The Shema

Every morning and every evening, for three thousand years, observant Jews have recited the same six Hebrew words. "Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad." Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. It is the first prayer taught to a Jewish child. It is the prayer a martyr was expected to die with on his lips. It is called the Shema, after its opening word.

The Shema is the confession that formed Israel. It is also the confession that formed Jesus. When a scribe asked him which commandment was the greatest, Jesus did not hesitate. He quoted the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4. He added the command that follows it, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." Then he named this combined confession "the first of all commandments" (Mark 12:29).

Everything the New Testament says about God is said under the canopy of the Shema. If the Shema says one thing, and a later Christian doctrine says another, the Shema is the starting point and the doctrine is the thing that has to be explained.

What the Shema says

Deuteronomy 6:4 is six Hebrew words in three pairs. Read them in the order the Hebrew reads them.

Shema Yisrael - Hear, O Israel

Adonai Eloheinu - Yahweh, our God

Adonai Echad - Yahweh is one

The first word is a command. "Hear" in biblical Hebrew does not mean merely to perceive sound; it means to attend, to obey, to receive as instruction. Israel is commanded to listen to the confession that follows and to live by it.

The second pair identifies the God whom Israel worships. "Adonai" is the reverential substitute that Jewish readers use when the sacred name YHWH (Yahweh) appears in the text; when we translate back to English, we can say "Yahweh" or "the Lord." "Eloheinu" is "our God," the covenantal possessive. Not "a god," not "the god of some people," but our God, the one who brought us out of Egypt, made a covenant with us, and named us as his people.

The third pair is the confession itself. "Yahweh is one." Not multiple. Not three. Not a committee. One.

The Hebrew word translated "one" is echad. Some interpreters, under the pressure of later Trinitarian doctrine, have tried to argue that echad means a "compound unity," as though it could mean a unity of several persons. The claim is usually based on Genesis 2:24, where a man and a woman become "one flesh," basar echad. But this is a grammatical misunderstanding. Echad is the ordinary Hebrew word for "one," used throughout the Hebrew Bible in numerical contexts ("one sheep," "one day," "one king"). It has no inherent plurality. Where the context signals unity of multiple parts (as in "one flesh"), the plurality comes from the context, not from echad itself. The Shema supplies no such plural context. "Yahweh is one" means Yahweh is one.

Across the camps, there is near-unanimity. The Shema says one. The Jewish translations (NJPS) and the Mainline (NRSVUE) and Catholic (NABRE) all agree. The Evangelical translations (NIV, ESV) print "the LORD is one" as well. There is no translation camp that prints "the LORD is three." The Hebrew does not support it. The Shema, in every camp, confesses one.

What the Shema meant to Israel

The Shema was not a philosophical definition of the divine nature. It was a covenantal confession in a polytheistic world. Israel's neighbors worshipped pantheons. Egypt had Ra, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Anubis, Bastet, and dozens more. Canaan had Baal, Asherah, Molech, Dagon. Mesopotamia had Marduk, Enlil, Ishtar, Tammuz. Rome, later, had an entire hierarchy of gods absorbed from every conquered nation. Into this world, Israel alone confessed: our God is one.

This was not merely a claim about arithmetic. It was a claim about loyalty. The Shema's next verse is the command to love this one God with all the heart, soul, and strength. A polytheistic worshipper spread loyalty across many gods, making offerings to whichever seemed relevant to the current need. Israel could not do this. There was only one God. Loyalty to him was total because he was total.

The Shema was also a claim about authority. If Yahweh is one, then no other god has authority over any domain of life. The thunder god of Canaan does not control the weather; Yahweh does. The fertility god of the harvest does not bless the crops; Yahweh does. The war god does not grant victory; Yahweh does. The oneness of Yahweh is the foundation of Israel's confidence that the whole world is under a single coherent rule.

The Shema finally was a claim about worship. If there is one God, there is one place of ultimate worship, one priesthood, one feast calendar, one people called to represent him to the nations. The rest of the Torah is the working out of what worship looks like for a people whose God is one.

What happened to the Shema in Christian theology

For four hundred years after the resurrection, the church retained the Shema. The apostolic writings quote it or echo it. Paul in 1 Corinthians 8:6 builds his teaching about food sacrificed to idols directly on the Shema: "there is no God but one ... yet for us there is one God, the Father." James says, "You believe that God is one; you do well" (James 2:19). The Shema was the foundation.

Then, across the fourth and fifth centuries, a theological shift occurred. Under pressure from Greek philosophical categories, the church developed the doctrine of the Trinity: one God existing eternally as three distinct Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each fully God, sharing one substance. The Shema was incorporated into this framework by the claim that its "one" was a "one in being" that could contain three "Persons."

The problem is that this is a claim foreign to the Hebrew text, foreign to the original audience, and foreign to the first-century Jewish world that Jesus and the apostles spoke into. Jesus quoting the Shema in Mark 12 was not making a subtle Trinitarian claim. He was making the claim that every first-century Jew would have heard him making: Yahweh, the one God of Israel, is the one God full stop. There is no other.

This is not a claim that the later theology was dishonest. It is a claim that the later theology has to be weighed against the Shema, not assumed to be compatible with it. If the Shema says one, and later doctrine tries to say one-but-also-three, the later doctrine is the thing that has to justify itself from the text.

The Biblical Unitarian position, which this site operates from, is that the Shema should be read the way Israel has always read it, the way Jesus read it, and the way Paul read it. Yahweh the Father is the one true God. Jesus is the Messiah whom he anointed and raised from the dead. The Holy Spirit is God's power in action. Three things, yes, but not three Persons in one Being; a Father, a Son, and a Spirit, with the Father alone as the one God.

The Shema in Jesus's mouth

When a scribe came to Jesus in Mark 12 and asked which commandment was first of all, Jesus did not reduce or simplify the Shema. He quoted the full text from Deuteronomy 6:4 and 6:5.

"The first of all the commandments is, 'Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.'" (Mark 12:29-30)

The scribe affirmed the answer. Then the scribe repeated it back to Jesus in words that are worth reading carefully.

"Well, Teacher. You have truly said that He is one, and there is no other but He." (Mark 12:32)

The scribe is quoting Deuteronomy 4:35 and 4:39 in his reply. "There is no other but He." This is what a first-century Jewish teacher meant when he affirmed the Shema. Not a compound unity. Not a threefold Persons. One God, with no other. Jesus heard this answer. His response? "You are not far from the kingdom of God" (Mark 12:34).

Consider what this means. The scribe confessed strict unitarian monotheism. Jesus commended him for it. Jesus did not correct him. Jesus did not say, "You are close, but actually the one God is three Persons." Jesus said, effectively, you have got it right. You are not far from the kingdom of God.

If the doctrine that developed four centuries later is what Jesus actually believed, this conversation makes no sense. If the doctrine that first-century Jews believed was also the doctrine Jesus believed, the conversation is exactly what you would expect.

The Shema in Paul

Paul is writing to Gentile believers in Corinth who are asking whether they can eat food that has been sacrificed to idols. Paul's answer begins with theology, not pragmatics. "We know that 'an idol has no real existence,' and that 'there is no God but one.' For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many 'gods' and many 'lords,' yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist" (1 Corinthians 8:4-6).

Paul is quoting the Shema here. "There is no God but one." The Greek construction he uses maps directly onto the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 6:4. Then Paul does something remarkable. He splits the Shema's two titles, "Yahweh" and "our God," and assigns them. The title "one God" (the theos of the Shema) goes to the Father. The title "one Lord" (the Adonai of the Shema, the Greek kurios that the Septuagint used for Yahweh) goes to Jesus.

Some read this as Paul deifying Jesus. A closer reading sees something different. Paul is not collapsing Jesus into the Father; he is naming Jesus as the agent through whom the Father works. The Father remains the one God. Jesus is the one Lord, the Messiah whom God appointed (Acts 2:36), the one through whom all things have been restored.

What this changes

If the Shema is the center of biblical monotheism, several things shift.

First, the New Testament is read as the continuation of Jewish monotheism, not the transformation of it into a Triune formula. Paul and John and Peter were Jews. They confessed the Shema. Their teachings about Jesus unfold within the framework of the Shema, not in replacement of it.

Second, John 17:3 becomes the anchor it deserves to be. In his final prayer, Jesus addressed the Father directly: "This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." The Father is the only true God. Jesus is the one sent by the only true God. This is Shema-shaped language. Jesus, praying to the Father, is reciting the Shema in his own idiom.

Third, the question "who is God?" becomes a settled question before you ever open the New Testament. The God of the Bible is Yahweh, one, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of Jesus. Every subsequent question (what is Jesus's relationship to this God? What is the Holy Spirit? How does salvation work?) is worked out inside this frame.

Fourth, the reader learns to read the New Testament with first-century ears. When Paul and John use language that sounds elevated about Jesus, the reader does not immediately reach for the fourth-century categories. The reader asks what a first-century Jewish believer, formed by the Shema, would have heard.

The Shema is where honest Bible reading begins. Three thousand years of Jewish confession, sealed by Jesus as the greatest of all commandments, echoed by Paul as the foundation of Christian ethics. Hear, O Israel. Yahweh our God. Yahweh is one.