Why Does the Hebrew Bible So Often Refer to God as “Lord of Hosts”?

Mosaic reader Fred Hansen writes:

I wonder if you would consider commenting on the meaning of the term “Lord of Hosts,” which seems to appear several hundreds of times in the Torah.

To say that the Hebrew expression adonai tsva’ot, translated by the King James Version as “Lord of Hosts,” appears several hundreds of times in the Bible is a bit of a stretch. By my own count, using the biblical concordance in my possession, I arrive at about 140 such occurrences. Still, that’s enough to make the expression a very common one. Let’s take a look at it.