Where does "God" come from anyway??
Do you know?
The Old Testament was written in the Hebrew language, but the New Testament (including the gospels) was written in Greek. In the early 400’s, it was translated into Latin, and in the middle ages it was again translated into English (a Germanic language),
In Hebrew language,
el,
elohim and
eloah, all the three words mean god (or God) according to the person’s own concept. el was the name for Saturn.
Originally
elohim meant gods as a collective noun. There was no system of using capital letters in the early days, and even today the Hebrew Bible uses small ‘
e’ for
el or
elohim or
eloah. There is no word with female gender for god in Hebrew.
In Greek language there is a word
‘theos’ that is used for
god or
gods, and also for
God. It literally means ‘the sacred’ or ‘the object of prayer.’ Primarily it was meant for Zeus (later, Roman Jupiter) or any other Greek god. In Classical Greek it was used for god/gods. In Classical Greek there is no capitalization of words.
In Modern Greek only in the beginning of a paragraph or in the names of certain important personalities or in the headline of a chapter, the first letter is capitalized. The word
theos is not capitalized even in the latest Bible. It just means god or gods or God, and it is masculine gender;
thea means goddess and
theai means goddesses.
In Latin language the word
‘deus’ is meant for god or deity which is derived from the word
‘deiuos’ which refers to the idea of a
luminous sky (a shiny thing or some kind of heaven). The Latin language took its literary shape between 200-100 BC.
In common Germanic, also called Teutonic language, (before 800 AD) there was a word ‘
gutha’ that was used for ‘god.’ It meant the
invoked being,
guth (single) and
gutha (plural).
Pagans also used the word
guth/gutha for god/gods. It was formed from the root verb
ghu (
to invoke), and
ghu was a variation of its ancestor
hu (
to call, to invoke).
Gutha word was later called
gud in Swedish, Danish and old Norse; and in Old High German and Middle High German it was written as
gut.
In the modern High German it was written as
Gott. The same is in modern German; and in English it is ‘God’ which is singular masculine. In the beginning
‘Gott’ was neutral gender (it), then it began to be used as a singular masculine noun. Plural for
Gott is
Götter, and its feminine word is
Göttin/Göttinen for goddess/goddesses.
Earliest attestation of the Germanic word in the
6th centuryCodex Argenteus (
Mt 5:9)
From the "Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Sixteenth Edition, Revised by Adrian Room) "God. A word common, in slightly varying forms, to all Germanic languages, and coming from a root word related to Old Irish 'guth,'
'voice.' It is in no way connected with the English word 'good.'" From the "Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology" by Robert K. Barnhart (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1995). "God or god. n. Old English (about 725) 'god' Supreme Being, deity; cognate with Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Dutch, 'god,' Supreme Being, deity,
Old High German 'got' (modern German 'Gott'), Old Icelandic 'godh,' 'gudh,' and Gothic 'guth,' ...
The original meaning and
etymology of the Germanic word
god ...
Proto-Indo-European form
*ǵhutóm, which is a passive perfect participle from the root
*ǵhu-, which likely meant "
libation", "
sacrifice". Compare:-