Who is god of jews

According to the Quran, God known as Allah revealed to Muhammad:. Thus, since Muhammad inherited the Jewish and Christian understandings of God, it is not surprising that the God of Muhammad, Jesus and Moses has a similarly complex and ambivalent character — a blend of benevolence and compassion, combined with wrath and anger.

If you were obedient to his commands, he could be all sweetness and light. To those who turned to him in repentance, this God was above all else merciful and all-forgiving. But those who failed to find the path or, having found it failed to follow it, would know his judgment and wrath. The God of the Old Testament was both good and evil.

He went way beyond the good when he told Abraham to offer his son to God as a burnt sacrifice. He was a warrior God who murdered the firstborn of Egypt and drowned the army of Pharaoh. Yet he was also a compassionate and loving God, one who in the well-known words of Psalm 23 in the Book of Psalms was a shepherd whose goodness and mercy supported his followers all the days of their lives.

He loved Israel like a father loves his son. Yet, behind this God of tenderness and love, there remained a ruthless God of justice. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus preached doom and gloom. He was offering Israel its last chance and God would be merciless to those who failed to heed his message. God would come in judgment at the end of history. All would then be resurrected. The first clue that the ancient Israelites worshipped gods other than the deity known as Yhwh lies in their very name.

Going by the name, the main god of the ancient Israelites was not Yhwh, but El, the chief deity in the Canaanite pantheon, who was worshipped throughout the Levant. In fact, it seems that the ancient Israelites weren't even the first to worship Yhwh — they seem to have adopted Him from a mysterious, unknown tribe that lived somewhere in the deserts of the southern Levant and Arabia.

The god of the southern deserts. The first mention of the Israelite tribe itself is a victory stele erected around BCE by the pharaoh Mernetpah sometimes called "the Israel stele". These Israelites are described as a people inhabiting Canaan. So how did this group of Canaanite El-worshippers come in contact with the cult of Yhwh? The Bible is quite explicit about the geographical roots of the Yhwh deity, repeatedly linking his presence to the mountainous wilderness and the deserts of the southern Levant.

All these regions and locations can be identified with the territory that ranges from the Sinai and Negev to northern Arabia. Support for the theory that Yhwh originated in the deserts of Israel and Arabia can be found in Egyptian texts from the late second millennium, which list different tribes of nomads collectively called "Shasu" that populated this vast desert region.

The many faces of god. How exactly the Shasu merged with the Israelites or introduced them to the cult of Yhwh is not known, but by the early centuries of the first millennium, he was clearly being worshipped in both the northern kingdom of Israel and its smaller, southern neighbor, the kingdom of Judah. As the Yhwh cult evolved and spread, he was worshipped in temples across the land. Nor, in ancient Israel, was Yhwh the invisible deity that Jews have refrained from depicting for the last two millennia or so.

In the kingdom of Israel, as Hosea 8 and 1 Kings relate, he was often worshipped in the form of a calf, as the god Baal was. Ergo, in northern Israel at least, the calves were meant to represent Yhwh.

Such depictions may have even continued after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile: a coin minted in Jerusalem during the Persian period shows a deity sitting on a wheeled throne and has been interpreted by some as a late anthropomorphic representation of Yhwh. Not all scholars agree that the iconography of Yhwh was so pronounced in Judah.

The God of the Jews. In any case, many scholars agree that Yhwh became the main god of the Jews only after the destruction of the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, around BCE. How or why the Jews came to exalt Yhwh and reject the pagan gods they also adored is unclear.

Most of the solutions are similar in that they acknowledge the necessity of speaking about God, while at the same time recognizing that all statements and descriptions of God are limited—half-truths at best. Of course, the first step in speaking about anything is naming it. In the Bible and later Jewish sources God has numerous names. During prayer and communal Torah reading it is pronounced: Adonai , from the word Adon or Lord. Another common name for God in the Bible is El or Elohim.

Traditional Jews refrain from using the actual scriptural names of God when not involved in religious activity; during casual conversation God is usually referred to as Hashem literally, the Name. Scholars debate the extent to which biblical religion was in fact monotheistic. The book of Exodus exhorts the Israelites to only worship the God who liberated them from Egypt, but it is never plainly stated that this is the only God that exists.

The latter notion originates in Deuteronomy , which according to critical Bible scholars comes from a source written much later than the book of Exodus. Nonetheless, the prohibition against idolatry and against imaging God is a fundamental teaching of the Bible. While it is a necessity to discuss and describe God, to do so with too much zeal—to try to capture a physical representation of the divine—is considered idolatry.