1 - One God, Ancient Egypt, and YHWH

Summary

In the first part of this book, we will examine texts predicating the numeral “one” of nouns for God, gods, or the divine. I will demonstrate that, although the idea that the traditional deity of one people was the only God among its region’s pantheon that exists had developed by the middle of the first millennium BCE, expressing this idea by stating that “God is one” does not emerge before the second century BCE. We will begin in this chapter by examining “God is one” from its earliest beginnings: first in ancient Egypt, where third-millennium inscriptions praise the Egyptian sun god, “Greetings, sole one who constantly endures every day”; and then in the rise of YHWH as the proper name of Israel’s God, of whom the Bible declares, “YHWH is one.” Yet these early texts intend only to praise these deities, not to deny the existence of others.