God (Abrahamic)

Judaism holds that God is one in a sense that admits no division and no parts. The Shema, Shema Yisrael, YHWH eloheinu, YHWH ehad, "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4), is recited twice daily and is the nearest thing the tradition has to a creed. Maimonides made the point technical in the second of his thirteen principles and in the opening chapter of the Mishneh Torah: the unity of God is not the unity of a body made of parts, nor of a species with members, but a unity unlike any other unity that exists; God has no body, no bodily form, and nothing in creation can be compared to Him.

The four-letter name YHWH, the Tetragrammaton, is written in the Hebrew Bible some six thousand times and is not read aloud. The reader substitutes Adonai ("my Lord") in liturgy and HaShem ("the Name") in ordinary speech. The Mishnah records that the High Priest pronounced it in the Temple on the Day of Atonement and that the people prostrated themselves when they heard it, and it preserves Abba Saul's ruling that one who pronounces the Name according to its letters has no share in the world to come. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE the pronunciation ceased to be transmitted and it is not recoverable. This entry records the restriction and does not attempt a pronunciation anywhere.

The vocalisation Yahweh is a modern scholarly reconstruction from Greek transcriptions in the Church Fathers, not a Jewish usage. Jehovah is a different thing again: a hybrid produced by reading the consonants of YHWH with the vowel points the Masoretes attached to them to cue the substitute word Adonai. It became current in Latin and then in the European vernaculars from the sixteenth century, and no ancient Israelite ever said it.

The other names work as descriptions rather than as the Name. Elohim is grammatically plural and takes singular verbs when it denotes the God of Israel. El Shaddai, El Elyon and El Olam are patriarchal titles; YHWH Tzevaot, the LORD of hosts, is the martial one. Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, the self-designation at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14), is rendered "I am that I am" and, with equal warrant from the Hebrew, "I will be what I will be".

Christianity confesses the same absolute monotheism and then says something about its inner structure that Judaism and Islam both reject. The doctrine of the Trinity holds that God is one in being and three in persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each fully God: not three Gods, and not three modes or masks of one person. It is not an appendix to the Christian doctrine of God. In the classical presentation it is the Christian doctrine of God, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls it the central mystery of Christian faith and life. An entry that treated it as a footnote to a shared monotheism would be misdescribing the tradition.

The formula was hammered out in the fourth-century controversies. The Council of Nicaea in 325 declared the Son homoousios, of the same being as the Father, against Arius, who held the Son to be the highest of creatures. The Council of Constantinople in 381 produced the creed still recited in most churches, extending the same confession to the Holy Spirit, "the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified". Chalcedon in 451 settled a related but distinct question, how divinity and humanity are united in Christ, and is often confused with the Trinitarian settlement; it is not the same thing.

One later addition split the church. The Latin West inserted filioque, "and the Son", into the clause on the procession of the Spirit. The Greek East held the addition to be both theologically wrong and unilaterally made, and it remains among the principal issues between Rome and the Orthodox churches.

Christian theology insists throughout that the Trinity is not tritheism, and the insistence is not a modern apologetic afterthought, the anti-tritheist qualifications are as old as the doctrine itself. Whether that distinction survives contact with Jewish and Islamic monotheism is exactly what the fourth section of this entry is about, and it is not resolved there. One further point belongs here because it is easy to get wrong in both directions: the language of Father and Son is not treated in the tradition as one metaphor among many that could be swapped out, and the same Catechism nonetheless states flatly that God "is neither man nor woman: he is God".

The Islamic doctrine of God is tawhid, the assertion of an absolute and undivided oneness, and it is stated most compactly in Surat al-Ikhlas, the hundred and twelfth chapter of the Qur'an, four short verses in constant recitation: "Say: He is God, One; God, the Eternally Sufficient; He begets not, nor was He begotten; and there is none comparable unto Him." Qur'an 42:11 puts the denial of likeness in a single clause: "there is nothing like unto Him." Both cut against any account of God that admits generation, division or resemblance to anything created.

The corresponding sin is shirk, association, setting up any partner, equal or intermediary alongside God. The Qur'an names it the one sin that is not forgiven in a person who dies in it (4:48), and it is the frame in which the Qur'an addresses Christian claims. 4:171 tells the People of the Book not to exceed the bounds of their religion and to "say not: Three"; 5:73 says that those who call God "the third of three" have disbelieved; 5:116 stages a scene at the judgement in which Jesus is asked whether he told people to take him and his mother as gods besides God. Read plainly, this is a direct theological contradiction of Trinitarianism, and the atlas does not soften it.

How far those verses reach is itself argued within Islamic scholarship, and the argument matters for the next section. Classical commentators including Ibn Kathir read them as refuting the doctrine of the Trinity as such. The Study Quran, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, argues the contrary: that orthodox Trinitarian theology does not make God one of three, and that the verses address a tritheism, and a divinising of Mary, which mainstream Christianity itself rejects. Both readings are held by serious Muslim scholars, and the question will not be settled by quotation.

God is known through the ninety-nine names, al-asma al-husna, the most beautiful names: al-Rahman the Merciful, al-Rahim the Compassionate, al-Malik the Sovereign, al-Quddus the Holy. The first two open all but one chapter of the Qur'an. What the names actually predicate of God occupied kalam, Islamic speculative theology, for centuries. The Mu'tazila held that affirming eternal attributes distinct from the divine essence compromised the oneness it was meant to protect; the Ash'aris affirmed the attributes and refused to specify their manner, bila kayf, "without asking how". The position that hardened into Sunni orthodoxy is closer to the second.

Holding one entry for three traditions makes this question unavoidable, so it is put here rather than buried. It does not have an agreed answer, and it is really two questions: whether the three traditions refer to the same being, and whether they describe that being compatibly. Almost nobody in the debate denies that the descriptions differ. The argument is over whether a difference of description defeats sameness of reference.

Catholic teaching answers yes for Islam, and does so at the level of a council. Nostra Aetate (1965) says of Muslims that "they adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth"; the Catechism, quoting Lumen Gentium, says that they "together with us adore the one, merciful God". The relation to Judaism is not in question in the same way, since the church holds the Hebrew scriptures as its own. Not all Christians accept the conciliar position, and several evangelical and Reformed bodies reject it explicitly.

Jewish authorities have split along a line running opposite to the Christian one. Maimonides ruled that Muslims are not idolaters, their monotheism is unqualified, while classing Christian worship as avodah zarah, foreign worship; the passages saying so were cut from many printed editions by Christian censors. Against that, Tosafot held that gentiles are not warned against shittuf, associating another with God, and later Ashkenazi authorities used the category to treat Christian worship as permitted to Christians though not to Jews. Menachem Meiri went further and exempted the "nations bound by the ways of religion" from the laws of idolatry altogether. None of these positions was universally accepted and the disagreement is live.

The Qur'an contains both moves. 29:46 instructs Muslims to say to the People of the Book: "our God and your God is one, and unto Him we submit". 5:73 says that those who call God the third of three have disbelieved. Muslim readers have reconciled these differently, and the reconciliations track the exegetical split described in the previous section.

Modern philosophy of religion puts it as a question about reference. The volume edited by Miroslav Volf out of the Yale consultations collects Christian, Jewish and Muslim contributors arguing largely that reference can hold across serious doctrinal disagreement, on the model that two people can be talking about the same person while believing incompatible things about him. Others argue that a description can be wrong in ways that make it fail to pick anything out, and that the Trinity, or its denial, is a difference of that kind. The dispute is not academic: when Wheaton College placed Larycia Hawkins on leave in December 2015 for writing that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, and opened proceedings that ended in February 2016 with her departure, this was the question at issue, in public.

This entry does not settle it, and the single row it occupies should not be read as settling it either. What can be said without controversy is narrower and worth stating plainly: the three traditions share a genealogy, a large part of a scriptural cast, and the claim that there is exactly one God. Whether that is enough to make the object of worship one thing is a theological judgement, and an encyclopedia has no standing to make it.

Everything above is what the traditions confess. Historians of ancient Israelite religion describe something different, and the two accounts should be kept apart rather than blended. The critical account is not a claim about whether God exists. It is a reconstruction of how the texts and the worship came to look as they do, built from a small and contested epigraphic record.

The name YHWH first appears outside the Bible on the Mesha Stele, the Moabite inscription of about 840 BCE, which speaks of carrying off "the vessels of YHWH". Earlier Egyptian topographical lists at Soleb and Amarah West name a Shasu land of yhw in the fourteenth century BCE, which many scholars connect to the divine name and to a southern, Midianite or Edomite, origin for the god. That connection is argued, not established. Several archaic biblical poems place YHWH's approach from the south: Seir and Edom in Judges 5, Teman and Mount Paran in Habakkuk 3.

El is the other thread. El heads the Canaanite pantheon in the Ugaritic tablets and is also the ordinary Semitic word for a god, and the Hebrew Bible applies El's own titles to the God of Israel: El Elyon, El Shaddai, El Olam, El Elohei Yisrael. Mark S. Smith's account, standard in the field, describes a process of convergence, El's characteristics, and later some of Baal's, drawn into YHWH, followed by differentiation, the deliberate exclusion of everything else. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 is the pivot text: the Masoretic Text has Elyon apportioning the nations "according to the number of the sons of Israel", while the Septuagint and a Qumran copy read "sons of God", giving a scene in which the Most High divides the nations among divine beings and YHWH receives Jacob as his share. Psalm 82 has God standing in the divine council and passing sentence on the other gods.

Inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud in the northern Sinai, dating to about 800 BCE, bless by "YHWH of Samaria and his asherah" and "YHWH of Teman and his asherah", evidence, on most readings, that popular Israelite religion in that period was not what the biblical writers wanted it to be. What asherah denotes there, a goddess or a cult object, is itself disputed.

The usual reconstruction therefore runs from monolatry, the worship of one god without denying that others exist, to explicit monotheism, the denial that any other exists at all. The clearest statements of the second are exilic: Isaiah 45:5-7, "I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god." Julius Wellhausen's nineteenth-century source criticism supplied the framework, much of its detail has since been revised, and the developmental picture has held.

None of this is what Judaism, Christianity or Islam teach about themselves, and it is here because an atlas that reports only confessional accounts is not reporting. A reader who holds the traditional account should read this section as the historian's reconstruction it is; a reader who holds the critical account should note that it is a reconstruction, and that several of its load-bearing pieces, the Shasu identification, the sense of asherah, the date of the shift, are contested by specialists.