Do the letters of God's Hebrew name "El" make their own meaning?

Early writing systems like ancient Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, and Chinese began by using pictures or logograms for words. For the Akkadians, the word for God, "El"or "Ilu" in cuneiform, was written with an eight-legged star symbol that also signified the heavens. The Canaanites and Hebrews used a phonetic script - the Phoenician alphabet - that began with pictures, so that each letter was drawn in the form of something related to the name the letter. So for example, the alphabet began with the letter "Aleph" that was drawn like an ox's head. The word "aleph" in Hebrew commonly means cattle or oxen. According to a theory by Jeff Benner, the meaning of some words can be related to the meaning of the individual letters making up the words. I am skeptical of his theory, but am open to considering whether it might be true in the case of a few words. Does this apply to the name for God, "El"?

One of the common associations for the Canaanite and Levantine god "El" was the bull, and this association also shows up in Biblical episodes:

As for ancient Near Eastern deities, they were characteristically horned. From the time of Sumer down to the eclipse of the Ugaritic pantheon, the heads of divinities bore the horns of either bulls or rams.
...
It was explicitly stated in the Book of Numbers that God (Elohim) had “the horns of the wild ox” (24:8 RSV).*** And His throne was guarded by human-headed bulls called cherubim. In fact, bulls were set up as golden images of Yahweh in the two rival temples of the ten northern tribes of Israel (1 Ki. 12:28-29).

...the Zondervan Bible Dictionary [says]

• Aaron made a golden image of a male calf in order that the people might worship Jehovah under this form (Exod. 32:4). ... The feast held in connection with this worship was “a feast of Jehovah” (Exod. 32:5). After the division of the kingdom, Jeroboam set up two golden calves in his kingdom, one at Bethel and one at Dan (1 Ki. 12:29) because he feared that his people might desert him if they continued to worship in Jerusalem. He was not trying to make heathenism the state religion, for the bull images were undoubtedly supposed to represent Jehovah. In time, these images, at first recognized as symbols, came to be regarded as common idols (1 Kings 12:30, Hosea 12:11).

The historian Will Durant has elaborated further:
"Moses could never quite win his flock from the adoration of the Golden Calf, for the Egyptian worship of the bull was still fresh in their memories, and Yahweh was for a long time symbolized in that ferocious vegetarian.*"

The archæologist William F. Albright confirmed this view.

• ...the erection of a “golden calf” at Dan...refers to an attempted return by the Israelites of Moses’ time to the ancient practice of representing the chief divinity in the form of a storm-god standing on a young bull...though we do not know whether or not the figure of the god standing on the young bull was supposed to be visible or invisible. The latter was true later. In view of the archaism of Exodus 32 and Jeroboam’s obvious intention, over 350 years later, to restore pre-Solomonic faith and practice rather than to create a new paganism, it is much safer to assume that the Israelites did not erect a visible image (of Yahweh atop the bull) at either Bethel or Dan.*

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http://www.atkinslightquest.com/Documents/Religion/Hebrew-Myths/Worship-of-Yahweh-as-a-Bull.htm

But was the bull by itself ever a written symbol for "God", "El", in the same way that 1 in English is a symbol for one, & is a symbol for "and", the Akkadians used a star to represent God and the heavens?

The first letter of the ancient Hebrew alphabet, before the Israelites took the Assyrian script, was "Aleph", in the shape of a bull's skull. In the 2007 book Letter by Letter: An Alphabetical Miscellany, Laurent Pflughaupt writes: "The first pictograms that evolved into the first Phoenician letter ALEPH and eventually our letter A had the form of a bull or an ox. Drawn rather realistically, the animal was represented either in its entirety or simply by the outline of its head: In the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, around 1700 BCE, appeared in this form."

This idea has been around a long time in academia. In the 1898 book The Hittites and Their Language, Claude Reignier Conder wrote: "We find, for instance, that a or av was the old Mongol word for "bull," and the bull's head is the very evident origin of the letter called Aleph (bull), whence our A is derived".

This raises the question for me of whether the Aleph was ever drawn by itself as a symbol for God. In Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z, David Sacks writes:

"How and why aleph was chosen for first place, we will never know. No modern explanation satisfies—especially not references to the sacredness of the bull in ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures. ...According to mystical writings such as the medieval European compilation called the Kabbalah... alef symbolizes the divine energy that preceded and initiated Creation. The seeding power existed before any other form could be realized which is why the opening word of the Hebrew Bible bereshith (in the beginning) starts with the Hebrew alphabet's second letter, for the first."

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The word "Aleph" developed into the Hebrew word for chief, "Aluph". Aleph is also special as the first letter of the alphabet, recalling how God is a first cause. I don't think that this answers to question, but it suggests a possible answer. I think that the Aleph could in fact have started the alphabet in reference to its association with the sacred bull, since the aleph bull's head was a symbol for El or God.

Further, absent any findings that an Aleph by itself could be a written symbol in writing for God, El, could the combination of the names or pictures of the two letters that make up "El" in Hebrew (Aleph and Lamed) have a special meaning known to the Hebrews?
According to scholars, the letter Lamed was drawn like the picture of an ox goad, L , and "Malmad" was the word for Ox-goad, "malmad" being derived from the Hebrew word "Lamed", meaning "teach" or "learn" in English.

But it's hard for me to see what combination "bull" or "ox"(aleph) would make with ox-goad or teach in order to have a new meaning related to God (El) in some way. The word "El" also can mean strength or power in Hebrew, and not just "God". I guess that an ox pushed by an ox goad could represent strength, but the pictures don't look like a direct allusion to God.

I have also heard a claim that the L (Lamed) could look like a staff, which would make more sense as a reference to God, who has shepherd-like spiritual qualities. But I found very little from real scholars themselves proving this theory conencting to Lamed to a staff in academic publications. Hebrew letters were named after things that their sounds and pictures were associated with, and the word for staff (Shebet) in Hebrew is very different from the word "Lamed" and doesn't have an L. Plus, a staff has its crook at the top like a r , whereas the Lamed has its crook at the bottom like a L.

Doug Petrovich writes his proposal of the theory connecting Lamed to a Staff by associating the Lamed with an Egyptian letter that looks like a staff:

The Hebrew lamed derives from the Middle Egyptian hieroglyph S39 in the standard hieroglyphic Sign List (hereafter ‘S.L.’), which depicts a shepherd’s crook/staff (Fig. 4).

[SEE CHART AT LINK]

The third letter lamed depicts a shepherd’s staff, known as a crook, and derives from the Egyptian staff/crook hieroglyph (S39 in S.L.; Fig. 4). The Canaanite syllabary contains no such grapheme for the l-sound, or any other sound. Instead, the Canaanites used a drawing of the sky with a sickle suspended from it to represent the la- syllabic (Fig. 5a), which is based on the word for “night” (laylu). Seemingly, Canaanite borrowed from the Egyptian glyph for “night” (N2 in S.L.; Fig. 4), which depicts the sky with a w3s-scepter suspended from it.

The Egyptian language presents no such trouble for the derivation of the lamed-staff as Canaanite does. The hieroglyphic S39 staff was used interchangeably with the S38 staff, which featured a far more curved handle, to denote “flocks” (‘wt) of animals such as sheep and goats, though it also could be used alone to represent the word for “scepter” (ḥq3t).

The connection of Egyptian as a source language for Hebrew is strengthened by Hebrew’s borrowing of the Egyptian glyph to represent its own letter l, since the Hebrew name for the instrument used to goad animals along was a lmd (Judg 3:31), despite the superfluous m at the beginning of dm'l.m; (“oxgoad”), due to mimation.

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http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2013/07/25/New-Find-Jerusalems-Oldest-Hebrew-Inscription.aspx

Unfortunately, Petrovich's connections between Lamed and the Egyptian staff letter seem to be too speculative for me. The Egyptian staff letter was not pronounced as an L, but as an "awt", hqa, or heqat sound. (SEE: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Crook_(hieroglyph))

The Hebrew word "L" means "toward" (see http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/alphabet_letters_lamed.html ) and this meaning matches up with the idea of an ox-goad in a way, since a goad makes something move toward something else. So it seems more that the idea of Lamad was a goad than a staff.

Sanoy said:

Well, El was never a name for God. There were many El's, but only one El Elyon. El is more of a classification, like "Mammal", and all those in that classification that were depicted had horns or horned hats. But Yahweh is vastly separate from this other group of Els, just like a human is from a shrew.

I do think that other cultures were thinking of Yahweh when they thought of An or El Elyon, but I think that was a conceptual knowledge rather than an intimate knowledge. In the Bible, with the exception of Cyrus, it seems that other cultures refer to Yahweh under the title "King of Heaven"* which is one of An's titles. Now there is very little we know about An to see how far this conceptualization extends but I think they might have retroactively conceptualized the God of Israel to this An they formerly worshiped. So there may be some tie in's between these three but the only one we can really trust for information about Yahweh is Israel who know Him intimately. And they say no man can see Him face to face so no description of His appearance could be accurate.

(*Examples of “God of heaven” include Ezra 5:11-12, 6:10, 7:12, and Nehemiah 2:4) (Example of the title “King of Heaven” comes from Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:37)

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Thanks for writing back. According to Wikipedia, El was the name of the head god of the Semitic pantheon, and it also meant "God" and "god". It shows up a few places as God's name in the Bible, as in Genesis 33:20: "And he erected there an altar, and called it El elohe Israel". El elohe Israel means "El the god of Israel". Another verse is Genesis 46:3 - “I am El, the God of your father”.
It doesn't make as much sense to translate it as "Genesis 46:3 - “I am God, the God of your father,” because the word "God" would be redundant. One Wikipedia entry says:

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.[24] In the Hebrew Bible El (Hebrew: אל‬) appears very occasionally alone (e.g. Genesis 33:20, el elohe yisrael, "El the God of Israel",[25] and Genesis 46:3, ha'el elohe abika, "El the God of thy father"),[26] but usually with some epithet or attribute attached (e.g. El Elyon, "Most High El", El Shaddai, "El of Shaddai", El `Olam "Everlasting El", El Hai, "Living El", El Ro'i "El my Shepherd", and El Gibbor "El of Strength"), in which 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 is usually interpreted and translated as "God", but it is not clear whether these "el"s refer to the deity in general or to the god El in particular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism#El

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My first main question is not about whether El referred to God's name, so much as whether it was drawn with a bull.

Sanoy said:

In Genesis 43:3 the Grammer actually is "the God" because it is written in Hebrew Ha El. Hebrew does not use the definite article with proper names. It won't ever say "the Yahweh". So if we see the definite article there, it's indicating that it's not a proper name, even though it makes it sound weird in English.

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I understand what you are saying, but I am not sure what to make of this issue, since there are so many translations that put it as just "I am God, the God of your father":

King James Bible
And he said, I am God, the God of thy father: fear not to go down into Egypt; for I will there make of thee a great nation:

A longer list is here:
http://biblehub.com/genesis/46-3.htm

Sanoy said:

I looked it up and Aleph looks like the anarchy sign fallen backwards and lamed looks kind of C shapped or like a nose. At first glance it kind of looks like horns but they are asymmetrical and not possibly a set of horns.

Are you sure phonecian is supposed to have pictorial significance? I know there is pictorial significance in cuneiform but that goes from protocuneiform which is glyphs to cuneiform. The later being a stylus drawing out of the protocuneiform glyph. Phonecian is alphabetical and spells out a word using a combination of shapes. Given that word meanings are made up of any combination of word letters I'm not sure how a word could contain an intentional pictoral layer.

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Sanoy,

The letters of Hebrew developed in ways like you can see here, starting from a Phoenician version and then going to an Assyrian one:
The Ancient Hebrew Alphabet - Aleph

Here is another diagram:
http://www.hebrew1.com/GRAPHICS/WP1.jpg

Sanoy said:

Go to that same link you gave me, go to the top where all the banners are and find the white banner. Click the interlinear feature and you will see what I am talking about.

You would have to keep the definite article silent in English and I believe that is what the translators are doing because the English word "God" is equivalent to Ha*El. In English we have god and "The God" which we would write God capital G.

You can see how the "Ha" gets used with an interlinear of Genesis 3:9. Ha*Adam gets rendered "the man". Adam doesn't officially become a proper name until Genesis 5. The interlinear will give you the literal translation, which the translators then change to a proper name.

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Good explanation.
Ha El and Ha Adam are changed to God and Adam and treated as both proper nouns. In Josephus Flavius, God is called The Deity sometimes in Greek.

DamianWarS said:

According to the Ancient Hebrew Lexicon it says:
The pictograph

is a picture of an ox head and also represents its strength. The

is a picture of a shepherd staff and also represents the authority of the shepherd. Combined these two pictographs mean "the strong authority" and can be anyone or thing of strong authority.

Something that is interesting is the shepherd's staff has always been a strong symbol of authority and today has evolved into a king's scepter which serves no other purpose but to show who holds the authority.

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Thanks for writing in about this. My problem with this quote is that the writer doesn't provide evidence to back up his claim that "The

is a picture of a shepherd staff and also represents the authority of the shepherd. " Remember, a shepherd staff wood have the handle at the top like an r , not at the bottom like the L pictured.

DamianWarS said:

Check out Wikipedia for some confirmation, and here and here, also the latin letter 'r' has other origins from ancient hebrew "resh"

or phoenician (modern Hebrew ר) which eventually influences the greek "Ρ" (greek is roughly the mirror of phoenician) which then influences latin 'R' (the lower case resembles the mirror image of the modern hebrew ר and r) The greek also is pronounced like the /r/ despite its resemblance to latin 'P'

the direction of the character for the staff also makes complete sense as a shepherd's staff is not designed to be held and look pretty but to be used. The character is a staff in action.

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Damian,

Every letter of the Hebrew alphabet is named after the picture drawn. For example, the first letter is called "Aleph", a Hebrew word meaning "herd", oxen, cattle, and its picture is a bull's head.

The letter is called Lamad, a Hebrew word meaning "teach", from which is derived the Hebrew word malmad, which means ox-goad. Here is what an ox-goad looks like:
The hook must be held out away from the body.

The Hebrew word for staff is "Shebet". That sounds nothing like "Lamad". Here is what a shepherd's staff looks like. As you can see, the shepherd holds his staff with the hook at the top:




Wikipedia doesn't say that the Shepherd's Staff is related to the Hebrew letter Lamad.

It would be helpful if you could provide some published scholarly academic information stating that Lamad is somehow connected to a shepherd's staff, and explaining why the author believes this.

DamianWarS said:

I didn't write the lexicon so you may choose to accept it or reject it however the idea that Lamadh is a shepherd's staff doesn't seem to be so unpopular which the Wikipedia article affirms (but does not cite) saying it "originated from the representation of a goad, i.e. a cattle prod, or a shepherd's stick, i.e. a pastoral staff" Wikipedia also affirms the same concept in their article about a goad saying "the letter L is derived from the Semitic crook or goad" A quick google search revealed other sources that describe it as the same such as hebrew4christians.com.

A shepherd may hold his staff like your image depicts when not in use however the hook end may be directed toward the animal such as an extension of an arm to grab or pull.

I have no opposition to it being a ox-goad but I think in the case of the pictograph we are talking about analogous tools and it may represent both.

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Damian,
Wikipedia and Hebrew 4 Christians don't explain how they got to the conclusion that Lamad referred to a shepherd's staff, which is what I am looking for. I am not closed-minded to your theory, I am just looking for explanation or proof of this.

Hebrew letters are named after that which they depict, and the Hebrew name for L, Lamad, means teach and the noun from Lamad/teach is malmad, an ox goad. A staff is called "Shebet" and that word is unrelated etymologically to Lamad.

The Egyptian alphabet does have a hieropglyphic meaning "staff", and it is drawn with the crook or handle at the top, not at the bottom where Lamad has its hook.