Rabbinic Judaism considers seven names of God in Judaism so holy that, once written, they should not be erased: YHWH, El ("God"), Eloah ("God"), Elohim ("God"), Shaddai (“Almighty"), Ehyeh, and Tzevaot. Other names are considered mere epithets or titles reflecting different aspects of God, but Khumra sometimes dictates special care such as the writing of "G-d" instead of "God" in English or saying Ṭēt-Vav instead of Yōd-Hē for the number fifteen in Hebrew.
Yahweh was the national god of the kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah, with origins reaching at least to the early Iron Age and apparently to the Late Bronze Age. In the oldest biblical literature he is a storm-and-warrior deity who leads the heavenly army against Israel's enemies; at that time the Israelites worshipped him alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal, but in later centuries El and Yahweh became conflated and El-linked epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone, and other gods and goddesses such as Baal and Asherah were absorbed into the Yahwistic religion.
Baal, properly Baʽal, was a title and honorific meaning "owner", "lord" in the Northwest Semitic languages spoken in the Levant during antiquity. From its use among people, it came to be applied to gods. Scholars previously associated the theonym with solar cults and with a variety of unrelated patron deities, but inscriptions have shown that the name Baʿal was particularly associated with the storm and fertility god Hadad and his local manifestations.
ʼĒl is a Northwest Semitic word meaning "god" or "deity", or referring to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ʼila, represents the predicate form in Old Akkadian and in Amorite. The word is derived from the Proto-Semitic archaic biliteral ʼ‑l, meaning "god".
Jah or Yah is a short form of Hebrew: יהוה (YHWH), the four letters that form the tetragrammaton, the personal name of God which the ancient Israelites used. The conventional Christian English pronunciation of Jah is, even though the letter J here transliterates the palatal approximant. The spelling Yah is designed to make the pronunciation explicit in an English-language context, especially for Christians who may not use Hebrew regularly during prayer and study.
Hadad, Adad, Haddad or Iškur (Sumerian) was the storm and rain god in the Canaanite and ancient Mesopotamian religions. He was attested in Ebla as "Hadda" in c. 2500 BCE. From the Levant, Hadad was introduced to Mesopotamia by the Amorites, where he became known as the Akkadian (Assyrian-Babylonian) god Adad. Adad and Iškur are usually written with the logogram 𒀭𒅎dIM—the same symbol used for the Hurrian god Teshub. Hadad was also called Pidar, Rapiu, Baal-Zephon, or often simply Baʿal (Lord), but this title was also used for other gods. The bull was the symbolic animal of Hadad. He appeared bearded, often holding a club and thunderbolt while wearing a bull-horned headdress. Hadad was equated with the Greek god Zeus; the Roman god Jupiter, as Jupiter Dolichenus; the Indo-European Nasite Hittite storm-god Teshub; the Egyptian god Amun.
In the Hebrew Bible, elohim usually refers to a single deity, particularly the God of Israel. At other times it refers to deities in the plural.
There are various names of God, many of which enumerate the various qualities of a Supreme Being. The English word "God" is used by multiple religions as a noun or name to refer to different deities, or specifically to the Supreme Being, as denoted in English by the capitalized and uncapitalized terms "God" and "god". Ancient cognate equivalents for the biblical Hebrew Elohim, one of the most common names of God in the Bible, include proto-Semitic El, biblical Aramaic Elah, and Arabic 'ilah. The personal or proper name for God in many of these languages may either be distinguished from such attributes, or homonymic. For example, in Judaism the tetragrammaton is sometimes related to the ancient Hebrew ehyeh. In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh, the personal name of God, is revealed directly to Moses. Correlation between various theories and interpretation of the name of "the one God", used to signify a monotheistic or ultimate Supreme Being from which all other divine attributes derive, has been a subject of ecumenical discourse between Eastern and Western scholars for over two centuries. In Christian theology the word must be a personal and a proper name of God; hence it cannot be dismissed as mere metaphor. On the other hand, the names of God in a different tradition are sometimes referred to by symbols. The question whether divine names used by different religions are equivalent has been raised and analyzed.
Hallelujah is an interjection. It is a transliteration of the Hebrew phrase הַלְלוּ יָהּ, which is composed of two elements: הַלְלוּ and יָהּ . The term is used 24 times in the Hebrew Bible, twice in deuterocanonical books, and four times in the Christian Book of Revelation.
Anat, Anatu, classically Anath is a major northwest Semitic goddess. Her attributes vary widely among different cultures and over time, and even within particular myths. She likely heavily influenced the character of the Greek goddess Athena.
Elyon is an epithet of the God of the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible. ʾĒl ʿElyōn is usually rendered in English as "God Most High", and similarly in the Septuagint as ὁ Θεός ὁ ὕψιστος.
Theophory is the practice of embedding the name of a god or a deity in, usually, a proper name. Much Hebrew theophory occurs in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. The most prominent theophory involves names referring to:
Ashima is an ancient Semitic goddess.
Canaanite religion refers to the group of ancient Semitic religions practiced by the Canaanites living in the ancient Levant from at least the early Bronze Age through the first centuries of the Common Era.
Yahshua is a proposed transliteration of the original Hebrew name of Jesus, who is considered by Christians and Messianic Jews to be the Hebrew Messiah. The literal etymological meaning of the name Yəhôšuaʿ has been various proposed as Yahweh saves, (is) salvation, (is) a saving-cry, (is) a cry-for-saving, (is) a cry-for-help, (is) my help.
Qos was the national god of the Edomites. He was the Idumean rival of Yahweh, and structurally parallel to him. Thus ‘Benqos’ parallels the Hebrew ‘Beniyahu’. The name occurs only once in the Old Testament in the Book of Ezra as an element in a personal name, Barqos, referring to the 'father' of a family or clan of perhaps Edomite/Idumaean nĕtînîm or temple helpers returning from the Babylonian exile. The noun frequently appears combined with names on documents recovered from excavations in Elephantine, where a mixed population of Arabs, Jews and Idumeans lived under the protection of a Persian-Mesopotamian garrison.
The Tetragrammaton or Tetragram is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה, the name of the biblical god of Israel. The four letters, read from right to left, are yodh, he, waw, and he. While there is no consensus about the structure and etymology of the name, the form Yahweh is now accepted almost universally.
A weather god, also frequently known as a storm god, is a deity in mythology associated with weather phenomena such as thunder, lightning, rain, wind, storms, tornados, and hurricanes. Should they only be in charge of one feature of a storm, they will be called after that attribute, such as a rain god or a lightning/thunder god. This singular attribute might then be emphasized more than the generic, all-encompassing term "storm god", though with thunder/lightning gods, the two terms seem interchangeable. They feature commonly in polytheistic religions.
Sacred Name Bibles are Bible translations that consistently use Hebraic forms of the God of Israel's personal name, instead of its English language translation, in both the Old and New Testaments. Some Bible versions, such as the Jerusalem Bible, employ the name Yahweh, a transliteration of Hebrew YHWH, in the English text of the Old Testament, where traditional English versions have LORD.
Adon literally means "lord." Adon has an uncertain etymology, although it is generally believed to be derived from the Ugaritic ad, “father.”
