names of God in Judaism

Judaism considers some names of God so holy that, once written, they should not be erased: YHWH, Adonai, El ("God"), Elohim ("God," a plural noun), Shaddai ("Almighty"), and Tzevaot (" fHosts"); some also include Ehyeh ("I Will Be").This is the formulation of Joseph Karo (SA YD 276:9). Maimonides (MT Yesodei haTorah 6:2), Jacob b. Asher (AT YD 276), and Isaac Alfasi (HK Menachot 3b) also included Ehyeh, as do many later authorities, including Moses Isserles (SA YD 276:9). The original lists are found in y. Megillah 1:9 and b. Shavuot 35a, with some MSS agreeing with each authority. Maimonides and followers give the number of names as seven; however, manuscript inconsistency makes it difficult to judge which are included. Early authorities considered other Hebrew names mere epithets or descriptions of God and wrote that they and names in other languages may be written and erased freely. However, some moderns advise special care even in these cases, and many Orthodox Jews have adopted the chumras of writing "G-d" instead of "God" in English or saying Ṭēt- Vav (,  "9-6") instead of Yōd- Hē (,  "10-5" but also " Jah") for the number fifteen or Ṭēt-Zayin (,  "9-7") instead of Yōd-Vav (,  "10-6") for the number sixteen in Hebrew.

Seven names of God

The names of God that, once written, cannot be erased because of their holiness are the Tetragrammaton, Adonai, El, Elohim, Shaddai, Tzevaot; some also include Ehyeh ("I Will Be"). In addition, the name Jah—because it forms part of the Tetragrammaton—is similarly protected. Rabbi Jose considered "Tzevaot" a common name and Rabbi Ishmael considered "Elohim" to be one. All other names, such as "Merciful", "Gracious" and "Faithful", merely represent attributes that are also common to human beings.

YHWH

Also abbreviated Jah, the most common name of God in the Hebrew Bible is the Tetragrammaton, , that is usually transcribed as YHWH. Hebrew script is an abjad, so that the letters in the name are normally consonants, usually expanded as ''Yahweh'' in English.

Modern Jewish culture judges it forbidden to pronounce this name. In prayers it is replaced by the word ''Adonai'' ("My Lord"), and in discussion by ''HaShem'' ("The Name"). Nothing in the Torah explicitly prohibits speaking the name and the Book of Ruth shows it was being pronounced as late as the 5th century BCE. Mark Sameth argues that only a pseudo name was pronounced, the four letters YHWH being a cryptogram which the priests of ancient Israel read in reverse as , "heshe", signifying a dual-gendered deity, as earlier theorized by Guillaume Postel (16th century) and Michelangelo Lanci (19th century). It had ceased to be spoken aloud by at least the 3rd century BCE, during Second Temple Judaism. The Talmud relates, perhaps anecdotally, this began with the death of Simeon the Just. Vowel points began to be added to the Hebrew text only in the early medieval period. The Masoretic Text adds to the Tetragrammaton the vowel points of Adonai or Elohim (depending on the context), indicating that these are the words to be pronounced in place of the Tetragrammaton (see Qere and Ketiv), as shown also by the subtle pronunciation changes when combined with a preposition or a conjunction.

The Tetragrammaton appears in Genesis and occurs 6,828 times in total in the Stuttgart edition of the Masoretic Text. It is thought to be an archaic third-person singular of the imperfective aspect of the verb "to be" (i.e., " eis/was/will be"). This agrees with the passage in Exodus where God names himself as " I Will Be What I Will Be" using the first-person singular imperfective aspect, open to interpretation as present tense ("I am what I am"), future ("I shall be what I shall be"), or imperfect ("I used to be what I used to be").

Rabbinical Judaism teaches that the name is forbidden to all except the High Priest, who should only speak it in the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur. He then pronounces the name "just as it is written." As each blessing was made, the people in the courtyard were to prostrate themselves completely as they heard it spoken aloud. As the Temple has not been rebuilt since its destruction in 70, most modern Jews never pronounce YHWH but instead read Adonai ("My Lord") during prayer and while reading the Torah and as HaShem ("The Name") at other times. Similarly, the Vulgate used ("The Lord") and most English translations of the Bible write "the " for YHWH and "the God", "the Lord " or "the Sovereign " for Adonai YHWH instead of transcribing the name. The Septuagint may have originally used the Hebrew letters themselves amid its Greek text, but there is no scholarly consensus on this point. All surviving Christian-era manuscripts use (, "Lord") or very occasionally (, "God") to translate the many thousand occurrences of the Name. However, given the great preponderance of the anarthrous solution for translating YHWH in the Septuagint and some disambiguation efforts by Christian-era copyists involving Kyrios (see especially scribal activity in Acts), should probably not be considered historically as a serious early contender substitute for the divine Name.

Adonai

Adonai ( ''ʾăḏōnāy'',  "My Lords," a plural noun) is the possessive form of ("Lord"), along with the first-person singular pronoun enclitic. As with Elohim, Adonai's grammatical form is usually explained as a plural of majesty. In the Hebrew Bible, it is nearly always used to refer to God (approximately 450 occurrences). As pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton came to be avoided in the Hellenistic period, Jews may have begun to drop the Tetragrammaton when presented alongside Adonai and subsequently expand it to cover for the Tetragrammaton in the forms of spoken prayer and written scripture. Owing to the expansion of (the idea of "building a fence around the Torah"), the word "Adonai" itself has come to be too holy to say for Orthodox Jews outside of prayer, leading to its replacement by HaShem ("The Name").

The singular forms and ("my lord") are used in the Hebrew Bible as royal titles, as in the First Book of Samuel, and for distinguished persons. The Phoenicians used it as a title of Tammuz, the origin of the Greek Adonis. It is also used very occasionally in Hebrew texts to refer to God (e.g. Psalm 136:3.)

Deuteronomy 10:17 has the proper name alongside the superlative constructions "God of gods" (, literally, "the gods of gods") and "Lord of lords" (, "the lords of lords": ; KJV: "For the your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords").

The final syllable of Adonai uses the vowel , rather than which would be expected from the Hebrew for "my lord(s)". Professor Yoel Elitzur explains this as a normal transformation when a Hebrew word becomes a name, giving as other examples Nathan, Yitzchak, and Yigal.

As Adonai became the most common reverent substitute for the Tetragrammaton, it too became considered un-erasable due to its holiness. As such, most prayer books avoid spelling out the word Adonai, and instead write two () in its place.

El

El appears in Ugaritic, Phoenician and other 2nd and 1st millennium BCE texts both as generic "god" and as the head of the divine pantheon. In the Hebrew Bible, El (, ) appears very occasionally alone (e.g. Genesis 33:20, , "Mighty God of Israel", and Genesis 46:3, , "El the God of thy father"), but usually with some epithet or attribute attached (e.g. , "Most High El", , "El of ", "Everlasting El", , "Living El", "El my Shepherd", and "El of Strength"), in which cases it can be understood as the generic "god". In theophoric names such as Gabriel ("Strength of God"), Michael ("Who is like God?"), Raphael ("God's medicine"), Ariel ("God's lion"), Daniel ("God's Judgment"), Israel ("one who has struggled with God"), Immanuel ("God is with us"), and Ishmael ("God hears"/"God listens") it is usually interpreted and translated as "God", but it is not clear whether these "el"s refer to the deity in general or to the god El in particular.

Elohim

A common name of God in the Hebrew Bible is Elohim (, ), the plural of (). When Elohim refers to God in the Hebrew Bible, singular verbs are used. The word is identical to ''elohim'' meaning gods or magistrates, and is cognate to the found in Ugaritic, where it is used for the pantheon of Canaanite gods, the children of El and conventionally vocalized as "Elohim" although the original Ugaritic vowels are unknown. When the Hebrew Bible uses not in reference to God, it is plural (for example, Exodus 20:2). There are a few other such uses in Hebrew, for example '' Behemoth''. In Modern Hebrew, the singular word ("owner") looks plural, but likewise takes a singular verb.

A number of scholars have traced the etymology to the Semitic root ''*yl'', "to be first, powerful", despite some difficulties with this view. ''Elohim'' is thus the plural construct "powers". Hebrew grammar allows for this form to mean "He is the Power (singular) over powers (plural)", just as the word means "owner" (see above). "He is lord (singular) even over any of those things that he owns that are lordly (plural)."

Theologians who dispute this claim cite the hypothesis that plurals of majesty came about in more modern times. Richard Toporoski, a classics scholar, asserts that plurals of majesty first appeared in the reign of Diocletian (CE 284–305). Indeed, Gesenius states in his book ''Hebrew Grammar'' the following:

The Jewish grammarians call such plurals ... ''plur. virium'' or ''virtutum''; later grammarians call them ''plur. excellentiae'', ''magnitudinis'', or ''plur. maiestaticus''.

This last name may have been suggested by the ''we'' used by kings when speaking of themselves (compare 1 Maccabees 10:19 and 11:31); and the plural used by God in Genesis 1:26 and 11:7; Isaiah 6:8 has been incorrectly explained in this way. It is, however, either ''communicative'' (including the attendant angels: so at all events in Isaiah 6:8 and Genesis 3:22), or according to others, an indication of ''the fullness of power and might'' implied. It is best explained as a plural of ''self-deliberation''. The use of the plural as a form of respectful address is quite foreign to Hebrew.

Mark S. Smith has cited the use of plural as possible evidence to suggest an evolution in the formation of early Jewish conceptions of monotheism, wherein references to "the gods" (plural) in earlier accounts of verbal tradition became either interpreted as multiple aspects of a single monotheistic God at the time of writing, or subsumed under a form of monolatry, wherein the god(s) of a certain city would be accepted after the fact as a reference to the God of Israel and the plural deliberately dropped.

The plural form ending in can also be understood as denoting abstraction, as in the Hebrew words ("life") or ("virginity"). If understood this way, means "divinity" or "deity". The word is similarly syntactically singular when used as a name but syntactically plural otherwise.

In many of the passages in which occurs in the Bible, it refers to non-Israelite deities, or in some instances to powerful men or judges, and even angels (Exodus 21:6, Psalms 8:5) as a simple plural in those instances.

Shaddai

El Shaddai (, , ) is one of the names of God in Judaism, with its etymology coming from the influence of the Ugaritic religion on modern Judaism. El Shaddai is conventionally translated as "God Almighty". While the translation of ''El'' as "god" in Ugaritic/ Canaanite languages is straightforward, the literal meaning of ''Shaddai'' is the subject of debate.

Tzevaot

Tzevaot, Tsebaoth or Sabaoth (, , ,  "Armies"), usually translated "Hosts", appears in reference to armies or armed hosts of men but is not used as a divine epithet in the Torah, Joshua, or Judges. Starting in the Books of Samuel, the term "Lord of Hosts" appears hundreds of times throughout the Prophetic books, in Psalms, and in Chronicles.

The Hebrew word was also absorbed in Ancient Greek (, ) and Latin (, with no declension). Tertullian and other patristics used it with the meaning of "Army of angels of God".

Ehyeh

() is the first of three responses given to Moses when he asks for God's name in the Book of Exodus. The King James Version of the Bible translates the Hebrew as "I Am that I Am" and uses it as a proper name for God.
The word is the first-person singular imperfect form of , "to be". Biblical Hebrew does not distinguish between grammatical tenses. It has instead an aspectual system in which the imperfect denotes any actions that are not yet completed, Accordingly, can be rendered in English not only as "I am that I am" but also as "I will be what I will be" or "I will be who I will be", or "I shall prove to be whatsoever I shall prove to be" or even "I will be because I will be". Other renderings include: Leeser, "I Will Be that I Will Be"; Rotherham, "I Will Become whatsoever I please", Greek, (), "I am The Being" in the Septuagint, and Philo, and Revelation or, "I am The Existing One"; Latin, , "I am Who I am."

The word is a relative pronoun whose meaning depends on the immediate context, so that "that", "who", "which", or "where" are all possible translations of that word.Seidner, 4.

Other names and titles

Baal

Baal (),''Oxford English Dictionary'' (1885),
Baal, ''n.''
properly Baʿal, meant "owner" and, by extension, "lord", "master", and "husband" in Hebrew and the other Northwest Semitic languages. In some early contexts and theophoric names, it and Baali (; "My Lord") were treated as synonyms of Adon and Adonai. After the time of Solomon and particularly after Jezebel's attempt to promote the worship of the Lord of Tyre Melqart, however, the name became particularly associated with the Canaanite storm god Baʿal Haddu and was gradually avoided as a title for Yahweh. Several names that included it were rewritten as ("shame"). The prophet Hosea in particular reproached the Israelites for continuing to use the term:

Elah

Elah (; arc, ܐܠܗ; pl. "Elim or Elohim") is the Aramaic word for God and the absolute singular form of , . The origin of the word is from Proto-Semitic ''ʔil'' and is thus cognate to the Hebrew, Arabic, Akkadian, and other Semitic languages' words for god. Elah is found in the Tanakh

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