Quora Answer: Why Did They Change the Name of God to “Allah”?

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ 

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why did they change the Name of God to “Allah” if it was the same prophet as in the Old Testament?” 

You have forgotten that the Old Testament was not written in English.  It was not even written in a Germanic or Romance language.  That means the Name, “God”, does not actually appear in the text.  The word “god” is Germanic in origin, “gott”, meaning “to invoke”.  It came into the English language in the 6th century, from the Codex Argenteus. 

In Aramaic, the language of much of the earlier gospels, and the language Jesus (a.s.) likely spoke, the word for “God”, depending on the sentence structure and tense, was “Ilaha”, or “Alaha”.  Arabic, being the related language, used “Allah”.  In Hebrew, it is “Elohim”, which is the pluralised form of “Eloh”, or “Eloha”.  This means the Qur’an’s use of “Allah” is very close to the original word used by the prophets and others in the Tanakh, and the rest of the Old Testament.  So, why did they change the Name of Allah to “God” in the Old Testament?



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