did god had any name before naming himself 'allah'?
It would do Abrahamic believers a world of good to research the origins of the name of the God they call YHWH in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic because then they might get over the rather unhistorical mythology that these names are somehow pristine without pagan predecessors which is decidedly not the case.
Take YHWH for example. "YHWH" is the dressed up in a magic tuxedo name for the old Egyptian name of Yah, Yaw or Yahwu, Yahwe in its Canaanite form.
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The Midian-Egyptian connection to the origin of Yahweh
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Yah[/FONT]
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Moon-god.[/FONT]
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"In its earliest attestations the name Yah refers to the moon as satellite of the earth. Yah then becomes conceptualised as a lunar deity, iconographically anthropomorphic but whose manifestations, from the hieroglyphic evidence, can include the crescent of the new moon, the ibis and the falcon- comparable to the other moon deities, Thoth and Khonsu. It is probable that contact with Middle Eastern states in Palestine, Syria and Babylonia was instrumental in the development of Yah as a deity. Certainly the zenith of Yah's popularity lay in the period following the Middle Kingdom when immigration from the Levant was high and princes from Palestine, knoiwn as the Hyksos, rulers, dominated Egypt. These foreigners may well have looked for a lunardeity analogous to the Akkadian moon-god Sin who had an important temple at Harran in north Syria. Strangely, it is with the Theban royal family eventually responsible for the expulsion of these alien rulers that there is a difinite inclination for names involving the mood-god Yah. The daughter of Seqenenre Tao I (Dynasty XVII) is Yah-hotep ('Yah is content'). The founder of Dynasty XVIII was called Yahmose ('Yah is born') and the same element is in the nameo f his wife Yahmose-Nefertari. Most likely the Middle Eastern deity who gave the stimulus to the adoption of Yah is the influence behind the name Kamose, the brother of Yahmose, who began the final thrust against the Hyksos domination. Kamose ('the bull is born') might be the Egyptian equivalent of the epithet applied to Sin describing him as a 'young bull... with strong horns' (i.e. the tips of the crescent moon). This imagery would be totally compatible with the Egyptian concept of the pharaoh as an invinvible bull. In the tomb of Tuthmosis III (Dynasty XVII), the pharaoh whose campaigns took him to the banks of the Euphrates river, there is a scene where the king is accompanied by his mother and three queens, including Sit-Yah 'daughter of the moon-god'. Traces of his cult beyond this period are sporadic."[/FONT]
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Yah, was the name of the god of the Midians into which Moses supposedly married by marrying the daughter of a Midian priest. Yah was also the name of the desert god worshipped by the Bedoins. It is likely this name is the same one Canaanites applied to Yamm as Yaw or Yawu. See below:[/FONT]
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Yahti, was the name of the Egyptian Father god. Hebrew monotheism followed the trail blazed by Pharaoh Akenaton who overthrew all the Egyptian gods and goddesses substituting his Aten (only god) Ra (sun god) or Amen (hidden god) Ra as the only god there is. There is considerable evidence linking the story of Moses to Egyptians priests and "habiru" outcasts forced to flee Egypt when the Semitic (read Canaanite) Hyksos Pharaohs lost power then later when Akenaton and his monotheistic revolution went sour.
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There is a Canaanite cuniform text where the top God, EL Elyon, or God Most High, renames the Canaanite sea and river and judgment god, Yamm, Yah or Yahwe. This renaming forms the basis of the Hebrew name for the tribe of Benjamin which literally means "Sons of Yamm" and not "Sons of my right hand" as Jewish makeover wants to claim. (Hebrew reinvention of borrowed pagan names is typical of Abrahamic makeovers of pagan religious ideas and language, e.g. "Moses" in Hebrew meaning drawn out of water as if all those Egyptian pharaoh's names that have "moses" in them were somehow disconnected to Egyptian origins, e.g. "EL Elyon" becomes disassociated from His Canaanite roots through being subsumed into Yahweh in the Moses story, i.e. a Hebrew makeover of the Canaanite deity. Allah too has this sort of pagan history.
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But to think God is limited even in names of the languages of ancient Near Eastern communities is to limit God. For instance, I am a Christian in America who 30 years ago was woken out of my atheist slumber of 35 years to the reality of God and the spiritual truth that is held within the Christian traditions, learned to my astonishment 19 years later that the name of God who had given me such a crash course in God's spiritual reality was not the Old World Near Eastern name for God but the New World Native American name Wakan Tanka, the Lakota peoples' name for God. How did I find this out? By God arranging "signs" or synchronicity events in my life to teach me spiritual truths which is the way I learned that God's influence on my life was real. God sealed this knowledge when my daughter married a local young man as European-American looking as most Americans only to discover a few years later this white boy was a direct descendant of the Lakota's most honored spiritual warrior leader, Sitting Bull. Now I have grandkids who are a 16th Lakota and I am now working with the Lakota tribes on an economic development project to reacquire ancestral lands. Only God could so arrange one's life experiences so when I hear that "Allah" is the Name of God or YHWH it is just sort of silly to me. God comes to one in whatever way God comes.
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