Magdlyn

Funny, thanks! :blush:

Of course, the universe is still expanding.

But really, yeah. That's a good example of the kind of lengths the rabbis will go to, to avoid thinking of their male warlord god as a breasted goddess.

No Robots

If you check the book I linked to, you would see that the author is linking Shaddai to the principle of finitude.

And of course, not everyone thinks that the universe is expanding: some of us think it may be infinite

Could we not be dealing here rather with the lengths that our over-feminized skeptics will go to find a teat?

spin

This etymology doesn't work. Firstly, )L ("El") is masculine. Secondly, $D means breast in Hebrew, but how does it relate to $DY? $DY is usually understood as derived from the verb $DD ("act violently towards"), which supplies a more likely trajectory for the word's etymology.

One finds the $DYYN referred to in an ancient inscription from Deir Alla in Jordan from no later than the 8th c. BCE, known as the "oracle of Balaam", a name known from several oracles at the end of Numbers. In this inscription the $DYYN are a group of gods who are El's council -- shades of Ps 82 --, so the term Shadday exists independently from El and the El-Shadday of Genesis. And the plural $DYYN (which looks Aramaic, but may be Canaanite) is certainly not derivable from $D ("breast"), which should be Heb: $DYM or Aram: $DYN -- the double YOD not allowing the etymology.


spin

Steviepinhead

I suspect we're getting a little out of dave's depth here.

But fascinating stuff, nonetheless.

Selah!

-Jay-

The mental gymnastics on display here are astounding. Truly of Olympic quality.

regards,

NinJay

Magdlyn

Did the Hebrews even have a word for goddess, tho? What was it? The idea of goddess worship was so abhorred, I would not be surprised to see one hidden within a masculine word.

Sorry, spin, I can't make sense of your notations~ I see dollar signs? I don't speak much Hebrew, but it would be more understandable to me if you used phonetics.


Certainly a god-name associated completely with fertility and nurturace would not be named "Violence" or "Destruction." That makes no sense.

-Jay-

Infinite doesn't preclude ongoing expansion. Brian Greene at Columbia University in New York discusses some possible scenarios for this in The Fabric of the Cosmos. Infinite is a complex concept, and a lot of what we tend to think about it oversimplifies it.

regards,

NinJay

spin

The Hebrew writers seemed to have allowed only the plural form to relate to a goddess, 1 Kgs 11:5, 33.

Goddesses were only later abhorred. The oak in the sanctuary where Joshua erected a pillar was sacred to Asherah. There are two Judean inscriptions from around 800 BCE which feature "Yahweh and his Asherah". Only later did what happened under every green tree become an abhorrence.

Ummm, I'm using a common representation of Hebrew letters used by scholars. Speaking as a linguist, there is no phonetics for transcribing Hebrew letters. The dollar sign is a SHIN, so $DY would be the Hebrew letters SHIN, DALET, YOD, which underlie the English representation "Shaddai".

To you maybe, but gods were often violent, often destroyers.


spin

Magdlyn

Ah. Thanks.

So, the Hebrew word used here is elohim? If so, and if elohim could be used as a title or word for a goddess, could not Elohim Shaddai been shortened to El Shaddai? After all, if they could change a guy's name from Baal to Shame...

Of course. I am referring to the time when the HB was edited and redacted and perhaps El Shaddai was (partially) replaced with YHWH in the Jacob's Ladder story. Josiah's time.

Right. I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, self-schooled. Still learning. Sorry to seem dense-- I have reread what you said about a group of "gods" named the Shadayyin (?), and I looked for refs online and found one here

http://books.google.com/books?id=7WA...Uafyt4uoPEbZU4

but I don't find that to be clear or conclusive. The link mentions a "mountain" meaning. But thanks for the info.

Why is it more likely if it has the double D and means violent? Why would Isaac send Jacob out on a long journey to find a wife with the blessings of a violent god on his head? Why would a god of destruction honor Sarai with a child in her old age?

Sure. El of Armies (God of hosts), for example. Kali, Shiva, Thor, Mars. But surely a god of destruction would not be one invoked for fertility. If Asherah was so popular at the time of the Kings, why couldn't another goddess have been popular 800ish yrs earlier, during a more nomadic, less civilized time?

spin

There is good evidence that the Baal/Bosheth change took place.

There was a high place just outside of Jerusalem at Malhah at the time (I think there's a shopping mall built over it now). There was nothing wrong with that during Josiah's time, despite what later literature says. It seems the literature doesn't really reflect what things were like.

It should be clear that the breast meaning is not in the picture. It doesn't fit the context. I pointed you to Ps 82 and its meeting of gods under El. That's the image at Deir Alla as well.

If I understand what you are referring to correctly, the letter is a YOD, not a DALET. $DYYN has a double YOD. My comment was about any connection with $D, "breast", the plural of which is $DYM (Joel 2:16). I see no way to account for the double YOD.

You are looking at the term based on its etymology. (What's the connection between that which we call an undertaker today and its etymology?) There is no necessity for Shaddai to mean what is indicated by its etymology.

Why shouldn't a powerful god be nice to a believer?

Asherah was probably popular earlier as well. She was around in Ugarit before that city was destroyed in the twelfth century BCE. So was El and Baal. Ugarit is a good reflection of the religious continuum.

Your problem is that you are trying to read your desires into a term that doesn't help you. "El-Shaddai" is male and Shaddai doesn't seem to have anything to do with breasts. Your position seems like wild conjecture to me. If it was someone's idea before you, blame them and beat a quick exit.


spin