Or better yet, for the linguists.
According to
Dictionary.com, whose etymologies I have found to be accurate and even to fairly cover controversial word origins, the English word "god" (which has obvious cognates in all the Germanic languages, from German
Gott to old Norse
guð) clearly goes all the way back to Proto-Germanic
guthan. And BTW it is not related to "good"; the similarity is an accident of phonetic development and the chaotic evolution of English spelling.
This takes it back more than a thousand years before the Roman priests brought Christianity to the "barbarian" tribes of Europe, to a time when even the pre-Roman Latin people were a Neolithic tribe who had never heard of the God of Abraham.
P-G
guthan is derived from Proto-Indo-European
ghut, "that which is invoked," which also survives in Sanskrit
huta, one of the names of the god Indra. It is an inflected form of the verb
gheu, "to invoke." But some etymologists link it instead to
ghu, "poured," which may have come to refer to the spirit soaked into a burial mound.
The various branches and sub-branches of the Indo-European family have different words for "god," indicating that the tribes developed the concept some time after the diaspora out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe began in the 2nd millennium BCE. The original tribe may have had a typical Stone Age animist outlook, ascribing spirits to many living and inanimate objects, rather than focusing on supreme beings that look and behave like people.The word is in the very first sentence in the very first book of the Old Testament: "In the beginning God created..." This is a translation of the Hebrew word
eloh which occurs in various inflections, although, oddly enough, most often in the plural,
elohim. It is a cognate of Arabic
Allah; Hebrew and Arabic are closely related languages in the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, which also includes the Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian and Omotic branches.
The Hebrew word
יהוה (
YHWH, the four letters known as the
tetragrammaton) is also used, and is customarily translated into English as "Lord." Its origin is murky. Since vowels are not phonemic in the Afro-Asiatic languages they are written in abjads, phonetic writing systems with no vowels, and therefore we have no clue as to the pronunciation of YHWH. The Jews believe that to actually speak that name is blasphemy, so they have avoided attempting to find the authentic vowels. In Hebrew it is always rendered as
Yahweh, apparently because in the distant past some foolhardy scholar dared to say it aloud and was not turned into a pillar of salt, proving that it was safely incorrect. The Romans, with no Y or W, rendered it as
Iehouah, whimsically inserting vowels of their own choosing, which also have proven not to be the correct ones. This has come down to us in the modern Roman alphabet as Jehovah, to which we apply the modern English pronunciation of the letters, and to this very day no one has been struck dead for speaking the name, so we've all been very lucky.
[Excuse my un-scholarly muddling of Latin U and V, to highlight the evolution of the spelling of YHWH.]
