El Shaddai - Shaddai As A Toponym

Shaddai As A Toponym

The term may mean "God of the mountains," referring to the Mesopotamian divine mountain. The term was one of the patriarchal names for the tribal god of the Mesopotamians. In Exodus 6:3, El Shaddai is identified explicitly with the God of Abraham and with YHWH. The term appears chiefly in the Torah. This could also refer to the Israelite camp's stay at Mount Sinai where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.

Shaddai was a late Bronze Age Amorite city on the banks of the Euphrates river, in northern Syria. The site of its ruin-mound is called Tel eth-Thadyen: "Thadyen" being the modern Arabic rendering of the original West Semitic "Shaddai." It has been conjectured that El Shaddai was therefore the "God of Shaddai" and associated in tradition with Abraham, and the inclusion of the Abrahamic stories into the Hebrew Bible may have brought the northern name with them (see Documentary hypothesis).

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