Where is the Trinity in Shema Israel, if God is One? A Response to a Bizarre Claim - Rabbi Skobac

One of the clumsiest doctrines in Christianity is their insistence that God is to be understood as a trinity of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The doctrine has virtually no foundation even in the Christian scriptures, and some Christian denominations and many individual Christians do not accept such a belief. Many of those who cut their ties with Christianity do so because of the objections they have to this doctrine. One of the denominations who reject the concept of the Trinity published a book years back entitled, Why You Should Not Believe in the Trinity. In response, there was an evangelical Christian scholar named Robert M. Bowman who published a book in 1989 entitled, Why You Should Believe in the Trinity. And even though the entire purpose of this book is to support and advocate for belief in the Trinity doctrine, on page 22, Bowman admits that, All Trinitarians agree that the ideas about God expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity are not found directly in the Old Testament. But his conclusion has been lost on those missionaries who desperately pick through passages in the Hebrew Bible to find some kind of support for their unfortunate fidelity to the baseless belief in a triune God. One very useful exercise for anyone interested in what the Jewish Bible actually teaches is to catalog all of its passages that, in context, are speaking about God and describing him. It's not that difficult to do. You start in the beginning of Genesis and you go through the end of the Jewish Bible and you take note, where does the passage in the Bible actually try to tell me about God, where the context is describing God. And if you make a catalog of all of these passages, not one of them contains even the barest hint that we should understand God as a Trinity. In Deuteronomy chapter 4, verse 35, scripture says, you were shown in order to know that the Lord, he is the God, there is none beside him. And this is describing the experience that Israel had at Mount Sinai when three million people reached the level of prophecy and they heard God speak. This was the most profound experience of God that anyone has ever had in history. Afterward, in the Bible, numerous times, idolatry is defined as any understanding of God that we and our ancestors had not known. God says to us, I showed you so that you should know who I am. Anything that you did not experience, anything that you and your fathers did not know, that is what the Bible refers to as idolatry. If it's different than our experience at Mount Sinai, it's idolatry. Not one person, not one person who stood at Mount Sinai ever told their children, who either were too young or who were not born yet, that God revealed himself to them at Mount Sinai as a Trinity. Not one person ever heard from their ancestor who was at Sinai that their experience of God was as a Trinity. Such a concept was and still is foreign to Jews and to Judaism and to what God revealed to us. But this has not stopped missionaries in their search for the Holy Grail. Amazingly, some Christian missionaries insist that one of the clearest sources for the idea of the Trinity is found in the very passage which most clearly expresses the Torah's pure monotheism. Deuteronomy 6, verse 4. Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. And missionaries grasp at two things here. Number one, they say, look, there are three names of God in this verse. Hear, O Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one. There are three times the word God is used. Of course, they ignore the fact that the verse only has two divine names. It says, Shema Yisrael, hear, O Israel, the Lord, the Tetragrammaton, the Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh. He is Eloheinu. He is our God. The Lord, the Tetragrammaton, Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh, is one. It doesn't have three different names of God, which maybe you could twist into some kind of an allusion to a Trinity. There are two names of God in this verse. One of them is repeated and is mentioned twice. But secondly, what the missionaries insist is that the word in this verse for one, the Hebrew word Echad, missionaries insist that it does not mean an absolute oneness. But they say it implies a compound oneness, a compound unity. And missionaries will try to support this claim by citing biblical verses where the word Echad is used as a compound unity. For example, in Genesis chapter 2, verse 24, the Torah says, Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh, Basar Echad. Well, if you understand the one flesh to be referring to man and wife, it would be an example of a compound unity. The man and the woman become one flesh. However, many understand that they will become one flesh in their progeny, when they have children. That's how the man and the woman will become one flesh. And that would be not such a good argument to show that Echad is a compound unity. Of course, there are far greater problems for the missionary claim that the word Echad means compound unity. Again, that's their assertion. They say, look, if you go through the Bible, the word Echad, one, is a compound unity. So while they do wheel out a number of biblical passages where Echad is understood as a compound unity, they conveniently ignore all of the many places where Echad is an absolute oneness. One famous example is from Ecclesiastes, Kohelet, chapter 4, verse 8. There is one alone, without companion. He has neither son nor brother. Absolute one. Or when the sons of Jacob proclaim in Egypt, we are all sons of one man. All the sons of Jacob. We're saying we're all sons of one man. That one man was Jacob. It's not a compound unity. Jacob is one man. Absolutely one. And there are numerous other examples where the word Echad means exactly that, an absolute oneness. What we see is that the Hebrew word Echad is used in the same way as the English word one. Sometimes one can be a compound unity. We might say those nine baseball players are one good team. So that one team is made up of nine players. There the word one seems like a compound unity. But usually in English, one is an absolute unity, not a compound unity. Like if I say I own one car. It's one car. It's not a compound unity. So when Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 4 insists that God is one, Echad, how do you know whether it's an absolute unity or a compound unity? So when we say here, when we read the Shema in Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 4, it says that the Lord is our God. The Tetragrammaton is Eloheinu, is our God. That's what it says in the Shema. The Lord is our God. The special four-letter name of God, Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh, is a contraction of the three Hebrew words Ha-Ya, Ho-Veh, Yi-Yeh. He was, he is, he will be. Meaning that this name of God, the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh, essentially refers to God being an eternal one. He was, he is, he will be. It speaks about God's eternal nature. And the verse is simply saying that our God, the deity that we serve and that we worship, is the eternal one who existed before everything else came into being and will exist for all eternity. That's what the Shema is saying. Hear, O Israel. Listen, Israel. The Tetragrammaton, the Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh, the eternal one, he is our God. The eternal one is one. The verse says absolutely nothing about God's Son, about God's Holy Spirit. The verse says nothing about conceiving of God as being comprised of three persons. This idea of the Trinity is simply not in Deuteronomy 6, verse 4. This is simply a pathetic attempt to force a theological square peg into a round hole. As James Bowman admits, Christians may believe in the Trinity, but they're not going to find it in the Hebrew Scriptures. Now, the prophet Zachariah, in chapter 14, verse 9, in a verse that we end all of our prayers every day, three times a day, we end our prayer services by saying, In that day, the Lord is going to be one and his name is going to be one. What does it mean when we say that God will be one? Isn't he one right now? And what the Torah is saying here is that one day, everyone in the world, but especially all the Christians who don't accept the absolute unity and oneness of God, the entire world is going to acknowledge exactly this, that God is an absolute oneness and an absolute unity, and that is what we are saying is going to happen in the messianic future.