El Shaddai

El Shaddai (אֵל שַׁדַּי) is the name by which God identifies himself to the patriarchs (Genesis 17:1; 28:3; 35:11; 48:3; Exodus 6:3). The first element, El, is a generic Northwest Semitic word for 'God'. The second, Shaddai, is contested: the Greek Septuagint usually renders it pantokratōr ('almighty'), giving us the traditional English 'God Almighty'. Modern scholarship has proposed alternatives — 'God of the mountain' (from Akkadian shadu), 'God of the breast' (life-giver, from shad), or 'God of the open plain'. In Exodus 6:3 God tells Moses that he appeared to the patriarchs as El Shaddai but did not make himself known to them by the name YHWH — drawing a deliberate line between the patriarchal and the Mosaic revelations. The name reappears in Job, which is set in patriarchal-era idiom, where it occurs more than thirty times.