Perhaps the deity’s name is related to Shaddai, a late Bronze Age Amorite city on the banks of the Euphrates River (in what is now northern Syria). So to hear and understand the meaning of El Shaddai is to have one's faith bolstered and undergirded. The priestly writer seems to have elevated El Shaddai rather than call attention to the worship of the goddess. El Shaddai, as previously mentioned, is most often translated as "God Almighty.". A. The combination of El and Shaddai represents an androgynous way of thinking about God.
One of the objectives of the priestly source P was to assimilate into Yahweh all of the patriarchal gods, including the Canaanite El, hence the compound name El Shaddai.Prior to modern scholarship, Shaddai was believed to be derived from “to devastate.” However, Albright in his thorough investigation on the subject writes:“Unhappily for the plausibility of this view, the only known word from which it could be directly derived, is sod, ‘devastation,’ so that that it could at best mean only ‘belonging to devastation,’ or the like. El Shaddai is our All-Sufficient Sustainer. ), The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (Vol. Biale also notes that in Egyptian, shdi is a verb meaning “to suckle” which would make El Shaddai the God who suckles. I. 2, p. 938). The verse notifying Moses that Yahweh appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai (Exod. Every English Bible translates El Shaddai as The Almighty. We often speak of Him as The Almighty. Shaddai would then be a demythologization of El, the Canaanite father god and his consort Asherah. El Shaddai in the Septuagint: theou saddai - God Shaddai; pantokratôr (for Shaddai) - the Almighty Meaning and Derivation: El is another name that is translated as "God" and can be used in conjunction with other words to designate various aspects of God's character. Incidentally, Asherah is usually depicted with prominent breasts, which she holds up as if to provide the world nourishment.At the time of the writing of the books of Ezekiel, Ruth and Job, Shaddai had acquired the image of a storm and war god, the same symbolism used to describe Yahweh in the exilic and post-exilic period. However, the name is not found in the Bible as often as one might expect. He is the epitome of might and power. El Shaddai is the name of God which sets Him forth primarily as the strengthener and satisfier of His people. “Hence, it is possible that, just as El was assimilated to Yahweh, so Asherah was adopted into Priestly Yahwism by a surreptitious sex change: the Canaanite ‘wet nurse of the gods’ was reincarnated as El Shaddai, the God with breasts” (Biale, p.254). If El was the high God of Abraham—Elohim, the prototype of Yahveh—Asherah was his wife, and there are archaeological indications that she was perceived as such before she was in effect "divorced" in the context of emerging Judaism of the 7th century BCE. "El" (Father of Heaven / Saturn) and his major son: "Hadad" (Father of Earth / Jupiter), are symbolized both by the bull, and both wear bull horns on their headdresses.In Canaanite mythology, El builds a desert sanctuary with his children and his two wives, leading to speculation,In the episode of the "Palace of Ba‘al", the god Ba‘al Hadad invites the "seventy sons of Athirat" to a feast in his new palace. 1. The adjectival formation in question is not Hebrew at all…so the difficulty becomes still greater” (p.181).Other scholars suggested Shaddai was derived from the Arabic,Modern scholarship identifies Shaddai with the Akkadian word,Albright suggests, along with other scholars, that Shaddai is derived more directly from the Hebrew word.Chronologically El Shaddai appears in the texts after the earlier usage of the plural gods Elohim and before the single god Yahweh. But to each of the other gods he gave two wings upon the shoulders, as meaning that they accompanied Cronus in his flight.