One True God - Abrahamic Religions - Judaism - The Shema

The Shema

Judaism's earliest history, beliefs, laws, and practices are preserved and taught in the Torah (the first part of the Hebrew Bible), dating from around 600 BCE. It provides a clear textual source for the rise and development of what is named Judaism's ethical monotheism which means that:

(1) There is one God from whom emanates one morality for all humanity. (2) God's primary demand of people is that they act decently toward one another...The God of ethical monotheism is the God first revealed to the world according to the Jewish Bible. Through it, we can establish God's four primary characteristics:

1. God is supernatural.
2. God is personal.
3. God is good.
4. God is holy.

...in the study of Hebrew history: Israel's monotheism was an ethical monotheism. Dennis Prager

When Moses returned with the Ten Commandments, the second of those stated that "you shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3), right after the first, which affirmed the existence of God. Furthermore, Israelites recite the Shema Yisrael ("Hear, O Israel") which partly says, "Hear, O Israel: YHWH is our God, YHWH is one," meaning that Israel was to worship none of the gods of other peoples. Monotheism was and is the central tenet of the Israelite and the Jewish religion.

The literal word meanings are roughly as follows:

• Shema — 'listen' or 'hear.' The word also implies comprehension.
• Yisrael — 'Israel', in the sense of the people or congregation of Israel
• Adonai — often translated as 'Lord', it is used in place of the Tetragrammaton
• Eloheinu — 'our God', a plural noun (said to imply majesty rather than plural number) with a pronominal suffix ('our')
• Echad — 'one'

In this case, Elohim is used in the plural as a form of respect and not polytheism.

Gen.1:26 And Elohim said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Elohim is morphologically plural in form in Hebrew, but generally takes singular agreement when it refers to the God of Israel (so the verb meaning "said" in this verse is vayyomer ויאמר with singular inflection, and not vayyomru ויאמרו with plural inflection), and yet in this case the "our" and "us" seems to create a presumption of plurality, though it may just be God talking to angels and not another god.

Judaism, however, insists that the "Lord is One," as in the Shema, and at least two interpretations exist to explain the Torah's use of the plural form. The first is that the plural form "Elohim" is analogous to the royal plural as used in English. The second is that, in order to set an example for human kings, Elohim consulted with his court (the angels, just created) before making a major decision (creating man). An alternative explanation by Mark S. Smith is that the notion of divinity underwent radical changes throughout the period of early Israelite identity. Smith has said that the ambiguity of the term Elohim is the result of such changes, cast in terms of "vertical translatability" by Smith (2008); i.e. the re-interpretation of the gods of the earliest recalled period as the national god of the monolatrism as it emerged in the 7th to 6th century BCE in the Kingdom of Judah and during the Babylonian captivity, and further in terms of monotheism by the emergence of Rabbinical Judaism in the 2nd century CE.