The True Arabs
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God is also a proper name in English. Not 'the god', not 'a god' which are titiles but just 'god' which we capitalize out of respect like all names, hence 'God'. When you say 'Oh God' you are saying the exact equivalent of 'Ya Allahu' when you say 'Oh you god' speaking to any god (maybe a god of the greeks or someone who thinks of himself as a god), you say 'Ya ayuhaal-ilaah' or Yaa ilaahaaah or Waa ilaaahaah. To give a confirmig example, if you say 'Oh grief!' that is 'yaa hasrataaah.' If you say 'Oh you man' you say 'yaa ayuhaar-rajul'. God and Allah are proper names that we humans gave to the Creator. They are good names with some solid etymological logic and they only express the idea of the creator, who would exist whether we gave him a name or not.
Godbless,
Anwar -
Peace,
As for Elohim, I liken this word to al-kaa'inaat in Arabic. Al-kaa'inaat is also a name of Allah. If you translate it literally you will get 'the many female things that exist'. But this is wrong. The plural form in Arabic and the female have a way of emphasizing singular masculine things. Look at Allahumma. Look at the royal plurals. Like antum for anta and even hum for huwa. Look at khalifah which is an empasis of khalif. And there are more.These are somewhat rare and are extreme cases but they still DO surface. So al-kaa'inaat is like saying 'the great and magnficent being.' I think Hebrew has some similar linguistic patterns and Elohim is probably an emphatic form of Eloh.
As Jafar said the linguistic etymology of Yahweh/Jehovah is 'he who was, is and will be.'
By the way if you haven't read the savethetruearabs page please do. This stuff comes directly from the dictionaries and puts the other stuff about white Muhammad (God bless him) into context. If he was white (or if his underarms were white) and he (or his underarms) was a wheat brown color. As the Arabs when they referred to very white individuals like the northern Persians or The Romans from the Turkish area they used the word 'red.' Check it out
http//www.savethetruearabs.blogspot.com/
Godbless,
Anwar -
Peace,
Actually the word Elohim is found in the Quran. I mean exactly 'Elohim'!!!
I don't know why the Quran quotes foreign words as it is! As if the author (apparently) is mindlessly copying ancient texts with complete disregard of the actual meaning of the word.
The word Elohim in the midst of Arabic is nonsense. What does it signify? What is relation of Elohim to Allah?
The more I try to defend the Quran, the more I realize that it is the ultimate spin. brickwall
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Where is God? We are the ones stumbling in the darkness here!
God is incorporeal, which means He's everywhere...
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Allahumma is NOT Elohim Rami. It is Allahumma and I actually did a good job of explaining its possible origins. Please do not insult the Quran or your intelligence by stating such things as Allahumma is Elohim and the Quran is a spin off. Go to a good Arabic dictionary and look up the word. The word is actually pre-Quranic Arabic and it only means yaa allah.
Godbless,
Anwar -
Allahumma is NOT Elohim Rami. It is Allahumma and I actually did a good job of explaining its possible origins. Please do not insult the Quran or your intelligence by stating such things as Allahumma is Elohim and the Quran is a spin off. Go to a good Arabic dictionary and look up the word. The word is actually pre-Quranic Arabic and it only means yaa allah.
Godbless,
AnwarAllahuma is not Elohim. Hmm. How did you know that? Did you use post Quranic dictionaries??
I will give you another one. The Tawrat and Injil. These words are not arabic and they have Arabic counterparts...why did the Quran use the foreign words rather than translating them ? ???
And yet another one, Jahannum is Ge-hinnom or the valley of the sons of Hinnom. Why is the Quran using a foreign word of a place south of Jerusalem to describe the fire??
So I am not insulting my intelligence at all. I am just stating the obvious.
peace
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Rami,
The Quran has plenty of loan words. These words usually refer to cultural concepts or words that come from outside of the peninsula. Sundus for silk and istabraq for brocade are both old persian loan words. firdaws is from the greek word for paradise. Qirtaas is from the greek word for paper or parchment. You can doubt the post-Quranic dictionaries if you want. I think they did a good job of documenting early Islamic and pre-Quranic Arabic (by the way these are 99.9% the same). You ask why the Quran borrowed these words, but your question is very wrong. The Quran didn't borrow them Pre-Islamic Arabic did. Israelites came to the area and words like Jahannam (which may have more of an Aramaic origin) entered the language. Same goes for all of those other loan words. But what you do find are the purely Arabic equivalents also found in the language. Al-Jahimu also means Hell (literally fire). Al-Jannah is also used to describe paradise (firdaws). So these words entered Arabic through Greek and Aramaic influences from the Christian and Jewis communities settled in Arabia but the Quran still shows itself fully capable of describing these things without these Arabicized loan words. Remember Arabic took them on BEFORE the Quran. For you to say Elohim and Allahumma are the same thing is a baseless conjecture. Allah is of a completely separate origin and purely Arabic etymology than Eloh. And the im ending in Hebrew corresponds to the eena ending in Arabic. So it should be Ilaaheena if it were a borrowing and not Allahumma. But I will be researching this further. I will let you know if I discover that you are correct. I will tell you why you are wrong if the dictionaries confirm what I have come to know so far.
Godbless,
Anwar -
So there is no such thing as a pure Arabic vocabulary but there is a pure Arabic tongue. The tongue of the Quran is Arabic but the vocabulary is a mixture. So the vocabulary comes from everywhere (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic etc). So any vocab is usually a composite but the tongue is unique.
This could be the answer to the puzzle.
Anwar's explanation is acceptable.
Peace.