One of the names for Israel’s God in the Torah
Was El Shaddai, typically rendered in English
As something along the lines of God Almighty,
Although scholarly translations leave it as is.
For a boy raised on the King James Version
And who, as a teenager, spent a few weeks
Enchanted by Frank Herbert’s Dune novels,
El Shaddai echoed as a dreamlike resonance,
A mysterious and formless shadow in mind,
Especially as no scholar knows for sure
Whence the name came or what it first meant.
The one part, El, is easy. That’s the word
For the Canaanite high god, and the common
Noun, god. God Shaddai. But even the syntax
Of the phrase seems open to interpretation.
Toponym, cognomen, or attribute of a god?
God of Shaddai. God named Shaddai. God
With the characteristic of being Shaddai.
Even in the Torah, its use is spookily shadowy,
A reach back to a time already ancient then.
In moments of revelation, as to Moses,
The God of Israel deploys the name to identify
Himself to His people as being the same
As the God of their ancestors, El Shaddai,
Name by which ancestors knew Him then.
Even the etymology of Shaddai is speculative,
With links suggested to terms for fertility,
Wilderness, destructiveness, and mountains.
Might have been the name of an actual place,
But if so, the location of that place is lost.
It is, in fine, almost wholly untranslatable.
It conjures something, nonetheless, a prayer,
Not to the later YHWH of priest and covenant
Who claims to speak for and as El Shaddai, but
To a destructive god of wild, fertile mountains,
God of a former world that never really was.
There’s just too much time between never,
Possibly, probably, and for sure, those four
Courses against a stop of the lips whispering,
Mumbling their wish to address the lost Lord
Who moves underneath all well-worn words.
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