Judaism

Oneness, in the Tanakh’s own words

Select a verse to read the translation, the note, and a link to compare translations. The last two are marked ambiguous: they are the passages read by others as evidence of plurality, and they belong in the list for that reason.

• Deuteronomy 6:4 The Shema Explicit +

  שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד

• Deuteronomy 4:35 Deuteronomy Explicit +

  יְהוָה הוּא הָאֱלֹהִים אֵין עוֹד מִלְּבַדּוֹ

• Deuteronomy 4:39 Deuteronomy Explicit +

  כִּי יְהוָה הוּא הָאֱלֹהִים בַּשָּׁמַיִם מִמַּעַל וְעַל־הָאָרֶץ מִתָּחַת אֵין עוֹד

• Exodus 20:2–3 The Decalogue Explicit +

  אָנֹכִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ … לֹא יִהְיֶה־לְךָ אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים עַל־פָּנָי

• Isaiah 43:10–11 Isaiah Explicit +

  לְפָנַי לֹא־נוֹצַר אֵל וְאַחֲרַי לֹא יִהְיֶה … אָנֹכִי אָנֹכִי יְהוָה וְאֵין מִבַּלְעָדַי מוֹשִׁיעַ

• Isaiah 44:6 Isaiah Explicit +

  אֲנִי רִאשׁוֹן וַאֲנִי אַחֲרוֹן וּמִבַּלְעָדַי אֵין אֱלֹהִים

• Isaiah 45:5 Isaiah Explicit +

  אֲנִי יְהוָה וְאֵין עוֹד זוּלָתִי אֵין אֱלֹהִים

• Numbers 23:19 Numbers Explicit +

  לֹא אִישׁ אֵל וִיכַזֵּב וּבֶן־אָדָם וְיִתְנֶחָם

• Hosea 11:9 Hosea Explicit +

  כִּי אֵל אָנֹכִי וְלֹא־אִישׁ בְּקִרְבְּךָ קָדוֹשׁ

• Malachi 3:6 Malachi Explicit +

  כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָה לֹא שָׁנִיתִי

• Genesis 1:26 Genesis Ambiguous +

  נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ

• Psalm 110:1 Psalms Ambiguous +

  נְאֻם יְהוָה לַאדֹנִי שֵׁב לִימִינִי

The manuscript record

What survives, in what order, and what each witness shows. Dates BCE and CE as marked.

The entries marked as redaction are editorial stages, not surviving objects: they are what critical scholarship reconstructs from the text itself, and dates for them are estimates. Each is listed with the traditional reading beside it, and the questions below take the argument up properly.

• Composition
• Redaction
• Manuscript
• Ancient version
• Apparatus

1. Composition and collection c. 1200–165 BCE

   The books were written and gathered across roughly a millennium; the three divisions — Torah, Prophets, Writings — closed at different times, with the Writings last. Traditional and critical accounts of authorship differ sharply, and the difference is set out below rather than settled here.

2. The scroll found in the Temple 622 BCE

   2 Kings 22 reports a scroll of the law found during Josiah’s repairs, and a reform carried out on the strength of it — sacrifice centralised in Jerusalem, which is what Deuteronomy demands and the earlier books do not. Critical scholarship reads that scroll as a form of Deuteronomy written shortly before it was produced; the traditional reading is that a long-neglected copy was recovered.

3. The Ketef Hinnom amulets c. 600 BCE

   Two silver scrolls found near Jerusalem carrying the Priestly Blessing of Numbers 6:24–26 — the oldest known text of any biblical passage, and evidence that wording now in the Torah was already fixed before the exile.

4. The Deuteronomistic History c. 600–550 BCE

   Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings share a vocabulary and a thesis — that exile followed from breaking the covenant — and most critics take them to have been edited into one continuous work, in a first edition under Josiah and a second after Jerusalem fell. The books name no author, and the tradition assigns them by inference rather than by claim.

5. The Priestly redaction c. 550–450 BCE

   Priestly material — Genesis 1, the tabernacle chapters, most of Leviticus — is widely held to have been combined with older narrative during and after the exile. The flood account is the standard exhibit: two counts of the animals and two reckonings of the days, interleaved rather than harmonised. Traditional commentary reads the same doublets as complementary detail with a purpose.

6. Ezra reads the Torah publicly c. 444 BCE

   Nehemiah 8 describes the Torah read aloud to the assembled people with Levites explaining it. Traditionally this is restoration after neglect; critically it is the point at which the Torah becomes the community’s constitution in something close to its final shape. A later legend (2 Esdras 14) has Ezra dictating the burnt scriptures afresh — a book Jews and Christians both treat as apocryphal, and one that Muslim polemic has sometimes leaned on further than it will bear.

7. The scribes and the tiqqune soferim c. 400–100 BCE

   The soferim counted the letters of the text and fixed its wording. The tradition also preserves a list of about eighteen places where, it says, the scribes altered a phrase out of reverence, softening an expression that spoke too plainly of God. The list is the tradition’s own record, published rather than concealed — which is both an admission that the wording moved and evidence of how closely it was watched.

8. The Septuagint from c. 250 BCE

   The Greek translation made in Alexandria. It differs from the later Hebrew standard in places — a shorter Jeremiah, a different Daniel, different chronologies in Genesis — and it is the text the New Testament writers usually quote.

9. The Dead Sea Scrolls c. 250 BCE – 68 CE

   Around 230 biblical manuscripts from Qumran, a thousand years older than the previous oldest Hebrew copies. The great Isaiah scroll is close to the received text; other scrolls agree instead with the Septuagint or the Samaritan Pentateuch, showing that more than one text form was in use.

   Check it yourself: The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

10. The Samaritan Pentateuch text form by c. 100 BCE

    The Torah as kept by the Samaritans, differing from the Jewish text in some 6,000 places — most of them spelling, but including the commandment to build the altar on Mount Gerizim rather than Ebal.

11. The consonantal text standardised c. 90–200 CE

    After the Temple fell, one text form displaced the others in Jewish use, while rabbinic discussion was still weighing the standing of Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes and Esther. What came out of it was a single consonantal text — the one the Masoretes would later point. The variety visible at Qumran does not reappear after this.

12. The Masoretes c. 600–1000 CE

    Generations of scribes in Tiberias and Babylonia added vowels, accents and marginal counts to a consonantal text that had carried none, and recorded every departure they would not make. The apparatus is why the Hebrew text is so stable after them.

13. The Aleppo Codex c. 930 CE

    The Masoretic text at its most authoritative, vocalised by Aaron ben Asher and used by Maimonides as his standard. About a third of it, including most of the Torah, was lost after 1947.

    Check it yourself: The Aleppo Codex online

14. The Leningrad Codex 1008 CE

    The oldest complete Masoretic Bible, and the base text of the printed scholarly editions — Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and its successors — from which most modern translations of the Hebrew Bible are made.

The hard questions about the Tanakh

Put as an opponent would put them, then answered.

• Did Moses write the Torah?

  The text reports Moses’s own death and burial (Deuteronomy 34), names places by later names, and repeats several narratives in different wording. Critical scholarship since the nineteenth century has read it as edited from multiple strands.

  The answer given: The traditional answer attributes the closing verses to Joshua and treats the doublets as deliberate repetition with a legal or rhetorical purpose. Documentary theory itself is far less settled than it was: the classic four-source division is now widely modified or rejected, though almost no critical scholar returns to single authorship.

• Which Hebrew text is the Hebrew text?

  Qumran shows several text forms circulating at once — proto-Masoretic, Septuagint-like, Samaritan-like — so the standard text is one line among several, fixed after the Temple fell.

  The answer given: The proto-Masoretic line is attested at Qumran too and is the one the rabbis carried forward; the Masoretes then guarded it with an apparatus of counts and notes that makes later drift visible. What the variety shows is that stabilisation happened at a datable point, not that the wording was invented at it.

• What happened to the divine name?

  The four letters YHWH appear some 6,800 times, but the reading tradition substitutes Adonai, and most English Bibles print "the LORD" instead of the name.

  The answer given: The substitution is a fence around reverence, not a loss: the consonants stand in every manuscript, and the vowels of Adonai written under them are what produced the hybrid "Jehovah" in Christian Bibles. Muslims and Jews are on the same side of this one — the name is treated as too weighty to handle casually.

• Do the messianic passages point to Jesus?

  Christian readings take Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 as predictions of Jesus; Jewish readings take them as referring to Isaiah’s own time, to Israel as the servant, and to David’s distress.

  The answer given: Judaism answers on the plain sense: almah in Isaiah 7:14 means a young woman, and the sign is given to Ahaz in his own crisis; the servant of Isaiah is named as Israel nine times in the surrounding chapters. Islam sides with neither wholesale — it affirms Jesus as Messiah, and denies that he was divine or that he died on the cross.

The Oral Torah, layer by layer

Rabbinic Judaism holds that the written Torah came with an oral one. These are the layers it was eventually written into; the bar shows how binding each is taken to be when the law is worked out.

• Mishnah c. 200 CE, Judah ha-Nasi

  The first written code of the Oral Torah: six orders of terse legal rulings, often preserving the minority opinion beside the majority one so that later readers can see what was rejected and why.

• Tosefta c. 250 CE

  A parallel collection of the same period, fuller in wording, holding material the Mishnah left out. Used to interpret the Mishnah rather than to override it.

• Jerusalem Talmud c. 400 CE, Galilee

  The Palestinian commentary on the Mishnah, left unfinished when the academies declined. Authoritative, but yields to the Babylonian where the two conflict.

• Babylonian Talmud c. 500–600 CE

  The central text of rabbinic Judaism: Mishnah plus the Gemara that argues over it, in about 2.5 million words. Its arguments, not only its conclusions, are the object of study.

• Midrash c. 400–1000 CE

  Verse-by-verse exposition, legal (halakhic) and homiletic (aggadic). Aggadic material carries no binding force in law, a distinction the tradition states explicitly.

• The codes Mishneh Torah 1180; Shulchan Aruch 1565

  Maimonides and later Joseph Karo distilled the argument into rulings. The codes are where most practice is actually taken from today, with commentaries recording where communities differ.

The weights are a reading of standard halakhic practice, not a figure any text states. Aggadic material is deliberately low: the tradition itself says stories do not settle law.

The hard questions about the Oral Torah

Put as an opponent would put them, then answered.

• Where does an oral Torah come from?

  The claim is that a second body of teaching was given at Sinai alongside the written text and transmitted by mouth for over a millennium before anyone wrote it down.

  The answer given: The rabbinic answer is that a written code cannot be applied without one: the Torah commands rest on the Sabbath without defining work, and slaughter "as I have commanded you" without recording the command. The Karaites rejected the claim outright and read the text alone — a live counter-position within Judaism itself.

• How reliable is a corpus that argues with itself?

  The Talmud preserves contradictory rulings side by side, attributes sayings differently in its two versions, and reaches no conclusion on many questions.

  The answer given: That is the design. The corpus records the reasoning so later readers can weigh it, and states the rule for deciding when the argument is not resolved. Judaism does not claim the Talmud is inerrant revelation — the claim is much narrower than the one made for the Torah, and the two are not treated alike.

• What about the passages quoted against the Talmud online?

  A small set of lines is circulated as proof that the Talmud sanctions terrible things. They appear across polemical sites, usually without context and often in mistranslation.

  The answer given: Almost all of them are misquoted, cut from a rejected minority opinion, or lifted from a discussion that concludes the opposite. This page has no interest in that literature. A disagreement about God is not helped by inventing evidence, and Muslims who argue that way should expect the same treatment of their own books.