God is called by a variety of names in Scripture. In Genesis 1, He’s Elohim. A few chapters later, He’s Yahweh. Abraham meets Him as El Shaddai. Hagar, a runaway slave girl with no status at all, calls him El Roi. Isaiah knows him as the Holy One of Israel. By the time we reach the New Testament he is Father, Immanuel, and Lord.
So a fair question arises: why so many? Are these different gods, later stitched into one? Are they moods, or masks, or stages in the slow growth of a religion?
Scripture’s own answer is simpler, and far more comforting. God is one. The names aren’t pieces of Him. They’re windows—many windows into one house—through which an unchanging God has shown Himself to people who could never have taken Him in all at once.
One Name Would Never Have Been Enough, Anyway
Before we look at a single name, three things need saying.
- God speaks to us in baby-talk. John Calvin put it memorably in his Institutes of the Christian Religion: God “lisps” with us, the way a nurse babbles to an infant. He doesn’t shrink Himself. He stoops.
- God has no parts. The Westminster Confession describes God as without body, parts, or passions. Theologians call this divine simplicity, which simply means God isn’t assembled out of ingredients. His love isn’t one slice of Him sitting beside His justice. So the names aren’t components, and they’re not moods that come and go. Think of white light passing through a prism. The colours are real. The light was never divided.
- God names Himself inside history. Herman Bavinck, the Dutch theologian, made the point sharply: strictly speaking God has no name, because a name marks a thing off from other things, and God cannot be marked off. Yet He has many names, because He has acted and spoken among us. Names attach to deeds. Geerhardus Vos called this progressive revelation—not God changing, but God unveiling Himself chapter by chapter, as His people were made ready to bear it.
And there’s a limit, marked out in Scripture itself: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deuteronomy 29:29). What we know of God is true. It’s never everything.
Three Kinds of Names—and Three Things That Aren’t Names
Bavinck sorted the names into three groups, and the sorting is worth keeping in our heads as we read.
| KIND OF NAME | WHAT IT DOES | EXAMPLES |
|---|---|---|
| Proper names | God tells us what to call Him | Elohim, El Shaddai, Yahweh, Adonai |
| Essential names | God named by what He is | Holy, eternal, good, jealous |
| Personal names | The names God bears in Himself, eternally, apart from creation | Father, Son, Holy Spirit |
Popular lists also blur three different things. A proper name is God’s own self-introduction. A title describes His office—King, Judge, Shepherd. A metaphor paints a picture—Rock, Shield, Consuming Fire, Ancient of Days. All three are true and all three are Scripture. Only the first is a name in the strict sense.
One further distinction is usually skipped. Several famous “names of God”—Yahweh Jireh, Yahweh Shalom, Yahweh Nissi—were never spoken by God at all. They’re altar names, given by men who’d just been rescued and wanted the place to remember it. That doesn’t make them any less precious. It does, however, mean we don’t treat them as though God had introduced Himself that way.
Elohim, and the El Names
Elohim is the ordinary Hebrew word for God, and the first name in the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Its root carries the idea of strength. It’s grammatically plural but takes singular verbs—a plural of majesty, rather like saying the fullness of God.
Does that plural prove the Trinity? Here we must be careful, because the claim is everywhere online and it’s weaker than it looks. Calvin himself, commenting on Genesis, judged the argument from the plural noun too flimsy to press against an opponent. The plural verbs are more suggestive—”Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26)—but the doctrine of the Trinity doesn’t stand on Hebrew grammar. It stands on the whole shape of revelation, and above all on the Son and the Spirit as we meet them in the New Testament. A doctrine this weighty deserves better foundations than a suffix.
El is the shorter, older form, and it rarely travels alone. It picks up a companion word from the moment of encounter.
| NAME | MEANING | WHERE IT APPEARS, AND WHAT IT MEANT |
|---|---|---|
| El Elyon | God Most High | Genesis 14:18–22. Melchizedek’s God, and not a local deity—the owner of heaven and earth. |
| El Shaddai | God Almighty | Genesis 17:1. The covenant name of the wandering years, spoken to a childless old man. |
| El Olam | The Everlasting God | Genesis 21:33. Abraham plants a tree in land he does not own and worships the God who outlasts it. |
| El Roi | The God who sees me | Genesis 16:13. Spoken by Hagar, pregnant and alone in the desert. |
| El Gibbor | Mighty God | Isaiah 9:6. Applied, astonishingly, to a child who is born. |
| El Qanna | Jealous God | Exodus 34:14. Not petty envy, but a husband’s refusal to share his wife. |
The origin of El Shaddai is genuinely uncertain. Scholars have proposed “mountain”, “the sufficient one”, and a root meaning breast or nourisher. What’s not uncertain is its setting: it’s the name God uses when He promises a 99-year-old man a son.
El Roi deserves a pause too. It’s the one name in Scripture given to God by a human being and left standing in the text—and the human being is an Egyptian slave, running away from a household that had used her. The first person in the Bible to name God is an exploited, runaway slave. That’s not an accident.
The Name at the Burning Bush
Moses asks the obvious question. If I go to Israel and say their God has sent me, they will want his name—what do I tell them?
The answer is unlike anything else in Scripture: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). In Hebrew, ehyeh asher ehyeh, built on the verb “to be”. From it comes the four-letter name YHWH, which we usually pronounce Yahweh, and which Jewish readers for centuries have treated as too holy to say out aloud.
Unpack it slowly, because a great deal of theology is folded inside.
- God isn’t defined by anything outside Himself. Every other thing that exists is explained by something else. God is explained by God. Theologians call this aseity—being from Himself.
- God doesn’t change. He wasn’t younger once. He won’t be wiser later. The name is a verb of pure being, in the present tense, permanently.
- God keeps His word. He immediately calls this his name “forever” and ties it to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Exodus 3:15).
Yahweh is above all the covenant name—the name of the God who remembers His promises across centuries.
John Frame summed up God’s lordship in three words that are hard to improve on: control, authority, presence. Yahweh runs the world, has the right to command it, and is with His people. All three arrive in that one name.
Why Our Bibles Print LORD in Capitals—and Where “Jehovah” Came From
That leaves a puzzle. God tells Moses: “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the LORD I did not make myself known to them” (Exodus 6:3). Yet Genesis uses Yahweh freely. Had the patriarchs never heard the syllables? The answer lies in how the Bible uses the word “know”. To know a name in Hebrew thought is to have experienced what it stands for. The patriarchs held the promise; they had not yet seen the rescue that filled the name up. They knew the word. They had not yet watched the sea open.
God Names Himself Where His People Are Hurting
Once Yahweh is given, it begins to combine—and the pattern is worth noticing. Almost every compound was minted at a moment of need.
| NAME | MEANING | WHEN IT WAS GIVEN |
|---|---|---|
| Yahweh Jireh | The LORD will provide | A ram caught in a thicket (Genesis 22:14) |
| Yahweh Rapha | The LORD who heals | Bitter water made sweet (Exodus 15:26) |
| Yahweh Nissi | The LORD is my banner | An altar after battle (Exodus 17:15) |
| Yahweh Shalom | The LORD is peace | A terrified Gideon (Judges 6:24) |
| Yahweh Mekoddishkem | The LORD who sanctifies you | The gift of the Sabbath (Exodus 31:13) |
| Yahweh Sabaoth | The LORD of hosts | Armies of heaven at his command (1 Samuel 1:3) |
| Yahweh Raah | The LORD is my shepherd | A shepherd king’s psalm (Psalm 23:1) |
| Yahweh Tsidkenu | The LORD our righteousness | A promised righteous king (Jeremiah 23:6) |
| Yahweh Shammah | The LORD is there | The name of the city to come (Ezekiel 48:35) |
Two of these carry unusual weight.
Yahweh Tsidkenu promises the righteousness we need will be given to us rather than produced by us—the seed of what the New Testament calls justification.
And Yahweh Shammah is the very last phrase of Ezekiel: the new city is named simply for the fact that God is present in it. The story is heading towards a place, and the place is named after him.
A Timeline When Each Name Is Unveiled
- At the time of the patriarchs—El Shaddai. God is strong enough to keep a promise nobody can yet see.
- At the Exodus—Yahweh. The promise-keeper acts, and a nation is redeemed.
- At the time of the prophets—the Holy One of Israel. Set apart, and stubbornly committed to a people who keep failing.
- At the incarnation—Immanuel, Jesus, Lord. The name walks into the room.
- In the new creation—Yahweh Shammah. God with His people, permanently.
The Name Above Every Name
Now the strands come together, and the joining is the most daring move in the Bible.
The Greek Old Testament had rendered YHWH as Kyrios, Lord. The apostles then take that word and apply it, deliberately and repeatedly, to Jesus of Nazareth. In Isaiah 45:23 God swears by Himself that every knee will bow to Him, and insists He shares His glory with no one; Paul quotes it in Philippians 2:9–11, and the knees bow to Jesus. Joel promises everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved; Paul quotes it in Romans 10:13, and the name is Jesus. These aren’t loose allusions. They’re the strongest one-God texts in the Old Testament, applied to a crucified, risen man.
His own name says it too. Yeshua means “Yahweh saves”, which is exactly the reason the angel states: “you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Beside it stands Immanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23).
Jesus also used the burning-bush name of Himself. “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). The reaction tells us the Jews immediately got the message: they figured He was claiming to be the great ‘I am’, and readily picked up stones. In the garden, (John 18:6) when the arresting party asks Him His name, He tells them He is the ‘I am’. What happens next is vindication for the name: they drew back and fell to the ground.
Two more names complete the picture.
- Abba. Jesus prays it in Gethsemane, and by the Spirit it becomes ours (Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15). James Barr showed grown sons used Abba of their fathers. It’s warm and respectful at once, which is precisely the posture of a Christian at prayer.
- The one name of the three. “Baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Notice the singular: one name, three persons. These are what Bavinck termed personal names—not roles God took up for our benefit, but who God has always been.
How Are We to Handle the Name?
The third commandment is usually read as a rule about swearing. The Westminster Larger Catechism reads it far more widely: it covers empty profession, careless use of God’s name in prayer and singing, and a life that carries His name while denying it. To take the name in vain is to pick it up and do nothing with it.
Two errors are worth naming plainly, because both are common.
The positive use is everywhere in Scripture, and it’s in prayer. “The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe” (Proverbs 18:10). “And those who know your name put their trust in you” (Psalm 9:10). The names were given to be called upon.
The Name He Will Write on Us
The Bible’s last pages turn the whole thing around. God spends 66 books telling us His name. At the end, He gives us one: a white stone with a new name written on it (Revelation 2:17), His own name written on the one who conquers (Revelation 3:12), and finally—”They will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads” (Revelation 22:4).
That is why He has so many names. Not because He is complicated, but because He is inexhaustible, and because He wanted to be known. Every name is another sentence in a very long introduction—and the introduction ends with His name written on our foreheads.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
Are Allah and the God of the Bible the same God?
The word itself isn’t the problem. Arabic-speaking Christians were using Allah for God long before Islam existed. And the word is a cousin of the Hebrew Elohim. Arabic Bibles still use it, and they’re right to. But shared vocabulary isn’t shared identity. The God of the Bible is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and He redeemed the world through a crucified and risen Son—both of which the Qur’an explicitly denies. Two people can use the same word and still be describing different beings, and here the difference goes to the very centre.
Is it wrong to say “Yahweh” aloud? Must Christians use the Hebrew name “Yahshua”?
Jewish avoidance of the divine name grew from reverence, not from a command in Scripture. Nowhere does God forbid His people to pronounce His name; the third commandment forbids using it emptily, which is a different matter. The Sacred Name movement goes further and insists only Hebrew forms—”Yahshua”, for instance—are acceptable. That claim fails twice over. “Yahshua” isn’t a form found in the Hebrew, and the apostles themselves wrote in Greek and called him Iesous. If the Holy Spirit was content to inspire the Greek name, we may safely use our own languages too.
Why did God refuse to give his name to Jacob and to Manoah?
In Genesis 32:29 Jacob asks his opponent for a name and is refused. In Judges 13:18 the angel of the LORD answers Manoah, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?” In the ancient world, to know a name was to have some hold over the one who bore it—the assumption behind every magical text of the period. God will not be handled that way. He gives His name as a gift, at the time He chooses, and never as something extracted from Him. That’s exactly what makes the burning bush so remarkable: the name that could not be seized was freely offered.
Does the Bible have a set number of names for God, like the Jewish 72 or the Islamic 99?
Scripture never counts. The lists you find—72 in some Jewish traditions, 99 in Islam, 7 or 16 in popular Christian books—are all later attempts to tidy the material up. Tidying isn’t wrong in itself, and a list can be a useful teaching tool. The danger is treating a fixed number as though it were revealed, which encourages the idea that we can collect the names and so complete our knowledge of God. We cannot.
Did Israel’s God begin as a Canaanite deity called El?
Critical scholars have argued Israel took over a Canaanite high god and gradually merged him with a desert deity named Yahweh, pointing to shared vocabulary and to inscriptions such as those at Kuntillet Ajrud. Israel repeatedly did mix the worship of Yahweh with the religion of its neighbours, and the prophets spent centuries attacking exactly that. Evidence of corruption isn’t evidence of origin. Shared language is what we’d expect when the true God speaks to real people in a real culture—He used their words, and then filled them with His own meaning.
Does praying “in Jesus’ name” make a prayer more powerful?
It’s not a password, and adding it to the end of a sentence changes nothing by itself. To pray in Jesus’ name means to pray on His authority rather than our own merit, and in line with His character and will. That’s why the phrase can be perfectly present and the prayer still go unanswered: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly” (James 4:3). Understood properly, the phrase is a great comfort. It means a sinner may approach God confidently, not because the words are correct, but because the Son who died is the one presenting the request.
Why does the Bible always call God “He”? Is God male?
God is spirit, without body, parts, or passions, and so He isn’t male in any biological sense; maleness and femaleness are both creaturely things, and God created both. Scripture does sometimes compare His care to a mother’s—”As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you” (Isaiah 66:13). But there’s a firm line between a comparison and a name. God is likened to a mother; He is never called Mother. He named Himself Father, and Jesus taught us to pray that way, and the pronouns of Scripture follow. Since these words were revealed to us rather than chosen by us, they’re not ours to revise.
Related Reads
- Is Jesus Yahweh? Answering Unitarian Objections
- Exodus 33:23 Explained: Why Moses Saw Only God’s Back
- Exodus 34:14: What Does It Mean that God’s Name Is Jealous?
- The Gender of God in the Bible: Is God the Father Male?
- Why Do Christians Call God ‘Father’?
- Attributes of God: Communicable and Incommunicable Explained
