The God of Israel

Filed as a deity and ranked as a high god, beside Ahura Mazda, Olodumare, El, Marduk, Zeus, Amun and Atum. That filing is a decision about this corpus's vocabulary rather than a claim about the figure, and it is worth stating plainly because it cuts both ways: it makes him comparable rather than singular, which is what a reader who rejects the corpus's framing should want, and it declines to give the doctrine a category of its own, which is what a reader who holds it might have wanted. The pantheon field is deliberately empty — see below.

What the Hebrew Bible says about him is not a single position. He is one, in a formula recited twice daily; he is also addressed in a court of other divine beings, which the sons-of-god entry in this corpus records. He is unrepresented by image, which is unusual among the neighbours catalogued here. He has a name that later practice stops pronouncing, so that the most-used name for him in the world is a word meaning "my lord" standing in for one nobody says.

He is a party to a dispute this corpus cannot resolve and should not pretend to. The Canaanite high god El is separately entered here, and the relation between the two is one of the live questions in the study of Israelite religion: epithets are shared, El appears inside Israelite personal names, and Deuteronomy 32 in its Dead Sea and Septuagint form apportions the nations under the Most High in a way that reads differently from the later Masoretic text. Some scholars read continuity, some read polemical appropriation, some read coincidence of title. The corpus files him under no pantheon at all rather than choosing, because filing him as Canaanite would have made that argument silently in a published study, and filing him as Israelite would have made the opposite one just as silently.

The texts that name him also contradict each other about him, and those contradictions are recorded on this page rather than harmonised. The Qur'an names the same God of Abraham and denies he begets or is begotten. The Nicene Creed confesses one God the Father almighty and then says of the Son that he is of one substance with the Father. Both are attested below in their own terms.