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356 of mystery and by medieval times became a code word for kabbalistic mysticism. Early Greek and Latin translators of the Hebrew Bible rendered Shaddai as "omnipotent," leading to the rendering of El Shaddai in the King James translation as "God Almighty" when the epithet appears in the tales of the Patriarchs (e.g. "And Yahweh appeared unto Abram and said to him: 'l am El Shaddai; walk before me and be thou perfect’," in Genesis 17:1), or in Ezekiel, in Psalms, or sev- eral times in other books of the Bible. Advances in the study of Akkadian in recent years suggest that the Hebrew word is related to shaddu, which means "mountain" in Akkadian; so that El Shaddai simply means "God of mountains." That this is a correct understanding of the biblical term is indicated by an incident reported in I Kings chapter 20. The Arameans, who were defeated in an attempt to invade Israel (Samaria), recouped their losses and a year later planned a second attack. To win this time, the Aramaean king's generals suggested that a ruse be used to lure the Israelites out of their mountain strongholds to a bat- tlefield in the coastal plains. "Their god is a god of moun- tains," the generals told the king, "and that is why they prevailed over us; but if we shall fight them in a plain, we shall be the stronger ones." Now, there is no way that Enlil could have been called, or reputed to be, a "god of mountains," for there are no mountains in the great plain that was (and still is) Mesopota- mia. In the Enlilite domains the land that was called "Moun- tainland" was Asia Minor to the north, beginning with the Taurus ("Bull") mountains; and that was the region of Adad, Enid's youngest son. His Sumerian name was ISH.KUR (and his "cult animal" was the bull), which meant "He of the mountainland.". The Sumerian ISH was rendered shaddu in Akkadian; so that Il Shaddu became the biblical El Shaddai. Scholars speak of Adad, whom the Hittites called Teshub (see Fig. 80) as a "storm god," always depicted with a light- ning, thundering, and windblowing, and thus the god of rains. The Bible credited Yahweh with similar attributes. "When Yahweh uttereth His voice," Jeremiah said (10:13), "there is a rumbling of waters in the skies and storms come from the ends of the earth; He maketh lightnings with the rain, DIVINE ENCOUNTERS