Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible Online

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I. Name Yahweh is the name of the official god of Israel, both in the northern kingdom and in Judah. Since the Achaemenid period, religious scruples led to the custom of not pronoucing the name of Yahweh; in the liturgy as well as in everyday life, such expressions as ‘the Lord’ ( ʾădōnāy, lit. ‘my Lord’, LXX κύριος) or ‘the Name’ were substituted for it. As a matter of consequence, the correct pronunciation of the tetragrammaton was gradually lost: the Masoretic form ‘Jehovah’ is in reality a combination of the consonants of the tetragrammaton with the vocals of ʾădōnāy, the ḥaṭēf p…

I. Name “Yahweh Zebaoth” occurs 284 times as a divine name in the Heb. Bible; 121 of these occurrences can be characterized as free, non-formulaic usage. This expression had a prominent function as a cultic name of Yahweh in Shiloh and Jerusalem. Serving as an important divine epithet in the Zion-Zebaoth theology of the Jerusalemite temple, it is attested from the premonarchic period to postexilic times. The Zebaoth designation is an important signpost in the religious history of ancient Israel and has therefore been the subject of intensive scholarly discussion (surveys in Schmitt 197…

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I. Name A deity Yaʿûq was worshipped by pre-Islamic Arabs. The personal names Yaʿăqān ( Num. 33.31, Num. 32; Deut. 10.6; 1 Chr. 1.42) and ʿăqān ( Gen. 36.27) have been interpreted as containing a reference to an animal deity worshipped by the Edomites (Roberston Smith 1912:455–483). II. Identity Islamic traditions refer to the cult of a deity Yaʿûq among the pre-islamic tribe of the Hamdān In the Yemenite village Ḫaiwān (North of Ṣan̂ā), there was a cult-centre. The Qurʾan Sure 71:20–25 and Ibn al-Kalbi’s Book of Idols (Klinke-Rosenberger 1942:35, 61) interpret the deity…

I. Name The name Judah, yĕhûdâ, occurs over 800 times in the OT and indicates (1) a person, e.g. the fourth son of Jacob; (2) the tribe Judah; (3) the kingdom governed by the dynasty of David; (4) a province in the Persian empire. The etymology of the name is still unsettled. The name has been construed as containing a theophoric element: e.g. J. Hempel ( BHH II, 898) interprets the name as a hypocoristicon of yĕhûd-ʾēl, ‘Praised be El’. A. Alt (Der Gott der Väter, KS I [München 1953] 5 n.1) suggested that Judah originally was a place name. The general tendency in OT studie…