Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments

I Appeared as El Shadday : Tracing the Origins of the God of Israel

Aleksander Krogevoll offers the first extensive study on El Shadday. This includes the most thorough review of all etymologies proposed for Shadday and the most extensive examination on the use and meaning of Shadday in the Hebrew Bible. The author challenges the views that Shadday was unique to the Priestly source or that Priestly source invented the epithet. He supports the etymology of Shaddai being the Akkadian šadû, "mountain." By tracing the epithet šadû from Akkadian where it was attached to Enlil and Dagan to the Ugaritic El, Krogevoll presents a new hypothesis for how Shadday was introduced into Hebrew. This work is the first book-length study on the equation between El Shadday and Yahweh. Other scholars have proposed that their shared mountain motifs played a part in the equation, but this work is the first study to examine the equation through the lens of the shared mountain motifs at length.