Yaldabaoth, sometimes spelled Jaldabaoth or Ialdabaoth (; Koine Greek: Ιαλδαβαώθ, romanized: Ialdabaóth; Latin: Ialdabaoth; Coptic: ⲒⲀⲖⲦⲀⲂⲀⲰⲐ Ialtabaôth), is a malevolent god and demiurge (creator of the material world) according to various Gnostic sects, represented sometimes as a theriomorphic, lion-headed serpent. He is identified as a false god who keeps souls trapped in physical bodies, imprisoned in the material universe. The origins of the name Yaldabaoth are heavily debated, with scholars proposing a variety of meanings generally stemming from Hebrew and Aramaic. David M. Litwa traces the myth of Yaldabaoth himself to the practice of interpretatio graeca, which Egyptians of the Ptolemaic Kingdom adopted from the Greeks. They identified traits of Yahweh, the Jewish god, with the Egyptian god Set, whom they considered malevolent. Set's Hellenistic depiction as having a donkey head was used by Egyptians to mock Yahweh and Jews in response to Jews mocking Egyptians as beast worshippers. This concept of Yahweh as an evil donkey-headed god spread among the Greco-Roman world, leading some Gnostics to conceive of Yaldabaoth as an evil version of the Christian god. Depending on the particular Gnostic tradition, Yaldabaoth is considered the son of Sophia. Yaldabaoth works to suppress the divine spark within humans which was instilled by Sophia, as well as demanding that humans acknowledge him as God. Some Gnostic sects regard Yaldabaoth as the God of the Old Testament whom they consider malevolent, as opposed to the good Monad who created the spiritual world, though others consider him incompetent rather than malevolent. Biblical events such as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the Flood, and the crucifixion of Jesus are viewed as punishments by Yaldabaoth upon those who reject him.
Etymology The etymology of the name Yaldabaoth has been subject to many speculative theories. The first etymology was advanced in 1575 by François Feuardent, supposedly translating it from Hebrew to mean Latin: a patribus genitus, lit. 'the child of fathers'. A theory proposed by Jacques Matter in 1828 identified the name as descending from Imperial Aramaic: ילדא, romanized: yāldā, lit. 'child' and Hebrew: בהות, romanized: bahot, a supposed plural form of Biblical Hebrew: בוהו, romanized: bōhu, lit. 'emptiness, darkness'. Matter, however, interpreted it to mean 'chaos', thus translating Yaldabaoth as "child of darkness [...] an element of chaos". This etymology was popular due to its perceived literary merits. It inspired Adolf Bernhard Christoph Hilgenfeld to keep Matter's proposed 'chaos' translation, while fabulating a more plausible sounding, but unattested second noun: בהותא bāhūthā, deriving the name from ילדא בהותא yaldā bāhūthā, supposedly meaning 'child of chaos', in 1884. This and its variants became the majority opinion from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, and were endorsed by Hans-Martin Schenke, de:Alexander Böhlig, and Pahor Labib. This analysis was convincingly deconstructed by Jewish historian of religion Gershom Scholem in 1974, who showed the unattested Aramaic term to have been fabulated and attested only in a single corrupted text from 1859, with its listed translation having been transposed from the reading of an earlier etymology, whose explanation seemingly equated "darkness" and "chaos" when translating an unattested supposed plural form of Hebrew: בוהו, romanized: bōhu. Consequently, most scholars retracted their endorsement (for example, Gilles Quispel did so by lamenting humorously that due to its literary merits he believes the originator of the name Yaldabaoth had made the same erroneous association between baoth and tohuwabohu as the former majority opinion). Additionally, Scholem argued that based on the earliest textual data, which termed Yaldabaoth "the King of Chaos", he was the progenitor of chaos, not its progeny. Scholem's own theory rendered the name as Yald' Abaoth from Aramaic yaldā, but translated as 'begetter', not 'child', and Abaoth, a term attested in magic texts, derived from Sabaoth, one of the names of God in Judaism. Thus he rendered Yald' Abaoth as 'begetter of Sabaoth'. Matthew Black objects to this on the grounds that yaldā should in fact be read as "son" or "child" (the passive form) and Sabaoth is the name of one of Yaldabaoth's sons in some Gnostic texts, rather than the converse. Instead, he suggests the second noun to be Jewish Babylonian Aramaic: בהתייה, romanized: behtɘṯā, lit. 'shame', cognate with bōšeṯ (בושה), a term used to replace the name Ba'al in the Hebrew Bible. Thus Blacks' proposal renders ילדא בהתייה yaldā behtɘṯā 'son of shame/Baal'. In his proposed 1967 etymology, Alfred Adam already diverged from the then-majority opinion and translated yaldā similarly to Scholem, as German: Erzeugung, lit. 'bringing forth'. He believed the name's second part to derive from Syriac: ܐܒܗܘܬܗ, romanized: ˀabbāhūṯā, lit. 'fatherhood'. This he interpreted, however, to describe more broadly 'the power of generation'; thus suggesting the name to mean 'the bringing forth of the power of generation'. Robert M. Grant proposed in 1957 that Ialdabaoth was derived from Yah(weh) El(ohei)-Sabaoth, "Yahweh, God of Sabaoth (Hosts, Armies)" (צבאות), a name of God in Judaism found with variants in 1 Samuel 1:3, 2 Samuel 7, the Book of Amos (3:13, 5:15-16, 27, and elsewhere), 1 Kings, Book of Jeremiah, Zechariah 3:10, and Psalm 89:9. He notes that the change from the tsade to a dalet or a teth is sometimes seen in Aramaic. Simone Pétrement made an argument against Schloem's etymology through analysis of Gnostic mythic texts, and derived it from Iao Sabaoth, which is attested in the Greek Magical Papyri — possibly independently from Grant, although she would not rule out having read Grant's article at some prior point.
Historical origins
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