Elyon

Elyon (Biblical Hebrew עליון; Masoretic ʿElyōn) is an epithet of the God of the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible. ʾĒl ʿElyōn is usually rendered in English as "God Most High", and similarly in the Septuagint as "Ο ΘΕΟΣ Ο ΥΨΙΣΤΟΣ" ("God the highest").

The critical scholar and Reform rabbi Abraham Geiger in the 19th century asserted that Elyōn was a word of late origin, dating it to the time of the Maccabees. However, its use in the Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria) tablets has proven it to be pre-Mosaic (Hertz 1936).

The term also has mundane uses, such as "" (where the ending in both roots is a locative, not superlative or comparative), "top", or "uppermost", referring simply to the position of objects (e.g. applied to a basket in Genesis 40.17 or to a chamber in Ezekiel 42.5).

Marvin H. Pope in his 1955 book, "El in the Ugaritic texts," states, "Elyon is not mentioned in the Ugaritic texts,..." He qualifies this by observing that "the texts so far exliumed are surely only a small portion of the original corpus of Ugaritic mythological text... and notes that "The only thing that might possibly be a reminiscence of Elyon in the extant Ugaritic texts is the epithet cly 20) applied to Baal, II K III 6, 8. The name cly appears to be identical with Elyon, except for the •on af formative 21 ), and it may be that both forms originally designated the same deity, the grandfather of El."

The compound name 'Ēl ʿElyōn 'God Most High' occurs in Genesis 14.18–20 as the God whose priest was Melchizedek king of Salem. The form appears again almost immediately in verse 22, used by Abraham in an oath to the King of Sodom. In this verse the name of God also occurs in apposition to Ēl ʿElyōn in the Masoretic text but is absent in the Samaritan version, in the Septuagint translation, and in Symmachus.

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