el

This is the oldest and simplest Semitic word for deity. In the Bible it usually names the one true God, especially in older poetry and in the worship language of the Psalms and Job, where it carries a tone of height, power, and awe. It often anchors the patriarchs' titles for God: God Most High, God Almighty, the God of Bethel, the everlasting God.

The same word can also name a god in the lesser sense: an idol someone has made, a foreign god, or one of the heavenly beings in God's court. The Bible uses the one word both ways and then insists, again and again, that only the LORD is truly this. So a verse like "who is like you, God, among the gods" sets the true God over against everything else the word can name.

The two shades are not separate words but one word stretched across a claim the Bible keeps pressing: there are many so-called gods, and only one of them is real.

In a fixed Hebrew expression, literally "it is to the power of my hand," this word means sheer capacity to act. "My hand has the power to do you harm," Laban tells Jacob; "do not withhold good when it is in the power of your hand to do it," says Proverbs. The phrase is always about whether someone is able to carry out what they intend, and the negative form, "there is no power in my hand," is a confession of helplessness.

This use is unrelated to the divine name in plain meaning. The link, if any, is the underlying idea of might, but here the word has drifted into an everyday idiom about human ability and is best read on its own terms.