God

The Hebrew Bible names God by multiple distinct words. The most common are:

• YHWH (יהוה) — the personal name, ~6,828 occurrences. Rendered "the LORD" in most English Bibles. The Tetragrammaton.
• Elohim (אֱלֹהִים) — the generic word for "God" or "gods" (grammatically plural; takes singular verbs when referring to Israel's God). ~2,600 occurrences.
• Adonai (אֲדֹנָי) — "my Lord." The spoken substitute for YHWH in Jewish reading practice.
• El, El Shaddai, El Elyon — older Semitic divine names retained in specific passages (Genesis 17:1; 14:18–20).
• YHWH Sabaoth ("the LORD of hosts") — common in the prophets, especially Isaiah and the post-exilic books.

The distinction between YHWH and Elohim has been a centrepiece of source-critical biblical scholarship since the 18th century — what scholars call the "documentary hypothesis" identifies passages that prefer one term over the other and proposes underlying compositional layers. The fact of the lexical distinction is undisputed; what to make of it remains debated.

Theophanies — moments when God appears in a visible form — are scattered through the Hebrew Bible: the burning bush (Exodus 3); the wrestling figure who meets Jacob at Peniel (Genesis 32); the cloud and fire that lead Israel through the wilderness; the chariot-throne vision of Ezekiel 1; the "still small voice" of 1 Kings 19. The text records these in concrete imagery; what mode of presence is described is debated.

The New Testament adds Greek vocabulary: theos (θεός, "God") is the standard term; kyrios (κύριος, "Lord") inherits the Septuagint's substitution for YHWH and is applied also to Jesus in passages that scholars read as deliberately deploying the YHWH-substitution. The Greek-language Christian tradition's vocabulary for God is shaped by these translation choices as much as by its own theology.