Jesus and “God” – Part 7 – What did the Shema originally mean?

I was reading Murray’s and Rea’s new An Introduction to Philosophy of Religion – the Trinity section, of course – and I was struck by this sentence: “… we cannot say that Jesus is the Father, nor can we say that they are two Gods (Deuteronomy 6:4).” (p. 74) I realized some time ago that there are problems in using that famous text as a proof-text for monotheism, so I decided to look into it some more. Here’s what I found.

But in a footnote, they give three (!) alternate translations  (i.e. ones that could be correct, one’s they can’t rule out, although they most prefer the one above) Call them A1-A3

• A1 The LORD our God is one LORD.
• A2 The LORD is our God, the LORD is one.
• A3 The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.

I don’t see how any of these imply monotheism, that is, that there is one and only one god. But let’s survey a few other translations.

NASB goes with A2, and doesn’t mention the others.

TEV (aka Good News Translation) goes with A3, but lists A2, along with

• A4 The LORD, our God, is the only God.

But I think A4 is a dynamic equivalence translation-interpretation – that is, they’re guessing maybe the writer had that in mind; none of the stricter translations I’ve seen even mention A4. Notice that it (and it alone) is clearly monotheistic.

NRSV goes with A3, and lists A1 and A2 as alternates, along with the NIV’s preferred rendering above. The popular recent NLT goes along with the NIV exactly. The NJB (which I mentioned in the last post) goes with a variant of A1, namely

• A5 Yahweh our God is the one, the only Yahweh.

and in a note the scholars argue, rather unclearly, against a variant of A3, on the grounds that A3 is a declaration of monotheism, but true monotheism (rather than henotheism – the worship of only one God) is a later stage of Israelite religion.

How about the best recent translation by Jewish scholars, the NJPS? They go with A3, and only mention the NIV translation as an alternate. Their study notes in this edition are most interesting, and I’ll discuss them next time. But first, let’s notice how different these renderings are – here are my paraphrases, adding A0 for the popular rendering I’ve been calling the NIV rendering.

• A0 Yahweh, our god, is “one”.
• A1 Our god Yahweh is the only Yahweh.
• A2 Yahweh is our god, and is also “one”.
• A3 Yahweh, and only Yahweh, is our god.
• A4 Yahweh, our god, is the only god there is.
• A5 Yahweh, our god, is the only Yahweh.

Another way to bring this out is to ask: what it is that the claim is ruling out or negating. They seem to be these:

• N0 Our god Yahweh is “non-one”.
• N1 There are other Yahwehs in addition to our god.
• N2 Yahweh isn’t our god, or is “non-one”.
• N3 We have gods other than Yahweh or Yahweh is not our god.
• N4 Our god Yahweh is not the only god there is.
• N5 There are other Yahwehs in addition to the Yahweh which is our god.

A comment on A0 and A2 – they are very obscure (hence, my quotation marks). One what? One god? (Ain’t that near-tautological?) Or is some kind of metaphysical oneness being asserted? Though it is obviously anachronistic, medieval Jewish interpreters often read a version of the doctrine of divine simplicity into this text. Trinitarian exegetes sometimes peer (squinting hard) into the Hebrew term for “one” – echad – and claim that it means a kind of oneness consistent with a different kind of plurality – that it may even suggest one being (which doesn’t rule out three persons).

But read in its ancient context, I’m not sure what an ancient Jew would have meant by those phrases. Here’s a guess: one could take “one” absolutely, the idea being that Yahweh is unique. But even if one could take the Hebrew this way, one still wonders: unique in what way? You might think that obviously, the point is that he’s uniquely divine – hence, the only god there is. The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament has an interesting take on this:

The claim that a deity is one, or alone, in other ancient Near Eastern texts (made, for instance by Enil [Sumerian] and Baal [Canaanite] generally relates to the supremacy of their rule. (p. 177)

The author then suggests that something like A1 is also a possibility – he mentions that we’ve found inscriptions of a “Yahweh of Samarian and Yahweh of Teman”. The idea, I guess, would be that even though you’ve heard of other Yahwehs associated with shrines elsewhere, there’s really one – me – and I have no rivals or peers (despite what the sameness of title or name might suggest).

But return to his suggestion just quoted. The idea would be that Yahweh is unrivalled in sovereignty – either over Israel or over the whole cosmos (so if there are in some sense other gods, in any case Yahweh is the dominant god).

Let us take A0 and A1 as meaning something like: Yahweh is unrivalled (in providence). A2 would be very similar: Yahweh is our god, and is moreover unrivalled (in providence). Let’s rule out A4, which seems to not be among the most legitimate translations of the Hebrew. A5, it seems to me, is not importantly different from A1. That would leave us with:

A0 The LORD our God, the LORD is one.
A1 The LORD our God is one LORD.
A2 The LORD is our God, the LORD is one.
A3 The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.

Moral so far: don’t unthinkingly lift your proof-texts from apologetics writers!

But are there reasons to prefer any of these over the others? Note that A3 says less – it says that Yahweh and only Yahweh is our god – the provident being (at least over us) whom we ought to honor and serve. The other say a bit more – not only do they assert or presuppose that Yahweh is our god, but they also assert he’s unrivalled in his reign – or at any rate somehow unique.

Next time: Jewish scholars try to sort out the Shema.