Same G-d?

Submitted by Stuart Teich (United States), Jun 28, 2005 at 10:31

The Hebrew word for "deity", which is just a hellenization of the more teutonic "god", is "eloha", not "Elohim", which, despite its plural suffix has referred to G-d, singular, unitary, individual, unique, and any other synonyms for "one" you can find in Rogets, for thousands of years. Lets not play Rumsfeldian games about whether a "robust insurgency" which is escalating in scale and intensity and may last another dozen years is or is not a guerrilla war.

It is entirely possible that Judaism started as a polytheistic volcano cult ("pillar of cloud by day, pillar of fire by night"), but Avraham, or whoever he represents, changed all that long ago.

We do still, however refer to G-d as El Shaddai (usually translated as "almighty El", but we don't really know what Shaddai means) and El Elyon ("highest El"), implying that the preJewish semitic deity El, as opposed to Baal (who gets a nasty reputation in Kings) or Asherah (whom Patai says was El's consort, and whose worship sites are apparently systematically stamped out as El comes to the fore) is the god whom we continue to worship, or at least that we continue to worship G-d under that name.

If the muslims continue to worship G-d under a premuslim label, that doesn't necessarily exclude them from the community of worshippers of G-d. No, it's their mass repudiation of the noachide commandments against things like murder that does that.

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