What is "elyon"

Elyon ( Biblical Hebrew ; Masoretic ; traditionally rendered in Samaritan as illiyyon) is an epithet of the God of the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible. 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 "upper" (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).