The Shema‘ Yisrael
Monotheistic Jewish amulet discovered near Carnuntum
According to a BAR article, the Shema‘ Yisrael on this Jewish amulet discovered near Carnuntum is one of the earliest monotheistic readings of Deuteronomy.
However, in the Second Temple period, the Shema‘ Yisrael text in Deuteronomy would have been read “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” The Shema‘ Yisrael was originally a monolatric statement; it stated that Israel had an exclusive relationship with its God, but it did not deny the existence of other national deities for other peoples.
When did Deuteronomy’s Shema‘ Yisrael become a monotheistic statement? When did Jews begin to recognize their deity as the only deity existing in the universe? In the May/June 2013 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Armin Lange and Esther Eshel discuss the discovery of a Jewish amulet near the city of Carnuntum that “marks an early pinnacle of this monotheistic interpretation of the Shema‘ Yisrael in Deuteronomy 6:4.”
The Jewish amulet was discovered in a third-century C.E. child’s grave near the Roman frontier city Carnuntum (close to modern Halbturn, Austria). The amulet is formed out of a silver capsule and small gold leaf, inscribed with a Hebrew Shema‘ Yisrael written in Greek letters. Lange and Eshel state that “the Jewish amulet reads the last clause of the Shema‘ Yisrael as ΑΔΩΝ Α ‘the Lord is 1.’ That is, it replaces the Hebrew word אחד, which meant originally ‘alone,’ with ‘one’ (a Greek A). The letter in ancient Greek represents the numeral 1.”
What is an early monotheistic Shema‘ Yisrael doing near Carnuntum? Lange and Eshel illustrate that Carnuntum had a well-integrated Jewish population that stated their religion openly. The Jewish population would have known how to recite the Shema‘ Yisrael, but most likely did not know how to write in Hebrew.
Lange and Eshel conclude:
To our knowledge the Halbturn amulet is the first text that renders the Hebrew word ehad (אחד) with the number “1.” This numerical representation of the final word of the Shema‘leaves no doubt about how the Jewish craftsman who made the Halbturn amulet understood the Shema‘ Yisrael —as a monotheistic statement! Only the Lord is God; there is no other God. Though the Jews of Carnuntum were open to the multi-religious culture of their city, this openness clearly had defined limits. For them, no other god existed but the Lord.
Armin Lange and Esther Eshel’s full article “‘The Lord Is One’: How Its Meaning Changed” explores the Jewish amulet and its Shema‘ Yisrael inscription in light of ancient Jewish magic, the evolution of monotheism and the local Jewish population.
BAS Library Members: Read the full article “‘The Lord Is One’: How Its Meaning Changed” as it appears in the May/June 2013 issue of BAR.
Not a BAS Library member yet? Sign up today.
This Bible History Daily feature was originally published in April 2013.
Related reading in Bible History Daily:
Ancient Amulets with Incipits by Joseph E. Sanzo
The blurred line between magic and religion
Word Play by Glenn J. Corbett
The power of the written word in ancient Israel
Miniature Writing on Ancient Amulets
Ketef Hinnom inscriptions reveal the power of hidden writing
Related reading in the BAS Library:
Paula Fredricksen, “Gods and the One God,” Bible Review, February 2003.
The BAS Library now includes the full book Aspects of Monotheism: How God Is One, edited by Hershel Shanks and Jack Meinhardt, featuring chapters written by Donald B. Redford, William G. Dever, P. Kyle McCarter Jr. and John J. Collins.
Not a BAS Library member yet? Sign up today.
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The Trinity’s Early Origins
The Bible tells of many gods and goddesses that people worshiped, including Ashtoreth, Milcom, Chemosh, and Molech. (1 Kings 11:1, 2, 5, 7) Even many people in the ancient nation of Israel once believed that Baal was the true God. So Jehovah’s prophet Elijah presented the challenge: “If Jehovah is the true God, go following him; but if Baal is, go following him.”—1 Kings 18:21.
The worship of pagan gods grouped in threes, or triads, was also common before Jesus was born. “From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity,” observed historian Will Durant. In the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, James Hastings wrote: “In Indian religion, e.g., we meet with the trinitarian group of Brahmā, Siva, and Viṣṇu; and in Egyptian religion with the trinitarian group of Osiris, Isis, and Horus.”
The Lie That Made God a Mystery
WHAT MANY BELIEVE The Christian religion “in its three classic forms of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism acknowledges one God in three Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. According to Christian theology, this acknowledgment is not a recognition of three gods but that these three persons are essentially one.”—The New Encyclopædia Britannica.
THE TRUTH FROM THE BIBLE Jesus, the Son of God, never claimed to be equal to or of the same substance as his Father. Rather, he said: “I am going my way to the Father, because the Father is greater than I am.” (John 14:28) He also told one of his followers: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father and to my God and your God.”—John 20:17.
The holy spirit is not a person. Early Christians “became filled with holy spirit,” and Jehovah said: “I shall pour out some of my spirit upon every sort of flesh.” (Acts 2:1-4, 17) The holy spirit is not part of a Trinity. It is God’s active force.
WHY IT MATTERS The Trinity, explain Catholic scholars Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, “could not be known without revelation, and even after revelation cannot become wholly intelligible.” Can you really love someone who is impossible to know or understand? The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, is a barrier to knowing and loving God.
Marco, quoted in an earlier article, saw the Trinity as a barrier. “I thought God was hiding his identity from me,” he says, “and that just made him even more distant, mysterious, and unapproachable.” However, “God is not a God of confusion.” (1 Corinthians 14:33, American Standard Version) He has not hidden his identity from us. He wants us to know him. Jesus said: “We worship what we know.”—John 4:22.
“When I learned that God is not part of a Trinity,” says Marco, “I was finally able to establish a personal relationship with him.” If we view Jehovah as a distinct Person rather than a mysterious stranger, it is far easier to love him. “He that does not love has not come to know God,” says the Bible, “because God is love.”—1 John 4:8.
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200275936
This article is nonsense, echad is neither ancient nor modern Hebrew for “alone”, it always meant “one”.
Even in large communities Greek letters and names mixed freely with Hebrew letters and Jewish names. More people were literate in Greek than in Hebrew letters. A family traveling with the Roman Legions into Austria was blessed indeed to have available a person who could write a Hebrew amulet. Perhaps the first part was copied from writing and the second part was written phonetically in Greek based on the sound. That seems most plausible. On an amulet magical symbolism is a possibility, here with insistence on using a clearly Jewish text. Magic achieved double effect mixing Hebrew and Greek. In short, touching and poignant, but too small a sample to draw conclusions.
i think the comments on this article is much more interesting to read.
To Ronnie :Trinity and oneness are very common theme, In Athaneus’ s confession the persons are “as” but also “not as”, because they describe the riches of “the one and same” God.
Regarding Bart Ehrman’s comment that, after the battles of the second and third centuries, one form of Christianity emerged victorious. That must have come as quite a shock to the Arians. Since Ulfilas, an Arian bishop converted many of the Germanic invaders to his form of Christianity and since these tribes took over much of The Western Roman Empire, Arians were pretty darn prominent in Western Europe and North Africa well after the third century.
To Kurt:
In all Trinitarian formulations I’ve yet seen, each “person” of the Trinity is fully God, meaning that they are distinguishable parts, but are not separate parts.
A good analogy I’ve found (at the URL below) is in music. The tonic chord in the key of C is composed of the notes of C, E, and G. The note C of the chord is a single sound. The note E of the chord is also a single sound. The note G of the chord is a third single sound, and the chord as a whole is also itself only a single sound. The chord sound cannot be called a separate note of the whole, no more than God can be called a separate person of the Trinity, but neither can the notes be separated without reducing the chord into something that it is not.
Let me say that a different way: when keys are struck on a piano, the playing of a single C would fill the entire heard space and would qualify as a single complete sound. The playing of an E together with the C would take up no extra heard space, the waveform of the resulting two-tone sound could still be modeled on a single line: you would still only really be hearing one sound; but you would also be able to distinguish the two notes heard in your head, both a C and an E, both coexisting perfectly as a single sound in a single shared heard space. Likewise, the addition of a G above the E and the C would not take up any more additional heard space, and so the chord would again be heard as a single sound, capable of being modeled as a single vibrating line; and yet in your mind you would nevertheless be perfectly capable of distinguishing between the notes of C, E, and G; the notes are irreducibly distinct, and yet perfectly model-able as a single waveform sound.
So do the Trinitarians describe God. In the person of the Father, we see God inasmuch as he has created a world and spoken directly in word and deed unto his chosen people Israel. In the person of the Son, we see God inasmuch as He has come into a specific place and time in human form, Himself made flesh, to found the church for all the world. In the person of the Holy Spirit, we see God inasmuch as He has continued to come into our own lives and that of the church, to inspire us on toward a more holy relationship with Himslef.
And while each of these persons of the Trinity is irreducibly distinct, each also appears in and with the other, such that while the Father is greater than Jesus, anyone who has seen Jesus has still seen the Father.
http://www.bethinking.org/god/understanding-the-trinity
Doctrines of the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church are not good examples because those religions have their origins in Babylon 2000 B.C. see The Two Babylons by Rev Alexander Hislop for evidence. They also murdered the early believers in the Messiah and their idolatry is forbidden by the New Testament, simply they don’t follow the teachings of the NT and the Book of Revelation condemns the Catholic church as the great whore of religions. Revelation 17-18
Its way more simple than all this. The Trinity reflects Father, Mother, Child.
Are you serious? There is no thinking person left on the planet who thinks God or the Holy Spirit is “male” in any meaningful sense. Also, the operations of the Holy Spirit in practice are so clearly inferior to those of God the Parent and of Jesus that no thinking person would consider the Spirit an equal to God.