webmaster wrote:THE BIBLE TEACHES THAT GOD IS ONE.
Isaiah 45:22 – “…for I am God and there is none else.”
Isaiah 45:5 – “…there is none else, there is no God beside me…”
Isaiah 44:6 – “…I am the first…beside me there is no God.”
1 Timothy 2:5 – “For there is ONE God…”
1 Corinthians 8:4 – “…a false god is nothing…and there is no other God but one.”
Deuteronomy 6:4 – “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is ONE Lord.”
Ephesians 4:5 – “ONE Lord, one faith, one baptism.”
Deuteronomy 6:4 – “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is ONE Lord.”
The literal translation of this would be:
4.
|8085| Hear,
|3478| O Israel,
|3068| Yahweh,
|0430| our God,
|3068| {is} Yahweh
|0259| one.
Here the name of God is mentioned three times, and the word translated one (echad) expresses a compound unity
No, the word
echad does not express a "compound unity."
Strong's Number: 259
Transliterated: 'echad
Phonetic: ekh-awd'
Text: a numeral from 258; properly, united, i.e. one; or (as an ordinal) first: --a, alike, alone, altogether, and, any(-thing), apiece, a certain, [dai-]ly, each (one), + eleven, every, few, first, + highway, a man, once, one, only, other, some, together
There, you see? Even your quote from
Strong's Concordance shows that it can mean anything from "first" through to "only" or "alone"!
It certainly doesn't show that this word refers to a "compound unity."
Example as in the expressions ''one cluster of grapes,''
That's still
one thing - a cluster of grapes. The plurality is in "cluster" (a group of grapes), not
echad.
"'the congregation was assembled as one man,''
That's still
one thing - an assembly. The plurality is in "assembly" (a group of people), not
echad.
and again, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.''
That's purely figurative language - and it still refers to
one flesh, not several fleshes in one.
The Hebrew word one (yacheed), which expresses absolute unity, is never once used to express the unity of the Godhead.
The Hebrew word
yachid does not express "absolute unity" and is only used
twelve times in the entire Old Testament anyway!
So there is no need for the
Shema to use
yachid, when
echad (which is used
969 times in the OT) is quite sufficient to indicate that the Deity consists of One Divine Person.
Yachid is, after all,
rarely used in Biblical Hebrew. (A mere
twelve times, compared with the
969 occurrences of
echad!)
It has been translated in several places as "darling"; it carries the meaning "only begotten son", or "solitary", and would therefore be inappropriate as reference to the God of Israel, Who is (a)
not an only-begotten son, and (b) constantly surrounded by His angelic host (and therefore never solitary.)
Trinitarians are fond of saying that
yachid is never used in reference to God (which is true) - but with only
twelve occurrences of this word in Scripture, you could say that about 99.9% of the people in the OT!
There is, however,
another Hebrew word -
bad which the Brown-Driver-Briggs
Hebrew Lexicon defines in the following way:
- bad
1) Alone, by itself, besides, a part, separation, being alone.
1a) Separation, alone, by itself.
1a1) Only (adverb.)
1a2) Part from, besides (preposition.)
1b) Part.
1c) Parts (eg limbs, shoots), bars.
This word
is used to describe the One God of Judaism, and it first occurs in
Genesis 2:18, describing Adam's state before the creation of Eve:
- And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; [bad] I will make him a help meet for him.
So the absolute singularity of the One God is consistently emphasised when He is addressed, as we find in this tiny sample of the 202 places where
bad is used:
- Nehemiah 9:6.
Thou art Yahweh alone [bad]
- II Kings 19:5.
Thou art God alone; [bad], the God of all the kingdoms of the earth
- Psalm 83:18.
That men may know that thou, whose name alone; [bad] is Yahweh
- Psalm 86:10.
Thou alone; [bad] art God