The name Dievas is not a personal name but the ordinary Baltic word for god, descended from the same Indo-European root deiwos, "the bright sky," that gives Latin deus, Greek Zeus (in the oblique stem) and Sanskrit deva. This is why Dievas is so difficult to recover as a distinct pagan personality: the moment the Baltic peoples became Christian, the word passed intact to the Christian God, and Latvian Dievs and Lithuanian Dievas mean simply "God" today.
Scholars therefore work backward, trying to distinguish the archaic sky-god of the folk songs, the quiet, kingly farmer of heaven who attends the celestial wedding, from the monotheist God whose vocabulary he lent. The type is familiar across Indo-European religion: a remote, sovereign sky-father who orders the world but rarely acts in it, leaving the storm to Perkunas and daily fortune to Laima.
The reconstructed Proto-Baltic form of his name, Deivas, places him within the wider Indo-European sky-father family alongside Vedic Dyaus Pitar and Germanic Tiwaz (Norse Tyr), a comparison drawn out fully only by modern historical linguists, since the pagan Balts left no native theology setting their own sky-word beside its distant cousins. The dainas also give Dievas a family: the Dieva deli, his "Sons," appear as a pair of celestial youths who court the daughters of the Sun in the same wedding-cycle of song that gives Saule her own mythology, so that even a god this thinly personified still has kin within the sung tradition.