The Names of God in the Old Testament 5 min read Lesson 3 of 12

The name the patriarchs knew, what it was said over, and why Almighty is a translation of a guess

El Shaddai: The Almighty Nobody Can Translate

God Almighty is the name Abraham heard at ninety-nine, the name Jacob blessed his sons under, the name Naomi accused in her grief and Job argued with for thirty chapters. Every English Bible renders it Almighty, and nobody knows what the Hebrew word means. That is not a failure of scholarship. It is a fact about the word, and a reader should hold the name with that fact in hand.

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Lesson 3 of 12 · The patriarchs’ name

El Shaddai is the name under which God spoke to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and nearly every time it is said in Genesis it is said over a promise of children and land to a man who has neither. Exodus 6 calls it the name the patriarchs knew, before Yahweh was given. What Shaddai means, no one now can say with confidence: the Greek translators rendered it "all-ruler," the Latin "omnipotent," and English "Almighty," and every one of those is a translation of a guess. Read the name as the Bible uses it rather than as the dictionaries define it, and it means: the God who promises the impossible to the old, and keeps it.

At ninety-nine

The name enters the Bible when Abram is ninety-nine and the promise is thirteen years stale.

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, Yahweh appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless. — Genesis 17:1 · WEB

Read the comment on Walk before me: the covenant in the flesh

I am El Shaddai; walk before me and be blameless. What follows is the covenant of the changed name, Abram to Abraham, and the promise of a son by a wife of ninety. The name is introduced at the moment the promise looks most absurd, and that is its pattern in Genesis: it is the name of the God who blesses the barren.

שַׁדַּי Shadday H7706

from שָׁדַד; the Almighty; Almighty.

The lexicon derives it from shadad, to destroy or overpower, and gives "the Almighty" — and that derivation is one guess among several. Others connect it with an Akkadian word for mountain (the God of the mountain), with the Hebrew word for breast (the God who nourishes, said over promises of fruitfulness), or with a word for field. The Greek Old Testament, unsure, usually rendered it pantokrator, all-ruler, and the Latin followed with omnipotens; English Almighty descends from those. It occurs forty-eight times, thirty-one of them in Job, where it is the name Job’s friends and Job himself use for the God they are arguing about.

The blessing name

In Genesis the name is spoken almost only in blessings, and the blessings are about fruitfulness.

“May God Almighty bless you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, that you may be a company of peoples,” Genesis 28:3 · WEB
Isaac sends Jacob away: may El Shaddai bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you. A father’s blessing on a son with nothing.
“God said to him, “I am God Almighty. Be fruitful and multiply. A nation and a company of nations will be from you, and kings will come out of your body.” Genesis 35:11 · WEB
God to Jacob at Bethel: I am El Shaddai; be fruitful and multiply. The name and the command of Eden together.
“even by the God of your father, who will help you, by the Almighty, who will bless you, with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies below, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb.” Genesis 49:25 · WEB
Jacob blessing Joseph: by El Shaddai, who will bless you with blessings of the breasts and of the womb. The name beside the words some scholars think it comes from.
“I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty; but by my name Yahweh I was not known to them.” Exodus 6:3 · WEB
I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai: the name summed up as the patriarchs’ own, before the name of the last lesson was given.

The name in grief

Outside Genesis the name belongs to people arguing with God, and the first of them is a widow.

She said to them, “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and Yahweh has brought me home again empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since Yahweh has testified against me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?” — Ruth 1:20–21 · WEB

Read the comment on Call Me Mara

Do not call me Naomi, call me Mara, for Shaddai has dealt very bitterly with me. Naomi uses the patriarchs’ blessing name to say she has been cursed, and the book does not rebuke her for it; it goes on to give her a grandson through the foreign daughter-in-law standing beside her, which is exactly what the name was said over in Genesis. Job uses the name thirty-one times for the same reason, and with the same result: it is the name you use when the God who promised fruitfulness seems to have withdrawn it, and the book that uses it most ends with the promise kept.

What the word does not tell you

Here the honest difficulty, stated rather than smoothed. Because the meaning is lost, every English rendering asserts something the Hebrew may not. Almighty asserts power, and Genesis never uses the name about power; it uses it about promise. A reader who hears "the Almighty" in Job hears a God whose defining attribute is force, which is Job’s friends’ theology and not the book’s. This lesson does not offer a better translation, because there is not one to offer. It suggests reading the name by its company: in Genesis it stands beside bless, fruitful and multiply, and that is a better definition than any etymology.

What the name asks

It asks for the patriarchs’ kind of faith: to be blessed under a name whose meaning you cannot parse, over a promise you cannot see kept, and to walk before it and be blameless anyway. Abraham did not know what Shaddai meant either. He knew what it said.