Abba is what a child calls a father, formal enough for a grown son to use and intimate enough for a toddler to shout.
Abba is Aramaic for father, but it doesn't split into a childish form and a respectful form the way some languages do. Grown children used it. So did small children. A man could use it to address his own elderly father in a household where age and authority mattered enormously. The word carries closeness without carrying immaturity, which is unusual and worth noticing.
That combination is the whole point wherever it turns up in the New Testament. It isn't a word for distant reverence, and it isn't baby talk either. It sits in the middle: plain, direct, and used by someone who has a real claim on the relationship, not someone approaching a stranger.
“Abba, Father,” He said, “all things are possible for You. Take this cup from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will.”
Jesus uses the word in Gethsemane, addressing his own father in the most exposed moment of the Gospels.
For you did not receive a spirit of slavery that returns you to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption to sonship, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”
Paul says believers cry 'Abba, Father' by the Spirit, framing it as the cry of someone adopted, not a servant.
And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!”
Nearly the same phrase, tied explicitly to being made a son and heir rather than a slave.
English Bibles almost always print the Aramaic word itself, followed by 'Father' in the same sentence, because Paul does exactly that in Greek. Translators keep 'Abba, Father' as a pair rather than choosing one English word, since neither 'Daddy' nor plain 'Father' covers the same ground on its own. 'Daddy' sounds too childish; 'Father' alone loses the warmth.
A well-known claim, often repeated in sermons, is that Abba means 'Daddy' and shows God's easy, informal cuddliness. That overstates it. Adult sons used the word for their fathers in ordinary, respectful address, so it isn't baby talk. The real point is that it's a family word, used by someone who belongs, not evidence that first-century Judaism thought of God as casual or cute.
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