Shema Yisrael: In What Way Is “YHWH One”?

This essay is dedicated to the memories of Professor Stanley Gevirtz of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles, and of my parents, Rabbi Dr. John J. Zucker, Ph.D. and Dr. Lilian R. Zucker, Ph.D., who inspired my love of Torah. I wish to acknowledge the invaluable help and contributions of TheTorah.com’s editors (Rabbi Dr. Zev I. Farber, Professor Marc Z. Brettler, and Rabbi David D. Steinberg) to the final version of this essay.

Jeffrey H. Tigay, The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1996), p. 76.

This same interpretation, albeit with less drama, can be found in the Yavneh commentary of Elia Samuele Artom (1887-1965) and in the Tanakh commentary of Sameul Leib Gordon (1867-1933).

This is a matter of contention in contemporary scholarship. See discussion in Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 149-178 [151-154].

The Hebrew is from the Kapih edition, the English translation from Maimonides: The Commandments, vol. 1: Positive Commandments (trans. Charles B. Chavel; Soncino, 1967), 2.

For a discussion of biblical conceptions of God, see James L. Kugel, The God of Old (NY: Free Press, 2003); Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith (New Jersey: Aaronson, 1983). See also Marc Z. Brettler, “Differing Conceptions of the Divine Creator,” TheTorah.com (2013); Baruch Schwartz, “‘The LORD Spoke to Moses’: Does God Speak?,” TheTorah.com (2014); Michael Carasik, “In the Presence of God,”TheTorah.com (2015).  

This same approach is taken by Avraham Ezra (1089-1167) ad loc.

If so, this Zechariah text is apparently the only text in Bible that refers to the Shema.

Tigay, loc.cit.

Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1-11 (The Anchor Bible, New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 337-338. See also his “Comment 6:4-9” on pp. 349-351.

Translation from Simon B. Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (SBL Writings from the Ancient Worlds 9; SBL, 1997), 136

See, Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 73.

This is my translation; Weinfeld quote all three only in Latin.

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that Weinfeld does believe that Deuteronomy is monotheistic. In this same quote he continues:

It is in association with the first two commandments of the Decalogue and its connection with other proclamations in the sermons of Deuteronomy, such as Deut 10:17, that make it monotheistic.

Benjamin R. Foster, “Mesopotamia,” in A Handbook of Ancient Religions, (ed., John R. Hinnell; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 161-213 [175]. He suggests that the system may have begun with Sin, the moon god, and branched out from there:

How or when these numerical values were assigned is unclear. Use of the numeral 30 to write the name of the moon-god, referring to the number of days in the lunar month, seems to antedate the general practice of numerical substitution for divine names, so may have inspired it. The other numerals would therefore have been derived by analogy on the basis of the deities’ relative importance

Robert R. Stieglitz, “Numerical structuralism and cosmogony in the ancient Near East”,Journal of Social and Biological Systems 5 (May 1982): pp. 255-266. See in particular the section “Numbers as gods”, pp. 260-262 and the right side of figure 2 (p. 261) which is captioned:

The 22 ‘standard’ reciprocals and major Mesopotamian deities. The standard numerals are arranged in an arithmetic continuum with 1 = 60 as the beginning and end. [emphasis mine]. 

Alasdair Livingstone, “Assur”, end of § II, in Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, Pieter Willem van der Horst, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd extensively revised edition (Leiden: Brill / Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999), 108-109. Livingstone writes (109):

In the Sargonid period it became a common scribal practice in Assyria to write the name of the god Assur with the signs AN.ŠÁR, originally used to designate a primeval deity in Babylonian theogonies. (State Archives of Assyria [SAA] 3 no. 34:54).

For an overview of this festival, see: Uri Gabbay, “Babylonian Rosh Hashanah: Battle, Creation, Enthronement, and Justice,” TheTorah.com (2014). 

 Ibid, p.109. Livingstone writes: “After his sack of Babylon in 689 BCE, Sennacherib attempted to institute a number of religious reforms. These included an endeavor to replace the cult of Marduk in Babylon by an analogous cult in Assyria with Assur playing the part of Marduk.”

Simo Parpola: “Monotheism in Ancient Assyria”, Concepts of Divinity in the Ancient World (ed. Barbara Nevling Porter; Transactions of the Casco Bay Assyriological Institute, Vol. 1, 2000), pp. 165-209. Paul Kriwaczek describes it thus:

One might pray to Ashur not only in his own temple in his own city, but anywhere. As the Assyrian empire expanded its borders, Ashur was encountered in even the most distant places. From faith in an omnipresent god to belief in a single god is not a long step. Since He was everywhere, people came to understand that, in some sense, local divinities were just different manifestations of the same Ashur.

Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2012), p. 164. 

Sennacherib also describes this ransom in the Rassam Cylinder (lns. 55-58). See text and discussion in Mordechai Cogan, The Raging Torrent: Historical Inscriptions from Assyria and Babylonia Relating to Ancient Israel (A Carta Handbook; Jerusalem: Carta: 2008), 111-123.

And Manasseh did so, worshiping multiple local deities, to the chagrin of the biblical authors (2 Kings 21:2-11, 16).

See Michael D. Coogan, The Oxford History of the Biblical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 255.

English translation from Simo Parpola and Kazuko Watanabe (eds.) in State Archives of Assyria 2 (SAA 2:6), available online from the University of Pennsylvania Oracc project,here. 

[25] As Assyrian culture was dominant in the empire, Assyrian religion would have been viewed as prestigious:

In lopsided social-political relationships, the line between force and persuasion is very thin. In such cases, ‘imitation’ is very difficult to distinguish from ‘imposition’. Judah and Assyria had that kind of lopsided relationship.

Richard Lowry, The Reforming Kings: Cults and Society in First Temple Judah (The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 120; Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2009), 140. Lowry (ibid.) compares this to non-Westerners adopting white bridal gowns.

Baruch A. Levine, “Assyrian Ideology and Israelite Monotheism”, Iraq 67.1 (Spring, 2005): 411-427. 

See, Deena Grant, “Loving God Beyond the Way You Love Ashurbanipal,” TheTorah.com(2016); See Jon Levenson, “The Shema and the Commandment to Love God in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context” TheTorah.com (2016); Pamela Barmash, “The Introduction of Blessings into our Treaty with God” TheTorah.com (2015). Although this is the majority view, some scholars have questioned with Deuteronomy really was built on Assyrian Vassal treaties. See, Markus Zehnder, “Building on Stone? Deuteronomy and Esarhaddon’s Loyalty Oaths (Part 1): Some Preliminary Observations”, Bulletin for Biblical Research, 19.3 (2009), pp. 341–374, and “Building on Stone? Deuteronomy and Esarhaddon’s Loyalty Oaths (Part 2): Some Additional Observations”, Bulletin for Biblical Research, 19.4 (2009), pp. 511-535; Carly L. Crouch, Israel and the Assyrians: Deuteronomy, the Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon, and the Nature of Subversion (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014).

This was proposed by Wilhelm Martin De Wette (1780-1849) and remains the majority view in scholarship. Nevertheless, some scholars dispute the claim and argue that the story of the finding of the Torah is a myth. See discussion in Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical, and Literary Introduction (New York: Continuum T&T Clark, 2009), 49-56.

Indeed, Baruch Levine sees parts of the book of Isaiah, especially the passage explaining the Assyrian conquest and what YHWH will do to the Assyrians in the future as the conceptual precursor to Deuteronomy:

What makes Isaiah 10:5-19 so remarkable within biblical literature is its global horizon. We read that Yahweh, the national God of Israel, a small and powerless people, is using Assyria, the global empire, as a punitive tool against his own people. In effect, the Israelite response has risen to the dimensions of the triumphal claims of the Assyrians. Yahweh controls the Assyrian empire, and it is he who has granted the kings of Assyria their many victories and conquests. … First Isaiah is the first to state the matter in such terms. … It is only later that we find resonance of this ideology, as in Deuteronomy 4, especially v. 35: “It has been clearly demonstrated to you that Yahweh, he is the (true) God; there is no other besides him.” (Levine, “Assyrian Ideology,” 413)

Editor’s note: An example of this kind of doublespeak in later Jewish practice comes from certain periods in the medieval age, during which time there was a requirement to submit siddurim to Christian censors. The blessing “blessed are you God… who has not made me a gentile” was considered offensive and some Jews replaced it with “who has not made me a beast” (שלא עשני בהמה), which appears in a number of medieval siddurim. Officially, these Jews had changed the blessing, and it is likely that the average person saying this blessing even thought that this is what happened, but those “in the know” probably interpreted the change differently: they were calling non-Jews “beasts,” a spiteful joke on the censors. See discussion in Zev Farber, “The Creation Blessings and the Morning Blessings: A Case Study in the Fluidity of Liturgy and its Practical Applications” Keren 2 (2014) 12-76 [40-44]. ZIF  

According to 2 Kings 18:26-27, Sennacherib’s official, the Rav-Shakeh, spoke Judean Hebrew, implying that Assyria had officials trained to understand the vernacular of its subjects, so that this would have been a relevant concern.