Hear, O Israel, יהוה Our God, יהוה Is [More Than] One?

The Trinity by Andrei Rublev

Jewish binitarianism and belief in two YHWHs/Yahwehs (יהוה) was a Second Temple and earlier biblical belief that was suppressed and deemed heretical by the rabbis after Christianity rose to prominence. It appears that the idea that Israel’s יהוה was a purely monotheistic singular deity was a later development and enforced teaching, possibly or likely in response to Christianity‘s claims for Jesus.

For more on this:

• Read “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John” by the Orthodox Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin.

• Read Israel’s Lord: YHWH as “Two Powers” in Second Temple Literature by David E. Wilhite and Adam Winn

• Read The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology by Andrei A. Orlov

• In addition, watch the 2013 lecture “Did Rabbinic Judaism emerge out of Christianity?” by Hebrew University Professor Israel Jacob Yuval re: how rabbinic Judaism may have “invented” ideas like the “oral Torah” as a response and reaction to Christianity.

From The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, by Dr. Michael S. Heiser, p. 148:

The most familiar way to process what we’ve seen is to think about the way we talk about Jesus. Christians affirm that God is more than one Person, but that each of those Persons is the same in essence. We affirm that Jesus is one of those Persons. He is God. But in another respect, Jesus isn’t God—he is not the Father. The Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Father. Nevertheless, they are the same in essence.

This theology did not originate in the New Testament. You’ve now been exposed to its Old Testament roots. There are two Yahweh figures in Old Testament thinking—one invisible, the other visible and human in form. Judaism before the first century, the time of Jesus, knew this teaching. That’s why ancient Jewish theology once embraced two Yahweh figures (the “two powers”).⁶ But once this teaching came to involve the risen Jesus of Nazareth, Judaism could no longer tolerate it.

⁶ I mentioned Alan Segal’s work in this regard in the first footnote of the previous chapter: Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (reprint, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012). In addition to Segal, the following scholarly studies are noteworthy in regard to Judaism’s two-powers teaching: Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John,” Harvard Theological Review 94.3 (2001): 243–84; Boyarin, “Beyond Judaisms: Meṭaṭron and the Divine Polymorphy of Ancient Judaism,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods 41 (2010): 323–65.