plural as a form of respectful address is quite foreign to Hebrew. Mark S. Smith has cited the use of plural as possible evidence to suggest an evolution in the formation of early Jewish conceptions of monotheism, wherein references to "the gods" (plural) in earlier accounts of verbal tradition became either interpreted as multiple aspects of a single monotheistic God at the time of writing, or subsumed under a form of monolatry, wherein the god(s) of a certain city would be accepted after the fact as a reference to the God of Israel and the plural deliberately dropped. The plural form ending in can also be understood as denoting abstraction, as in the Hebrew words ("life") or ("virginity"). If understood this way, means "divinity" or "deity". The word is similarly syntactically singular when used as a name but syntactically plural otherwise. In many of the passages in which occurs in the Bible, it refers to non-Israelite deities, or in some instances to powerful men or judges, and even angels (Exodus 21:6, Psalms 8:5) as a simple plural in those instances. Shaddai El Shaddai (, , ) is one of the names of God in Judaism, with its etymology coming from the influence of the Ugaritic religion on modern Judaism. El Shaddai is conventionally translated as "God Almighty". While the translation of El as "god" in Ugaritic/Canaanite languages is straightforward, the literal meaning of Shaddai is the subject of debate. Tzevaot Tzevaot, Tsebaoth or Sabaoth (, , , "Armies"), usually translated "Hosts", appears in reference to armies or armed hosts of men but is not used as a divine epithet in the Torah, Joshua, or Judges. Starting in the Books of Samuel, the term "Lord of Hosts" appears hundreds of times throughout the Prophetic books, in Psalms, and in Chronicles. The Hebrew word was also absorbed in Ancient Greek (, ) and Latin (, with no declension). Tertullian and other patristics used it with the meaning of "Army of angels of God". Ehyeh () is the first of three responses given to Moses when he asks for God's name in the Book of Exodus. The King James Version of the Bible translates the Hebrew as "I Am that I Am" and uses it as a proper name for God. The word is the first-person singular imperfect form of , "to be". Biblical Hebrew does not distinguish between grammatical tenses. It has