Some Muslims say Allah is the Arabic word for God; so the word Allah can be used by non-Muslims to refer to their own religious concept of God. Others vehemently oppose this. They maintain that no believing Muslim should translate the English sentence ‘Zeus is a Greek God.’ as ‘Zeus is a Greek Allah’. It is absurd, sacrilegious, and an affront to Islam. Allah is the name of the one and only God; and not just a word. There are 176 names of Greek Gods and Goddess; and none of them equal Allah.

Jews have one very special name for God (YHVH) that is untranslatable; and has not even been pronounced verbally out loud by Jews for the last 2300 years.

In the days of Abraham, the religions of the Near East and India had hundreds of gods, and so had hundreds of different names for their gods. But for the monotheistic religions that trace their prophets back to Prophet Abraham, and his two sons Ishmael and Isaac, the many names of God are not really names of God: they simply describe different aspects or attributes of the one God’s multifaceted personality.

For monotheists the many names of God are just appellations: titles and descriptions. Thus, to say that God is a King or a Judge describes one of many ways the one God acts. To say that God is the Compassionate One is to describe one of the many character or personality traits of the one God.

So for monotheists each of the many ‘names’ of the one God is only one of the many appellations of the one universal creator of space and time; both Islam and Judaism also have one special Divine name that is always in the believer’s heart and soul.

Because the Qur’an is filled with beautiful Arabic poetry; it is not surprising that the Qur’an is also filled with so many (99) ‘names’ of the one God.

Because the Jewish tradition dates back more than thirty five centuries; it is not surprising that Jews have used many additional ‘names’ (70) for God over those many centuries.

The word God in English is not a name of the one God like Allah or YHVH. It is the generic term used for any and every deity, similar to the West Semitic root word EL as it is found in Sumerian and Akkadian Ellil-Enlil; Hittite and Hurrian Ellel, and Hebrew El-Elohim. The words El, Elah, Elohei and Elohim are all pre Abrahamic West Semitic generic terms for a God or for many Gods. In these various forms they appear almost 3,000 times in the Hebrew Bible.

But for Jews, the most important unique personal name of the one God is the name that God himself reveals to Moses at the burning bush: YHVH, which appears more than 6,800 times in the Hebrew Bible.

In Exodus 3:13-15, Moses said to God, “If I go to the Israelites and tell them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’—what should I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh”.

Ehyeh is the verb “to be” future tense singular and means I will/could/might/may be/become who I may/could/will/might be/become i.e. Ehyeh is The God of Potentialities, The God of Possibilities, The Living God of Becoming and Transforming, the One who can and will liberate Israel........

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