Is trinitarianism something limited to the New Testament or is it in the Old Testament? Did Jesus introduce something new, or was he building on what was already known and believed by Jews? Does it seem odd that the disciples would accept that Jesus said he and the Father were one? When Paul wrote about Jesus, “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,” (Colossians 2:9), why was this not seen as heretical? Did the Jews already have an understanding of the Godhead and the triune God?

Now you may be wondering why is this important. I contend it is very important in terms of apologetics, in terms of our theology, our doctrine, the continuity between the testaments, and especially in evangelizing Jewish people. If you try to witness to a Jew, one of the things that they stumble over the easiest is how can you worship Jesus and be a monotheist? How can I accept the idea that Jesus is God and God is God and not be a heretic?

Among the Jewish people, the Shema is part of the daily morning and evening prayer services. It is the cornerstone of their faith and their most important prayer. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might,” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).

But believe it or not, there was the belief in Judaism in what they call them, two powers in heaven. This was not one good and evil, but both were good guys. This was Jewish theology up until the end of the second century.  Believing in the two powers did not conflict with the Shema, just as believing in the Trinity does not conflict with our belief that there is one God.

That was normative Judaism until after the Christian era. We have got to get over this divine plurality hurdle before we get to what you could really show a Jewish friend in terms of, “Hey, your old testament is not really different than the New Testament. You just got to look at it a little bit from different angles and you’re going to come out at same place.”

The other is an apologetic discussion. You may have run into certain groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons who deny the deity of Christ. The idea of God being the Father and Jesus is confusing to them. Jehovah’s Witnesses are famous for denying that Jesus was a deity. He’s a creative being according to the doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Mormons sort of see lots of gods in their bible and they believe Jesus and Lucifer are brothers. So they have many god figures and they’re all sort of equal and interchangeable.

Then there are the non-believing academics who are fond of saying things like the New Testament authors just sort of made this up about a trinity or God had you won’t find this in the Old Testament.

There’s also biblical continuity and interpretive clarity. The two testaments are very consistent with each other. Even something as fundamentally Christian as a Godhead, you will see in the Old Testament. You just have to know what you’re looking at and what to look for.

One of the most important things in understanding the Bible is contextualized theology and by that, I mean interpreting the scripture in context. Of course, all Bible teachers say you must take verses in context, but not many do. You need to think like an ancient Israelite to understand the Bible as they would understand it and as the writer intended it to be understood. Biblical theology is framed by the world and the people who created it. These people are not from the Middle Ages. They’re not from the Reformation era. They’re not modern. Scripture must be understood from the historical, cultural and linguistic context it was written.

We’re going to look at how Jews interpreted the two powers idea that they see in the Old Testament. Many Jews see a belief in Jesus as God as a problem. We need to be able to fit the idea of Jesus as God and then God is still there into monotheism. Somehow that needs to be monotheistic. If you’re talking to a Jewish friend, (or Jehovah’s Witness), you have got to be able to do that.

One of the first things we need to look at is the word “elohim.” The God of Israel is naturally elohim. But, the gods of the nations are called elohim.

In fact in 1 Kings 11:33, you get three of them and one of them is a goddess, although oddly, biblical Hebrew does not have a word for goddess.

1 Kings 11:33 reads, “Because that they have forsaken me, and have worshipped Ashtoreth the goddess (elohim) of the Zidonians, Chemosh the god (elohim) of the Moabites, and Milcom the god (elohim) of the children of Ammon, and have not walked in my ways, to do that which is right in mine eyes, and to keep my statutes and my judgments, as did David his father.”

In Deuteronomy 32:17 devils are called elohim.  “They sacrificed unto devils, not to God; to gods (elohim) whom they knew not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your fathers feared not,” Deuteronomy 32:17.

In first Samuel 28, the spirit of Samuel is called an elohim.

Moses was referred to as an elohim in Exodus 4:16 and 7:1. Moses was not a god, but he was God’s representative and in this role, he was considered to be standing in the role of an elohim. Exodus 7:1 ”And the Lord said unto Moses, See, I have made thee a god (elohim) to Pharaoh: and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet.”

Is there more than one elohim that is real and exists? Yes, in the Bible, we have plural elohim. They’re right there. I see them, but I’m a monotheist.

There’s some tension here because we’re used to thinking of the term monotheist in a certain way, and the way we think of it does not conform to the Bible. That’s the problem. That’s the tension we feel. So on the one hand, the use of the Hebrew term isn’t really clear. All you gotta do is look up elohim in a concordance. You’re going to find those verses. In the English, it is sometimes a bit obscured. But elohim is used to refer to the one true creator God, the gods and goddesses of the heathens, deceased humans, devils (demons) and other spiritual beings.

Now these figures, these entities are not equal in attributes. We’ve got obviously an angel is not at the level of the god of Israel. None of these are at the level of the god of Israel. So it can’t be about attributes. When we think about the word God, we tend to assign attributes to the word. We think of the one most high creator, his omnipotence and omniscience. God with a capital “G” does refer to the most high. When we see “god” with a little “g” we start getting nervous. Our monotheism wants to say there are no other gods, just Yahweh. Yet the Bible discusses others gods and treats them as real beings.

We are just not used to thinking in these terms. Elohim is a term used to denote what I call a place of residence. That is, if I called something an elohim, it means that thing lives in the spiritual world. Different elohim have different attributes or characteristics.

For more on the word “Elohim,” see: https://dennisregling.blogspot.com/2018/08/who-are-elohim-in-bible-by-dennis.html

A summary to this point, here’s what I want you to get. Where we’ve gotten so far, the biblical use of the word Elohim shows us that it’s not tied to a specific set of attributes. That explains why more than one thing gets described with the term in the Bible. English translations at times obscure this important point. Since elohim is not about attributes, the biblical writers were not denying monotheism by using that word to describe other figures they believed were real, that were also elohim.

Divine plurality language should not be a threat. If you are going to lead a Jew to Christ, this is a big deal. If you start leading them by the hand and getting them over this sort of threat of plural language for God, they can then go with you to the next step.

We can accept a plurality of elohim, but we also establish that Yahweh is inherently superior. He is in command. He by definition is superior to anything else in the spiritual world and of course our world, too. He is the creator of all other elohim.

Once we establish divine plurality, we need to address the “son-ship” language that you will see associated with certain elohim in the spiritual world. The word son gets rightly applied to divine beings because God created all those other divine beings, not only humans, without threatening monotheism.

Since divine plurality, it doesn’t interfere with monotheism, let’s talk about this “divine son” idea. To a Jew, who is the son of God? There are two candidates in the Old Testament. Who gets called “my son?” In Hosea 11, Israel is called God’s son. “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.”

The other passage is when Moses and Aaron go before Pharaoh and they request to be permitted to leave Egypt. Exodus 4:22 refers to Israel as God’s son, “And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is my son, even my firstborn.” Again, it’s a corporate reference. In 2 Samuel 7:14, speaking of Solomon, God says, “I will be his father, and he shall be my son. If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men.”  So both corporate Israel and a king were called sons of God.

But Jesus is saying he’s the son of God. He’s not Israel and he’s not the king. That seems to contradict this whole divine plurality thing that Jesus could be divine. But, it doesn’t because we have passages like Psalm 82 were the same language is applied to spiritual beings.

Psalm 82:1-8 “God (Elohim) standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods (elohim).
2 How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah.
3 Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.
4 Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.
5 They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.
6 I have said, Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the most High.
7 But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.
8 Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.”

So God is standing in the council of the gods. Our first reaction as Christians is, “this must be the Trinity.” Trust me in Psalm 82, you do not want the trinity. If you read the rest of the Psalm, what happens to the elohim? God judges them for being corrupt and evil. You don’t want the trinity in Psalm 82. It’s just really bad theology to do that.

So here we have in Psalm 82:1 the word Elohim two times. First it is singular and the second time it is plural. One of the things you’ll hear is that this council must just be people and then they will quote Jesus in John Chapter 10, not realizing that doing so undermines his deity in the passage.

Look at Psalm 89: 6-7, “For who in the heaven can be compared unto the Lord? who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the Lord? God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints, and to be had in reverence of all them that are about him.”

Here we have the heavenly beings. The “sons of the mighty” in Psalm 89 are in heaven. There are in the “assembly” of the saint, the divine council of God. These are the same beings as in Psalm 82.

Jesus quotes Psalm 82:6 in John 10. In Psalm 82, God says to the elohim of his counsel, “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.” And again, you don’t want the trinity here. Just not a good idea.
This is a declaration that because of their corrupt administration of the authority God gave them in ruling the nations, and part of their failure was having men allowing humans to worship them instead of the true God,” God is going to strip them of their immortality. In essence, God is saying, “I’m bigger than you are. I made you, not the other way around. I gave you life and I can take it.”

Psalm 82 is talking about Deuteronomy 32:8-9, “When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For the Lord’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.”

This will upset my KJV-Only friends, but there is a small problem with the translation of this verse. Most English translations will have “sons of Israel” in verse 8. The English Standard Version (ESV) has “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.”

Now, let’s look at the verse. When the most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided humankind, all mankind. When did that happen? When did the nation is divided? At the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. When God did that, he set up boundaries for the people’s according to the “number of the sons of Israel,” in most English translations. In the ESV, we have according to the “number of the sons of God.” The ESV is one of the few translations that we’ll have this rendering. However, that is the reading in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and also the reading of the Septuagint. So the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, we have read “sons of God” in this passage. But the age of the manuscripts is not why I believe the correct reading is “sons of God.”

The story is here is that God, if you remember back to the Tower of Babel episode, looks down on what is happening in Babel. Humanity is not dispersing as he had commanded them to do. So He goes down and he confused their languages and split everybody up, and then they disperse. In the chapter prior to that, Genesis 10, you have the table of nations. It gives a list of the nations that are associated with Genesis 11.

What happens here is God says, “you don’t want to listen to me, and we thought that the flood would sort of take care of this, but you don’t want to listen to me. I’m not going to be your God any more. I’m going to split you up. I’m going to put you under the authority of lesser divine beings. These are the sons of God who work for me. I’m going to create a people of my own from scratch.” That people was Israel. Israel does not exist at the time of the Tower of Babel because God hasn’t called Abraham yet, and Israel is not listed in the table of nations for that reason.

This is why it says he divides the people’s up according to the number of the sons of God, but the Lord’s portion is his people. Jacob, also known as Israel, is his allotted heritage. This is the story of the rest of the Old Testament in a nutshell. This is the beginning of antagonism between Israel and everybody else in between God and other deities, other pantheons. This is the Old Testament explanation for why the other nations have their own pantheons. Why they’re messed up because God punished them by abandoning them, disinheriting them.

Now we know from the very next chapter when God calls Abraham, God does not completely forget the other nations. When he calls Abraham, he says through you, “all nations of the earth will be blessed,” (Genesis 22:18). God hasn’t forgotten them, but they are under punishment.

Coming back to the Shema, is all of this a violation of the Shema? The idea God has sons that are elohim, (small “g” gods)? We want the Jewish person to look at their own Bible, their own old testament and realize it is okay to recognize divine plurality, because elohim just talks about where our being it lives and where he’s from has nothing to do with attributes. And some of those elohim are sons. There is son-ship language in the Old Testament. It’s not a violation of the Shema.

In view of divine plurality, the Israelites believed in a whole spiritual world, populated with other elohim. They understood God had punished the nations and some of those elohim had become corrupt and they were demanding and receiving worship from other people’s instead of the true God. They saw where God said, “I’m going to bring you out of Egypt, but you stay away from the other gods. You stay out of their territory. You don’t intermarry with them. You stay away from them,” because he knows the threat is real.

This is the story of the Old Testament. This is why in the Old Testament you get this sense of certain areas were owned or under the domain of different deities. This comes through in the biblical story.

This is what the Shema means. The Shema is not a denial of other elohim or that God has sons in the spiritual world. There’s a context for it. It’s just not one we’re used to.

You might be thinking, what about statements like “there’s none beside me, unlike me.” They’re not denials of the existence of other elohim, their statements of Yahweh’s incomparability.

I’ll just point out some of these denials are in Deuteronomy 32:39, “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand.” there in Deuteronomy 4:35,39 say, “Unto thee it was shewed, that thou mightest know that the Lord he is God; there is none else beside him. Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the Lord he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else.”

Well, what’s going on there? Deuteronomy 32 said the devils are gods and they must be real, because we can’t deny the demons are real. But what about these verses?

If you think of them as statements of incompatibility, there actually is no problem. In Zephaniah 2:15, Nineveh claims, “This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me: how is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in! every one that passeth by her shall hiss, and wag his hand.” In Isaiah 47:8, Babylon says, ” Therefore hear now this, thou that art given to pleasures, that dwellest carelessly, that sayest in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me.”

Now, are Nineveh and Babylon claiming they are the ONLY cities in the world? No. They are saying they are unique and stand above the others. That is exactly what God is saying when he says there is none like him. Again, we establish the Shema is not a contradiction to divine plurality and is not inconsistent with monotheism.

Understanding this helps us understand how Christianity grew out of Judaism. I haven’t touched on the two powers in heaven yet. That is an upcoming article. But establishing the existence of more than one elohim, the divine plurality, is the first step to getting to the belief that Jesus was God, yet the father was still God. I will be exploring this more in future articles.