Jewish

Judaism holds an absolute and undivided unity of God, and a pantheon in the ordinary sense, a company of distinct deities with different domains and different names, is exactly what Jewish theology denies exists. The Shema, Israel's central declaration of faith, states the claim as plainly as a religion can state anything: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one. Rabbinic Judaism reads that oneness as absolute rather than merely numerical, ruling out not only other gods but any division within God's own nature, which is part of why later Christian Trinitarian doctrine reads, from inside Judaism, as a departure from monotheism rather than a refinement of it.

That same insistence on unity is why God's personal name, the four-letter Tetragrammaton, is not pronounced in Jewish practice; substitute words such as Adonai or HaShem stand in its place in prayer and in speech, a discipline distinct from simple reverence, since it treats the name itself as too holy for ordinary utterance. The array of biblical titles and epithets recorded for this God, El Shaddai, El Elyon and YHWH Tzevaot among them, are read in Jewish tradition as different names and aspects of the single God rather than as evidence of an earlier plurality the Bible later suppressed, whatever critical biblical scholarship makes of the same evidence.

This dedicated entry exists not because Judaism holds a pantheon but because every tradition covered here gets its own entry of this kind, one to a religion. Judaism's entry accordingly holds exactly one member, which is the honest shape of the thing being described.

The claim that Judaism holds an absolute divine unity is attested across the whole span of Jewish religious literature rather than resting on any single late formulation. The Shema itself, Deuteronomy 6:4, is pre-rabbinic, and its declaration that the LORD is one became the daily liturgical centre of Jewish prayer life; Maimonides later made unity one of his Thirteen Principles of Faith, stating that God is a unity unlike any other unity, and that formulation is itself now recited in synagogues in the Yigdal hymn. The continuity between a biblical text, a medieval philosophical formulation and a piece of ordinary liturgy still in daily use is unusually direct evidence for how settled this doctrine has been within the tradition across roughly three thousand years.

Modern critical scholarship complicates the picture without overturning it for what this entry describes. Biblical scholars studying the earliest strata of the Hebrew Bible have argued that ancient Israelite religion moved toward strict monotheism gradually, out of an earlier context of Canaanite polytheism in which El and other named deities were worshipped alongside or identified with the God who became YHWH; the aliases El, El Elyon and El Shaddai recorded on this deity's own entry are part of that evidence. That historical question, about the religion's origin, is a different claim from what classical and modern Judaism itself holds and has held for the entire attested span of rabbinic tradition, which is unambiguous unity. This entry follows the tradition's own settled self-understanding while recording, on the deity entry itself, what critical scholarship separately describes about its origins.