The "God" of the Old Testament, who is He?

Who is the "God" of the Old Testament? As I was pondering this question the other day I realized that I didn't really, truly know so I began to do some independent research. What I came to learn was quite surprising. First, let us come to understand and know "God" through the people who actually knew Him on a personal basis.

Abraham, the Founding Father knew "God" as El Elyon which means 'God Most High' but when "God" established His Covenant with Abraham promising to make him the Father of a multitude of nations He revealed Himself as El Shaddai which means 'God Almighty' or even 'God the Mountain One' or 'God of the Mountains.'

God or El Shaddai established His covenant with Abraham by first revealing to him His name. The name of God is so very important because it characterizes Him and allows us to relate to him. It is a symbol of Gods authority and power and is a tool by which we can understand and come to know God. Who He is is in His name.

Abraham also referred to God as Elohim Shophtim Ba-arets or 'God Judge of the Earth (or Nations)' in Genesis 18. Abraham Also referred to God as El Olam or "The Everlasting God" in Genesis 21.

Jacob came to know God as Ha'el Elohe Abika "The Lord God of your Father(s)" and even at one point called him El Elohe Yisrael "The Lord the God of Israel".

In Genesis 16 God reveals Himself to Hagar as El Roi or "The God Who Sees".

In Exodus, God famously reveals Himself to Moses as "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh" or 'I Am that I Am" or 'I AM'. He is also referred to in Exodus as "Elohim Tzevaot" or "God of Hosts".

He is also reffered to in Scripture as "El Hai" or 'God who Lives', "El Ro'i" or 'God my Shepherd', "El Gibbor" or 'God of Strength' and "El Elohe" or 'God of gods'. There are many, many other names of God that go along these and similar lines.

So, as I've demostrated there seems to be a lot to God that we still don't fully understand or are even beginning to comprehend or at least I'm not. These are just a small fraction of the names of God in Scripture as there are hundreds. So, who is God? I still don't fully know but I'm learning. There is a lot to Him I've discovered. What I have learned is that God reveals himself through His names. So, still, the question remains; who is God?

The "Gods" were technologically advanced beings from another star system, living the lives of God amongst a primitive Culture. Apparently there's a whole bunch of them, all with different agendas and different names.

The natives of south America thought the Inquistadores were Gods because of their fancy clothing and ships. Go figure.

reply to post by I Want To Believe


So you are saying that the prefix to Gods name is "El" ??
So God is hispanic then?????

I think you are looking into it too deeply with the names thing. These 'names' you elude to are actually titles. Human society likes giving famous people titles - for examplr Alexander the brave, Diana, Queen of hearts etc etc.

God did reveal his actual name to Moses - it was YHWH. The Jews were so terrified of being unworthy of saying it they deliberately perverted it to Yahweh, even though it is Jehovah or 'I Am'

I have read many many ideas of who / what God might be ranging from a superior alien race that genetically engineered us into existence (AKA Sitchin) to Mystic creator of the universe and everything in it.

At the end of the day God is a being beyond anything we humans can grasp as a concept. To quote the movie 'The Mothman' "Have you ever tried to explain yourself to a cockroach?" i.e he is just too complex for us to understand fully in out human condition.

reply to post by I Want To Believe


Dear I Want To Believe,

So, as I've demostrated there seems to be a lot to God that we still don't fully understand or are even beginning to comprehend or at least I'm not. These are just a small fraction of the names of God in Scripture as there are hundreds. So, who is God? I still don't fully know but I'm learning. There is a lot to Him I've discovered. What I have learned is that God reveals himself through His names. So, still, the question remains; who is God?

His name is Jaime, "I Am Me". It is not about a name, the names all had meaning, efforts to allow us to understand what he was like, his personality if you will. He doesn't need a name, he is. In today's world names are used to index people, to find them and therefore we try and make them as unique as possible; but, names today do not define us. I can name a child chastity; but, that doesn't mean they are chaste. In past times names described what work you would be involved in or who owned you. The name Carpenter was used for people who were carpenters, as soon as you met them you knew what their family trade was and what they would be doing for a living, rather convenient and also restrictive.

God is a sentient, self aware being, just like you and I are self aware; but, that is not the end of the story. Think about who you are and all of your different emotions and attitudes and your position in life. God is described by many "names" because he is not one thing anymore than you are one thing. I am a father, brother, son, friend... to different people. In fact many young men refer to me as their dad; but, they are neither adopted legally or biologically mine, it is the relationship they have with me that causes them to call me that. Now lets go back to Abraham, at first his name was Abram, God changed it because his role in the world changed.

I do hope this somehow helps you to understand that the name is not what is important, it is the meaning of the name that helps us to understand him better. They are not names, they are descriptions of aspects of his personality, they are efforts to allow us to understand what he is like so that we can relate to him and have relationship with him. If I meet someone I want to know what they are like, I want to know what I can expect from them and what would offend them or what they enjoy. Peace.

Names Bible Code Illustrated: Adam to Jesus (10 min) www.youtube.com...
www.youtube.com... peace

Morgan Freeman is God

It does get confusing: i hope this helps. taken from the urantia book

The Urantia Book Paper 96 Yahweh — God of the Hebrews (1052.1) 96:0.1 IN CONCEIVING of Deity, man first includes all gods, then subordinates all foreign gods to his tribal deity, and finally excludes all but the one God of final and supreme value. The Jews synthesized all gods into their more sublime concept of the Lord God of Israel. The Hindus likewise combined their multifarious deities into the “one spirituality of the gods” portrayed in the Rig-Veda, while the Mesopotamians reduced their gods to the more centralized concept of Bel-Marduk. These ideas of monotheism matured all over the world not long after the appearance of Machiventa Melchizedek at Salem in Palestine. But the Melchizedek concept of Deity was unlike that of the evolutionary philosophy of inclusion, subordination, and exclusion; it was based exclusively on creative power and very soon influenced the highest deity concepts of Mesopotamia, India, and Egypt. (1052.2) 96:0.2 The Salem religion was revered as a tradition by the Kenites and several other Canaanite tribes. And this was one of the purposes of Melchizedek’s incarnation: That a religion of one God should be so fostered as to prepare the way for the earth bestowal of a Son of that one God. Michael could hardly come to Urantia until there existed a people believing in the Universal Father among whom he could appear. (1052.3) 96:0.3 The Salem religion persisted among the Kenites in Palestine as their creed, and this religion as it was later adopted by the Hebrews was influenced, first, by Egyptian moral teachings; later, by Babylonian theologic thought; and lastly, by Iranian conceptions of good and evil. Factually the Hebrew religion is predicated upon the covenant between Abraham and Machiventa Melchizedek, evolutionally it is the outgrowth of many unique situational circumstances, but culturally it has borrowed freely from the religion, morality, and philosophy of the entire Levant. It is through the Hebrew religion that much of the morality and religious thought of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Iran was transmitted to the Occidental peoples.

More from the urantia book:

1. Deity Concepts among the Semites

(1052.4) 96:1.1 The early Semites regarded everything as being indwelt by a spirit. There were spirits of the animal and vegetable worlds; annual spirits, the lord of progeny; spirits of fire, water, and air; a veritable pantheon of spirits to be feared and worshiped. And the teaching of Melchizedek regarding a Universal Creator never fully destroyed the belief in these subordinate spirits or nature gods.

(1052.5) 96:1.2 The progress of the Hebrews from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism was not an unbroken and continuous conceptual development. They experienced many retrogressions in the evolution of their Deity concepts, while during any one epoch there existed varying ideas of God among different groups of Semite believers. From time to time numerous terms were applied to their concepts of God, and in order to prevent confusion these various Deity titles will be defined as they pertain to the evolution of Jewish theology:

(1053.1) 96:1.3 1. Yahweh was the god of the southern Palestinian tribes, who associated this concept of deity with Mount Horeb, the Sinai volcano. Yahweh was merely one of the hundreds and thousands of nature gods which held the attention and claimed the worship of the Semitic tribes and peoples.

(1053.2) 96:1.4 2. El Elyon. For centuries after Melchizedek’s sojourn at Salem his doctrine of Deity persisted in various versions but was generally connoted by the term El Elyon, the Most High God of heaven. Many Semites, including the immediate descendants of Abraham, at various times worshiped both Yahweh and El Elyon.

(1053.3) 96:1.5 3. 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.

(1053.4) 96:1.6 One 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.

(1053.5) 96:1.7 4. El. Amid all this confusion of terminology and haziness of concept, many devout believers sincerely endeavored to worship all of these evolving ideas of divinity, and there grew up the practice of referring to this composite Deity as El. And this term included still other of the Bedouin nature gods.

(1053.6) 96:1.8 5. Elohim. In Kish and Ur there long persisted Sumerian-Chaldean groups who taught a three-in-one God concept founded on the traditions of the days of Adam and Melchizedek. This doctrine was carried to Egypt, where this Trinity was worshiped under the name of Elohim, or in the singular as Eloah. The philosophic circles of Egypt and later Alexandrian teachers of Hebraic extraction taught this unity of pluralistic Gods, and many of Moses’ advisers at the time of the exodus believed in this Trinity. But the concept of the trinitarian Elohim never became a real part of Hebrew theology until after they had come under the political influence of the Babylonians.

(1053.7) 96:1.9 6. Sundry names. The Semites disliked to speak the name of their Deity, and they therefore resorted to numerous appellations from time to time, such as: The Spirit of God, The Lord, The Angel of the Lord, The Almighty, The Holy One, The Most High, Adonai, The Ancient of Days, The Lord God of Israel, The Creator of Heaven and Earth, Kyrios, Jah, The Lord of Hosts, and The Father in Heaven.

(1053.8) 96:1.10 Jehovah is a term which in recent times has been employed to designate the completed concept of Yahweh which finally evolved in the long Hebrew experience. But the name Jehovah did not come into use until fifteen hundred years after the times of Jesus.

(1054.1) 96:1.11 Up to about 2000 B.C., Mount Sinai was intermittently active as a volcano, occasional eruptions occurring as late as the time of the sojourn of the Israelites in this region. The fire and smoke, together with the thunderous detonations associated with the eruptions of this volcanic mountain, all impressed and awed the Bedouins of the surrounding regions and caused them greatly to fear Yahweh. This spirit of Mount Horeb later became the god of the Hebrew Semites, and they eventually believed him to be supreme over all other gods. (1054.2) 96:1.12 The Canaanites had long revered Yahweh, and although many of the Kenites believed more or less in El Elyon, the supergod of the Salem religion, a majority of the Canaanites held loosely to the worship of the old tribal deities. They were hardly willing to abandon their national deities in favor of an international, not to say an interplanetary, God. They were not universal-deity minded, and therefore these tribes continued to worship their tribal deities, including Yahweh and the silver and golden calves which symbolized the Bedouin herders’ concept of the spirit of the Sinai volcano. (1054.3) 96:1.13 The Syrians, while worshiping their gods, also believed in Yahweh of the Hebrews, for their prophets said to the Syrian king: “Their gods are gods of the hills; therefore they were stronger than we; but let us fight against them on the plain, and surely we shall be stronger than they.” (1054.4) 96:1.14 As man advances in culture, the lesser gods are subordinated to a supreme deity; the great Jove persists only as an exclamation. The monotheists keep their subordinate gods as spirits, demons, fates, Nereids, fairies, brownies, dwarfs, banshees, and the evil eye. The Hebrews passed through henotheism and long believed in the existence of gods other than Yahweh, but they increasingly held that these foreign deities were subordinate to Yahweh. They conceded the actuality of Chemosh, god of the Amorites, but maintained that he was subordinate to Yahweh. (1054.5) 96:1.15 The idea of Yahweh has undergone the most extensive development of all the mortal theories of God. Its progressive evolution can only be compared with the metamorphosis of the Buddha concept in Asia, which in the end led to the concept of the Universal Absolute even as the Yahweh concept finally led to the idea of the Universal Father. But as a matter of historic fact, it should be understood that, while the Jews thus changed their views of Deity from the tribal god of Mount Horeb to the loving and merciful Creator Father of later times, they did not change his name; they continued all the way along to call this evolving concept of Deity, Yahweh.

reply to post by I Want To Believe

The actual names are not very important.
The Biblical claim is that the God who communicated with Moses was also the same God who was communicating with the later prophets, and the same God who originally spoke to Abraham..
So for practical purposes, his identity is "The God who spoke to Moses and the prophets".

reply to post by markosity1973

God did reveal his actual name to Moses . . .

Obviously that is not God's name, or even the actual name of the angel that Moses was talking with.
This was a way to not give a name and that names are not important from our point of view since there were lots of names of gods at that time but the point was that they were pretend gods while He was real, so His name is, "I Am Real". Not his actual name but it gets the point across for our use.

Guess.

If we plug in the very ancient pictorial meaning of the letters of "YHWH," then "YHWH" means "Behold the Nail, Behold the Hand." Who do you suppose that could be?

The God of the Old Testament, is also known as Yahweh, aka YHWH, aka YHVH, aka Jehova, aka Jesus Christ, aka I am.

God bless!

lol okay

im glad you guys got it

reply to post by H1ght3chHippie


Thank you for your imput and all the evidence you provided to back up your statement that God or gods is in fact a technologically advanced race of alien being(s). It was very informative.

reply to post by rangersdad


Yes, I am in fact saying that God is an illegal alien who's name is El Jesuis.

reply to post by markosity1973


Who and what God is is evidenced in His names. They allow us to understand and connect with him. As King David said in Psalms "The name of God is as a Tall and Mighty Tower." This verse demonstrates the importance and power of Gods name. If you dont know Gods name(s) you dont really know Him. At least that is my viewpoint.

Originally posted by I Want To Believe
reply to post by markosity1973

 

Who and what God is is evidenced in His names. They allow us to understand and connect with him. As King David said in Psalms "The name of God is as a Tall and Mighty Tower." This verse demonstrates the importance and power of Gods name. If you dont know Gods name(s) you dont really know Him. At least that is my viewpoint.

Once again, this is not an actual name, this is a praise of God's name. You will also see terms like that used for other biblical characters, though not as lavish in praise. All of these things you mention are perceptions of God's qualities, but not an actual name.

I totally agree with you that it is good to know these terms that people use to praise God with as they all praise different aspects of him. In a way they do help to get to know him better through hearing what he means to other people.

Originally posted by I Want To Believe
reply to post by markosity1973

 

Who and what God is is evidenced in His names. They allow us to understand and connect with him. As King David said in Psalms "The name of God is as a Tall and Mighty Tower." This verse demonstrates the importance and power of Gods name. If you dont know Gods name(s) you dont really know Him. At least that is my viewpoint.

Another approach to knowing God is to read the Law given to Moses. If you see behind the "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots," you can obtain a rough outline of what God loves and what He detests - "how He rolls" in the modern vernacular.