How the Jewish Conception Is Attested

The claim that Judaism holds an absolute divine unity is attested across the whole span of Jewish religious literature rather than resting on any single late formulation. The Shema itself, Deuteronomy 6:4, is pre-rabbinic, and its declaration that the LORD is one became the daily liturgical centre of Jewish prayer life; Maimonides later made unity one of his Thirteen Principles of Faith, stating that God is a unity unlike any other unity, and that formulation is itself now recited in synagogues in the Yigdal hymn. The continuity between a biblical text, a medieval philosophical formulation and a piece of ordinary liturgy still in daily use is unusually direct evidence for how settled this doctrine has been within the tradition across roughly three thousand years.

Modern critical scholarship complicates the picture without overturning it for what this entry describes. Biblical scholars studying the earliest strata of the Hebrew Bible have argued that ancient Israelite religion moved toward strict monotheism gradually, out of an earlier context of Canaanite polytheism in which El and other named deities were worshipped alongside or identified with the God who became YHWH; the aliases El, El Elyon and El Shaddai recorded on this deity's own entry are part of that evidence. That historical question, about the religion's origin, is a different claim from what classical and modern Judaism itself holds and has held for the entire attested span of rabbinic tradition, which is unambiguous unity. This entry follows the tradition's own settled self-understanding while recording, on the deity entry itself, what critical scholarship separately describes about its origins.