2 - One God and the Bible

Summary

Although the Hebrew Bible hardly uses the expression “God is one” at all, the idea that YHWH is the only God that exists does appear in its latest editorial layers. This chapter surveys how the Bible expresses YHWH’s relationship to other gods. We concentrate on three strands throughout the biblical books: first, an earliest stratum that preserves evidence of a theology according to which YHWH was one deity in a pantheon; second, the dominant biblical theology according to which YHWH was the greatest among the many gods in existence; and, finally, the theology that post-dates a deuteronomistic editorial hand, according to which only YHWH is God. This survey shows that the later ubiquity of the expression “God is one” was not inevitable. Yet verses declaring “YHWH is one” and “I am who I am” become the scriptural foundation on which later thinkers base a theology of God’s unity and transcendence.