THE NAMES OF GOD

NAMES OF GOD IN THE BIBLE: A DISPENSATIONAL APPROACH : PROF. M. M. NINAN
The very first verse in the Bible Genesis 1:! starts with:
In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth. The word Elohim is the plural of El which
is the generic word for God.
EL: God ("mighty, strong, prominent") is used 250 times in the OT It occurs 217 times in the Masoretic
text: 73 times in the Psalms and 55 times in the Book of Job. See Gen. 7:1, 28:3, 35:11; Nu. 23:22;
Josh. 3:10; 2 Sam. 22:31, 32; Neh. 1:5, 9:32; Isa. 9:6; Ezek. 10:5.
In the Levant as a whole, El or Il was the supreme God, the father of mankind and all creatures. The
word El was found at the top of a list of Gods as the Ancient of Gods or the Father of all Gods, in the
ruins of the Royal Library of the Ebla civilization, in the archaeological site of Tell Mardikh in Syria
dated to 2300 BC. He may have been a desert God at some point, as the myths say that he had two
wives and built a sanctuary with them and his new children in the desert. El had fathered many Gods.
It is a prefix to indicate the class of God. There are also places where 'El specifically refers to a
foreign God as in Psalms 44.20;81.9 (Hebrew 44.21;81.10), in Deuteronomy 32.12 and in Malachi
2.11. Thus in every culture the God has some form. El came from the nomadic culture and
essentially means God.
El appears in Ugaritic, Phoenician and other 2nd and 1st millennium BCE texts both as generic "god"
and as the head of the divine pantheon. In the Hebrew Bible El (Hebrew: אל ) appears very
occasionally alone (e.g. Genesis 33:20, el elohe yisrael, "El the God of Israel", and Genesis 46:3,
ha'el elohe abika, "El the God of thy father"), but usually with some epithet or attribute attached
which I have enumerated below. I
It is evident that in these cases it can be understood as the generic "god".
In theophoric names such as Gabriel ("Strength of God"), Michael ("Who is like God?"), Raphael
("God's medicine"), Ariel ("God's lion"), Daniel ("God's Judgment"), Israel ("one who has struggled
with God"), Immanuel ("God is with us"), and Ishmael ("God Hears"/"God Listens") it usually
interpreted and translated as "God", but it is not clear whether these "el"s refer to deity in general or to
the god El in particular. In most cases the suffic el in the angelic name seem to indicate an
emanation of El for a particular purpose.
The nomadic people represented God as a bull - since there wealth and prosperity and survival
depended on the cattle.This concept of God represented as a bull is probably behind the making up of
the calf by Aaron when Moses was up in the mountain.
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