El Shadai

אל שדי

Genesis 17:1 gives this as the name of Av-Ram's god in the covenant made after the expulsion of Hagar and Yishma-El.

Genesis 28:3 gives him as the god in whose name Yitschak blessed Ya'akov before sending him off to Padan Aram to find a wife.

Genesis 35:11: the god to whom Ya'akov dedicated Beit-El after himself being renamed Yisra-El (though he also dedicated an altar at Shechem to El Elohey Yisra-El).

Genesis 49:25: the god in whose name Ya'akov gives the twelve tribes their blessings.

Exodus 6:3: the most important of all the references, the god of the Midyanite volcano speaking to Mosheh: "And I appeared to Av-Raham, to Yitschak, and to Ya'akov, by the name of El Shadai; but by the name YHVH I was not known to them."

The name is frequent in Iyov (The Book of Job), and also appears in Rut (The Book of Ruth) 1:20 ff.

Clearly this is a very specific member of the Kena'ani (Canaanite) pantheon, and from the blessings and covenants associated with him it is not difficult to work out his role. Theologians who do not balk from this subject (and most do, for obvious reasons) choose to translate Shadai as "my breast", and rightly, since that is indeed one of the meanings of SHAD (שד). A convenient evasion nonetheless, though there is indeed a multi-breasted deity in the Yisra-Eli pantheon - see Dinah! This however is a male god, and generally male gods do not have mutliple lactating breasts.

SHED (שד) is also used to mean an idol, and mostly appears in the plural as a synonym for Ba'alim (cf Deuteronomy 32:17 where it is SHEDIM - שֵּׁדִים). But that too is a generalisation, and given that "idol" is a judgmental term, we can presume it meant something more specific before the Redactor bowdlerised it. What kind of an idol?

SHOD (שד) is used to express violence in nature, particularly storms and tempests; e.g. Job 5:22, Isaiah repeatedly - 51:19; 59:7, but especially 13:6 where "Ke shod mi shadai yavo" (כשד משדי יבוא) is normally rendered as "like a tempest shall it come down from the almighty". Given that Shed is used as a synonym for Ba'al, it is not perhaps surprising to recall that the Kena'ani god of the violent and destructive storm was - Ba'al himself, though originally Ba'al Hadad, and sometimes regarded as the son of Dagon. Ba'al was the most powerful – i.e. the almighty - of the Kena'ani pantheon, and it is the chief god's prerogative to make treaties (covenants) and hand out blessings. In this name more than any other, therefore, we can identify the god of the Yisra-Eli patriarchs with (but not necessarily as) Ba'al.

Note also that the sea-god in both Kena'an (Yam) and the Phoenician-Greek world (Poseidon) was always depicted holding a trident, whose forks give the letter Sheen (ש), and in modern Judaism El Shadai is always depicted by that initial letter, most commonly on the face of the mezuzah which hangs on the lintel of every Jewish door (see the illustration at the top of the page), and which is represented in the fingering employed both during ritual bathing and at the recital of the Yevarechecha.

This leaves open two questions. Why is he called El Shadai, since El was the father of Ba'al? Probably because El was used as a general name for a god, as well as being the specific name of the father-god. And the second question: if as elsewhere stated, Av-Raham and Sarah were really El and Asherah by other names, and if Ba'al was either El's or Dagon's son, then can we identify Ba'al with Yitschak, Av-Raham and Sarah's son? It is a logical question. The answer however is no, because Yitschak was not in fact Av-Raham and Sarah's son at all, despite the tales told in the Tanach. Which is to say, Av-Raham had many sons, to whom the Yitschak stories may very well belong. But Yitschak himself is an entirely different deity, and the patriarchal family tree is a late artifice of the Redactor as part of the goal of creating a unified national history.

However, there is still one more matter to think through. El Shadai is identified with certain places; but we have already found priestesses and/or goddesses at those shrines. Can we ascertain anything more from the links between them? I shall return to this on a future occasion, but you may well find sufficient in the notes to those locations not to require more here - see the several references at the top of the page.

And finally, there is another possible definition that I have not yet included: the possibility that El Shadai is intended metaphorically, breasts being a common metaphor for mountains. See my notes to Anu, the Assyrian/Babylonian equivalent of Elas king of the heavens, but simply note that th home of the deities in the Biblical epoch was mountaintops (Olympus, Valhalla, Chermon, Ararat, Tsi'on...), even though individually the sun-god and moon-goddess, the planets and stars, spent their office-hours in the heavens.

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