The family tree
of the word

The fuller story

The word Muslims, Arab Christians and Arabic-speaking Jews use for God did not appear from nowhere. It belongs to a family of words more than four thousand years old, shared by the Semitic languages of the Middle East. Hebrew Elohim, Aramaic Alāhā and Arabic Allāh are cousins.

The root: ʾil-

Linguists reconstruct an ancient Semitic word, ʾil-, meaning “god”. Every branch of the family kept it.

• Akkadian, the language of Babylon and Assyria and one of the oldest written languages, has ilum, “god”, on clay tablets from the third millennium BCE.
• Ugaritic, from the city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast (about 1400–1200 BCE), has ʾil, the name of the chief god of its pantheon, and ʾilhm for “gods”.
• Hebrew has El, as in Isra-el, Beth-el and the title El Shaddai, “God Almighty”; Eloah, a poetic singular found most often in the book of Job; and Elohim, the word in the Bible's first sentence: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
• Aramaic, the language of much of the ancient Near East and of parts of Daniel and Ezra, has Elāh; its Christian form, Syriac, has Alāhā, still used in Syriac and Assyrian church prayers.
• Arabic has ilāh, “a god”; al-ilāh, “the God”; and Allāh.

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The word Jesus used

Jesus (peace be upon him) spoke Aramaic. The Gospels keep his cry from the cross in his own language: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Matthew gives it as “Eli, Eli” (27:46). The word is the Aramaic cousin of Arabic ilāh.

One God, plural grammar

Elohim looks plural: the ending -im usually makes plurals in Hebrew. When it means the God of Israel, though, it takes singular verbs, as in “Elohim created” (singular), and scholars call it a plural of majesty or fullness. The same word can mean “gods” elsewhere, just as Ugaritic ʾilhm does. Context decides.

From al-ilāh to Allāh

Most scholars explain Allāh as a contraction of al-ilāh, “the God”, the way al-ilāt, “the goddess”, became Allāt. Over time it worked as God's own name. In Arabic, Allāh has no plural and no feminine. The Christian lintel at Zabad (512 CE) already uses the form with the article, a century before Islam.

A separate family

Greek Theos, Latin Deus and English God come from different roots. Deus comes from an old Indo-European word linked to the bright sky. The origin of Theos is debated. English God is a Germanic word of uncertain origin; one suggestion is “the one who is called upon”. Different roots, but translators used them all for the same God of Abraham. Maltese Catholics say Alla, and Bibles in Malay and Indonesian use Allah, a usage that goes back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

What scholars debate

• Where Allāh comes from. The contraction of al-ilāh is the majority view. A minority, associated with Gerhard Böwering, suggests it was borrowed from Syriac Alāhā. Nicolai Sinai and David Kiltz think it more likely that the common Semitic word simply took an Arabic shape.
• What classical Arabic grammarians said. Some, of the Basra school, held that Allāh is not derived from anything: a proper name of God alone. Others linked it to roots meaning “lofty” or “hidden”, or to a word for what is beyond understanding. Many Muslims prefer this view: the name is unique, as its Owner is.
• Whether a shared word means a shared God. Linguistics can show that words are related. It cannot settle what each faith means by them. That question belongs to theology, and each faith answers it in its own words.

Reflect

Your name came to you through a family. What do you think it tells, and what does it not tell, about who you are? Does the same hold for the names people use for God?

• W. Herrmann, “El”, in K. van der Toorn, B. Becking and P. W. van der Horst (eds), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd edn (Brill, 1999).
• Nicolai Sinai, Rain-Giver, Bone-Breaker, Score-Settler: Allāh in Pre-Quranic Poetry (American Oriental Society, 2019), pp. 7–8.
• Gerhard Böwering, “God and his Attributes”, Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, vol. 2 (Brill, 2002).
• “Allah”, Wikipedia (etymology; Maltese and Malay/Indonesian use; Kiltz 2012): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah (read 8 Nov 2026).
• Genesis 1:1 (JPS 1917); Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46 (World English Bible).