latin translation of "παντοκράτωρ" in the Vulgate is "omnipotens", which literally translates as "Almighty" and this was later used in most modern English Bibles, including the popular New International Version and Good News Bible.
The translation team behind the New Jerusalem Bible, however, maintains that the meaning is uncertain, and that translating El Shaddai as "Almighty God" is inaccurate. The N.J.B. leaves it untranslated as Shaddai, and makes footnote suggestions that it should perhaps be understood as "God of the Mountain" from the Akkadian shadu, or "God of the open wastes" from the Hebrew sadeh and the secondary meaning of the Akkadian word.
The translation in the Concordant Old Testament is 'El Who-Suffices'.