El Shaddai

• divine Providence; service rewarded with prosperity

96:1.53. El Shad­dai. It is dif­fi­cult to ex­plain what El Shad­dai stood for. This idea of God was a com­pos­ite de­rived from the teach­ings of Amen­emope’s Book of Wis­dom mod­i­fied by Ikh­na­ton’s doc­trine of Aton and fur­ther in­flu­enced by Mel­chiz­e­dek’s teach­ings em­bod­ied in the con­cept of El Elyon. But as the con­cept of El Shad­dai per­me­ated the He­brew mind, it be­came thor­oughly col­ored with the Yah­weh be­liefs of the desert.

96:1.6One of the dom­i­nant ideas of the re­li­gion of this era was the Egyp­tian con­cept of di­vine Prov­i­dence, the teach­ing that ma­te­rial pros­per­ity was a re­ward for serv­ing El Shad­dai.

• Moses’ parents believed in

96:4.2Moses had heard of the teach­ings of Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek from both his fa­ther and his mother, their com­mon­ness of re­li­gious be­lief be­ing the ex­pla­na­tion for the un­usual union be­tween a woman of royal blood and a man from a cap­tive race. Moses’ fa­ther-in-law was a Ken­ite wor­shiper of El Elyon, but the eman­ci­pa­tor’s par­ents were be­liev­ers in El Shad­dai. Moses thus was ed­u­cated an El Shad­daist; through the in­flu­ence of his fa­ther-in-law he be­came an El Ely­on­ist; and by the time of the He­brew en­camp­ment about Mount Sinai af­ter the flight from Egypt, he had for­mu­lated a new and en­larged con­cept of De­ity (de­rived from all his for­mer be­liefs), which he wisely de­cided to pro­claim to his peo­ple as an ex­panded con­cept of their olden tribal god, Yah­weh.

• Egyptian concept of God

142:3.53. El Shad­dai. Dur­ing these early days many of the He­brews wor­shiped El Shad­dai, the Egyp­tian con­cept of the God of heaven, which they learned about dur­ing their cap­tiv­ity in the land of the Nile. Long af­ter the times of Mel­chiz­e­dek all three of these con­cepts of God be­came joined to­gether to form the doc­trine of the cre­ator De­ity, the Lord God of Is­rael.