The Origin of the English Word for God

The English word for “God” has become a source of confusion for Christians since at least the Anglo-Saxon era.  Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary says that the origin of the word ‘god’ comes from a Germanic word ‘gad,’ pronounced as “gohdt.”

The following information on the origin of the word ‘god’ will help to understand why we use it in our vernacular.

GOD - The English word God is identical with the Anglo-Saxon word for “good,” and therefore it is believed that the name God refers to the divine goodness. (See Oehler's Theol. of Old Test.; Strong's and Young's concordances.)  (From New Unger's Bible Dictionary)  (Originally published by Moody Press of Chicago, Illinois.  Copyright (C) 1988.)

Further information on the source of our word for ‘God’ is listed below:

Word origin:  God - Our word god goes back via Germanic to Indo-European, in which a corresponding ancestor form meant “invoked one.”  The word’s only surviving non-Germanic relative is Sanskrit hu, invoke the gods, a form which appears in the Rig Veda, most ancient of Hindu scriptures:  puru-hutas,  “much invoked,” epithet of the rain-and-thunder god Indra.  (From READER’S DIGEST, Family Word Finder, page 351) (Originally published by The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., Pleasantville New York,    Montreal;   Copyright   (C)  1975)

Now if the sources noted above are accurate, then the word that we use for the Supreme Being, God, comes from a very pagan origin.  Thus the word god is used generically by many different religions to refer to their deity or “invoked one.”

Some may laugh at the notion, the very idea that the word “God” has any origin or association with Hindu Sanskrit.  To illustrate how this is possible, we again quote from ‘Family Word Finder’ on the historical development of our Modern English language:

Page 7, ‘Word Origins’ - “English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, which consists of about 100 related tongues, all descended from prehistoric language of a pastoral, bronze working, horse breeding people, the Aryans, who inhabited the steppes of Central Asia about 4500 B.C.  Scholars refer to their language at this stage as proto-Indo-European, or simply Indo-European.

Over the next 3,000 years or so, the community of Indo-European speakers splintered off, to Iran and India (where their idiom developed into the sister languages, Old Persian and Sanskrit) and elsewhere in many other directions, mainly westward.

The farther a field they ranged, the farther their ancestral manner of speaking the diverged.  The old national name, Aryan (meaning “noble”), survived in both Persia and India and is in fact the source of the present day Iran.

Within a few hundred years after the primeval Aryan community started breaking up, there were already several Indo-European languages where there had once been only one.

Derivative idioms grew even farther apart, so that by the dawn of recorded history a dozen branches of the Indo-European language family overspread most of western Eurasia from the Himalayas to the Atlantic.  The most important of these branches are:

·         Indo-Iranian (comprising-in Iran-Persian and-in India-Sanskrit, together with the derivative Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and other languages including Romany, the language of the Gypsies)

·         Slavic (Russian, Polish, etc.)

·         Hellenic (Greek)

·         Italic (Latin and derivative Romance languages such as French and Italian)

·         Celtic (Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, etc.)

·         Germanic (English, Dutch, German, Yiddish, and the Scandinavian languages).

To illustrate the family relationship of these languages, here are the words for mother and brother in languages belonging to the above-mentioned branches and also in the common ancestor tongue, Indo-European:

       English                        mother     brother

       German                       mutter      bruder

       Gaelic                          mathair      braithair

       Latin                            mater         frater

       Greek                           meter         phrater

       Old Church Slavonic      mati           bratu

       Sanskrit                        matr           bhratr

       Indo-European           * mater-       *bhrater

Note:  Indo-European forms are preceded by asterisks, indicating they are reconstructions - that is, these are educated guesses by scholars as to the word’s original form; also, because word endings are the least predictable, most changeable aspect of language, scholars place hyphens instead of conjectural ending at the end of each reconstructed Indo-European word.)

Words (from the list above) like ‘mother’ and ‘brother’ have common ancestry, and it is customary to refer to them as cognates.  Thus, English mother is cognate with Latin mater, although it does not derive directly from it. (diagram omitted)

During the Roman occupation of Britain in the first four centuries of the Christian era, many Britons and Romans were bilingual, but as far as we know it never occurred to any of them that their respective languages were long-lost cousins.

Still less, would it have occurred to them that the speech of the Jutes, Saxons, Angles, and Frisians (who were encamped on the North Sea from Jutland down to the mouth of the Rhine) might be kin?  It was with the coming of these Germanic tribes, however, after the collapse of the Roman authority in A.D. 410, in which the history of our language really began.

We now refer to their descendants as the Anglo-Saxons and to their language as Old English.  They were eventually to give Britain a new name: England, “Land of the Angles.”

The Anglo-Saxon era lasted 500 years.  During the second half of the period (from A.D. 800 onward), successive waves of Viking invaders took over much of England, reaching the height of their influence with the reign of Canute the Great (994-1035), king of England, Denmark, and Norway.  Though the Viking invaders eventually integrated with their Anglo-Saxon cousins, these Norse-speaking newcomers left a broad and indelible mark on our vocabulary.

The language of 10th-century England is as far removed from us today as the dragon ships of the Vikings.  To read Old English with comprehension, we must study it like a foreign language.  Here, for example, are the opening verses of the Lord’s Prayer as recited by Englishmen in the year 1000:

     Old English                                          Modern English (King James)

     Faeder ure,                                          Our Father

     Thu the eart on heofonum,                   which art in heaven,

     Si thin Nama gehalgod.                         Hallowed be thy name.

     Tobecume thin rice.                              Thy kingdom come.

     Gewurthe thin willa on eorthan              Thy will be done in earth,

     Swa swa on heofonum...                       as it is in heaven...

The Norman Conquest brought the old English period to an abrupt close.  Expropriating the English nobility in a series of bloodbaths following his coronation in London on Christmas Day, 1066, William the Conqueror installed a new ruling class.

Overnight, French became the language of state business; it was to remain so for several hundred years.  At the same time, William promoted marriages between Normans and English - a farsighted policy that led, in the long run, not only to a national reconciliation, but also was richly blended with imported French word-stock.

We call this language Middle English, and in it we can recognize the immediate ancestor of Modern English.  Emerging during the 12th and 13th centuries, Middle English became a polished literary language during the 14th century.

The dialect of the east Midlands around London was closer to Modern English than any of the other dialects of England.  In 1476 the printer William Caxton used this dialect when he set up shop at Westminster and printed The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, the first book ever to be published in England.

In this, as in many subsequent enormously influential translations from the classics, Caxton used the current speech of London and thus helped establish its predominant status.  By the reign of Henry VIII, nearly one generation later, London English was becoming a national standard.

A contemporary style manual advises the writer: “Ye shall therefore take the usual speech of the Court and that of London, and the shires lying about London within 60 miles, and not much above.”  The language of this admonition is a bit old-fashioned, but it is Modern English nonetheless.

While London town and London English were growing by leaps and bounds, Humanism, the revival of Classical learning, was becoming a major movement in England as elsewhere in Europe.  During the 16th century, Humanists introduced Greek and Latin words into the language by the thousands.

A large number of these words survived and now belong to our classic vocabulary.  Shakespeare’s works and the King James Bible, contemporary with the first English settlements in America, provided a modern standard on both sides of the Atlantic.

(From READER’S DIGEST, Family Word Finder, pages 7-10) (Originally published by The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., Pleasantville New York, Montreal; Copyright   (C) 1975)

UNDERSTANDING THE WORD “GOD” FROM THE BIBLE

Since our English language has it’s origin from Indo-European influence, our understanding of the meaning of the word for “God” (from the Biblical Hebrew and Greek languages) is obviously different.

When the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) was translated in  A.D. 1611, the translators used the words common to European people.  Instead of translating a word properly, by using the Hebrew or Greek meaning, the translators replaced the true meaning of the Scriptural words with words common to their London English vernacular.

For example, we will first examine the words, LORD, Lord, and lord.  By providing the true meaning of the use of these words, it is easy to see how the early Bible translations were in error:

LORD  - LORD. The rendering of several Hebrew and Greek words, which have different meanings:

1. LORD; GOD = Jehovah (Yahweh; Hebrew YHWH, third person singular noun from the root word, “ehyeh” meaning literally, “self-existent”).  This is used as a proper name of God and should have been retained in that form by the translators.  The LORD (Yahweh) should read in the KJV and other versions as, “He is” or “He exists”.

           

2. Lord or lord = (Hebrew ‘Adon’), an early word denoting ownership; hence, absolute control. It is not properly a divine title, being used of the owner of slaves (Genesis 24:14,27; 39:2,7, rendered “master”), of kings, such as the lords of their subjects (Isaiah 26:13, “master”), of a husband as lord of the wife (Genesis 18:12).  It is applied to God as the owner and governor of the whole earth <Ps. 114:7>.  It is sometimes used as a term of respect (like our sir) but with a pronoun attached (“my lord”).  It often occurs in the plural.

          

3. Lord = Adonai (Hebrew ‘adonay’), emphatic, “the Lord”; many regard it as the plural of number two (above; Adon).  It is used chiefly in the Pentateuch-- always where God is submissively and reverently addressed (Exodus 4:10,13; Joshua 7:8) and also when God is spoken of (1 Kings 13:9; 22:6).  The Jews, out of a superstitious reverence for the name Jehovah, always pronounce “Adonai” where “Yahweh” is written.  The similar form, with the suffix, is also used of men, as of Potiphar (Genesis 39:2, “master”) and of Joseph (Genesis 42:30, 33).

          

4. Lord, Master = (Greek ‘kurios,’ meaning, “supreme”); referencing he to whom a person or thing belongs, the master, the one having disposition of men or property, as the “owner of the vineyard” (Matthew 20:8; 21:40; Mark 12:9; Luke 20:15); the “Lord of the harvest” (Matthew 9:38; Luke 10:2); the “master of the house” (Mark 13:35); “Lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8; Mark 2:28; Luke 6:5), as having the power to determine what is suitable to the Sabbath, and of releasing himself and others from its obligation.

The term is also a title of honor sometimes rendered “sir” and is expressive of the respect and reverence with which servants salute their master (Matthew 13:27; Luke 13:8; 14:22);  employed by a son in addressing his father (Matthew 21:29); by citizens toward magistrates (Matthew 27:63); by anyone wishing to honor a man of distinction (Matthew 8:2,6,8; 15:27; Mark 7:28; Luke 5:12); by the disciples in saluting Jesus, their teacher and master (Matthew 8:25; 16:22; Luke 9:54; John 11:12).  This title is given to God, the ruler of the universe, both with the article ‘ho kurios’ (Matthew 1:22; 5:33; Mark 5:19; Acts 7:33; 2 Timothy 1:16,18) and without the article (Matthew 21:9; 27:10; Mark 13:20; Luke 2:9,23, 26; Hebrews 7:21).  The title is also applied to Jesus as the Messiah, since by His death He acquired a special ownership of mankind and after His resurrection was exalted by a partnership in the divine administration (Acts 10:36; Romans 14:8; 1 Corinthians 7:22; 8:6; Philippians 2:9-11).

          

5. Master, master, lord = Baal (Heb. ba`al, “master”), applied only to heathen deities, or to the man as husband, and so on, or to one especially skilled in a trade or profession.  See Baal.

          

6. Other and less important words in the original are rendered “Lord,” such as mare', “master” (Acts 2:47), an official title, and seren, a Philistine term found in Joshua, Judges, and 1 Samuel, where “the lords of the Philistines” are mentioned.

*Bibliography: E. Lohmeyer, Kyrios Christos (1928); W. Bousset, Kyrios Christos (1935). (From New Unger's Bible Dictionary) (originally published by Moody Press of Chicago, Illinois.  Copyright (C) 1988.)

According to New Unger’s Bible Dictionary, the word, “LORD” seen in the OT is “Yahweh.”  Unger’s says of the word Yahweh:

This is used as a proper name of God and should have been retained in that form by the translators.”  Since we know that most translators have mistranslated the name of the Almighty, by calling Him, “LORD,” instead of, “Yahweh,” we will now research the word “God.”  Perhaps there are similar translator errors here as well.:

A STUDY ON THE OLD TESTAMENT WORDS USED FOR “GOD”

1.  “El” - The primary Hebrew word for ‘God’ is the word “El.”  By using Strong’s Definition, we can quickly ascertain the meaning of both the Hebrew and Greek words for “God”:

·         410  'el (ale); shortened from 352; strength; as adjective, mighty; especially the Almighty (but used also of any deity):  KJV-- God (god), X goodly, X great, idol, mighty one), power, strong. Compare names in "-el."

·         352  'ayil (ah'-yil); from the same as 193; properly, strength; hence, anything strong; specifically a chief (politically); also a ram (from his strength); a pilaster (as a strong support); an oak or other strong tree:  KJV-- mighty (man), lintel, oak, post, ram, tree.

·         193  'uwl (ool); from an unused root meaning to twist, i.e. (by implication) be strong; the body (as being rolled together); also powerful:  KJV-- mighty, strength.

HISTORY ON THE USE OF THE WORD “EL”:

“El” = GOD or god ('el 410).  This term was the most common general designation of deity in the ancient Near East.  While it frequently occurred alone, ‘el’ was also combined with other words to constitute a compound term for deity, or to identify the nature and functions of the “god” in some manner.  Thus the expression “God, the God of Israel” (Genesis 33:20) identified the specific activities of Israel's God.

          

In the ancient world, knowledge of a person's name was believed to give one power over that person.  Knowledge of the character and attributes of pagan “gods” was thought to enable the worshipers to manipulate or influence the deities in a more effective way than they could have if the deity's name remained unknown.

To that extent, the vagueness of the term ‘el’ frustrated persons who hoped to obtain some sort of power over the deity, since the name gave little or no indication of the god's character.  This was particularly true for El, the chief Canaanite god.

The ancient Semites stood in mortal dread of the superior powers exercised by the gods and attempted to propitiate them accordingly.  They commonly associated deity with the manifestation and use of enormous power.  Hence the common meaning of the word for God (el) simply meant, “strength” or “strong.”

The concept of a deities’ strength or might is reflected in the curious Hebrew phrase, “the power (‘el’) of my hand” (Genesis 31:29), KJV; RSV, “It is in my power”; cf. (Deuteronomy 28:32).

Some Hebrew phrases in the Psalms associated ‘el’ with impressive natural features, such as the cedar trees of Lebanon (Psalms 80:10) or mountains (Psalms 36:6). In these instances, ‘el’ conveys a clear impression of grandeur or majesty.

          

Names with ‘el’ as one of their components were common in the Near East in the second millennium B. C. The names Methusael in Genesis 4:18 and Ishmael Genesis 16:11 come from a very early period.

In the Mosaic period, ‘el’ was synonymous with the Lord who delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and made them victorious in battle (Read Numbers 24:8). This tradition of the Hebrew ‘el’ as a “God” who revealed Himself in power and entered into a covenant relationship with His people was prominent in both poetry (Psalms 7:11; 85:8) and prophecy