Understanding What Was Always Declared
Before It Was Explained Away
One YHWH
Not 1+1. Not 1+1+1. Not a formula. Not a committee. One. The Hebrew text knew only one divine being and declared it in a single word.
Document 1 of 13
The most foundational declaration in the entire covenant text is not a statement about what YHWH has done. It is a statement about what YHWH is. And it is given not as a theological proposition to be analyzed but as a command to hear. Sh’ma, hear. Pay attention. Do not let this pass through you without landing. What follows is the most important thing that can be said.
Sh’ma Yisrael YHWH Eloheinu YHWH Echad. Hear O Israel YHWH our God YHWH is one. Six words in Hebrew. The entire covenant identity of the people rests on them. Every morning and every evening for three thousand years the covenant people have spoken these words. They are the last words a person is meant to say before death. They are written on the doorposts of homes in the mezuzah. They are the declaration that defines what the covenant people know about the nature of the one they are in covenant with.
YHWH is one. Not YHWH is first among three. Not YHWH is one person within a divine community. Not YHWH plus the Son plus the Spirit equals one divine being in the way that three separate things can be grouped into a single category. YHWH is one. The Hebrew word is echad, and echad carries a meaning that the English word one does not fully convey.
Sh’ma, hear. Not analyze. Not calculate. Not resolve the arithmetic of persons. Hear. YHWH is one. Echad. This is the foundation. Everything in the covenant testimony stands on it.
Echad is the word used in Genesis 2:24 when a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and the two become one flesh, echad. Two distinct persons, genuinely differentiated, becoming a unified oneness that does not erase the differentiation but transcends it. The oneness is not sameness. It is not the erasure of all distinction. It is a unified wholeness in which differentiation exists within the oneness rather than fracturing it into separate beings.
This is the echad of the Sh’ma. YHWH is one, a unified wholeness that contains within it the differentiation of registers, of expressions, of relational modes and covenantal functions, without that differentiation fracturing the divine nature into separate beings. The Av register, the covenant fatherhood, the one who passed between the pieces alone. The I am register, the eternal self-declaration, the name Moshe heard at the burning bush. The incarnate register, Yeshua, the name that carries YHWH within it, the one who arrived in the first word of the Torah before the creation began. The Spirit register, the presence and power of YHWH moving through creation, hovering over the waters in the second verse of the Torah, poured out on all flesh at Shavuot. Not four beings. Not three persons. Four registers of the same echad. One YHWH expressing himself in the modes the covenant requires.
The Sh’ma was not a new declaration when Moshe delivered it in Deuteronomy 6. It was the summary of everything the covenant testimony had already been showing since the first word was written. Bereshit, the Son declared in the first word. YHWH, the name written in four Paleo-Hebrew pictures declaring behold the hand, behold the nail. The covenant sealed in Genesis 15 while Avraham slept, by one who passed through alone holding both sides simultaneously. The let us make man of Genesis 1, the divine nature speaking from within itself in the plural of self-address. Everything in the covenant testimony before the Sh’ma was already declaring one YHWH in multiple registers. The Sh’ma named what the testimony had been showing.
Echad, the oneness of two becoming one flesh. Differentiation within unity. Not the erasure of distinction but the transcendence of it. YHWH is echad in the same sense, differentiation within a unified wholeness that never fractures into separate beings.
The name itself carries the oneness. YHWH, four letters, one name, one declaration: behold the hand, behold the nail. The name is not three names standing together. It is four letters that make one declaration about one identity. The hand and the nail, not the hand of one divine person and the nail of another. One declaration. One name. The identity of the one divine being declaring itself in the pictographic form of four letters drawn by Moshe in the wilderness approximately 1446 BCE.
And the I am that YHWH declared to Moshe at the burning bush, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, I am what I am, I will be what I will be, is the verbal form of the divine name. The name YHWH is derived from the Hebrew verb hayah, to be, to exist, to be present. YHWH is the third person form, he is, he exists, he is present. Ehyeh is the first person form, I am, I exist, I am present. They are the same verb in different grammatical persons describing the same eternal self-existence. The one who declared I am to Moshe is the one whose name the Sh’ma declares as the one YHWH. One being. One existence. One name. One declaration. One echad.
This is the foundation of the twelve documents in this series. Not a theological position to be defended against other theological positions. Not a formula to replace the formula of three persons. The declaration that was always there, in the Sh’ma, in the name, in the first word, in the covenant sealed while Avraham slept, in the I am before Avraham was, waiting to be heard as what it is. One YHWH. Echad. In every register simultaneously. The same one. Always.
The documents that follow examine how this foundation was covered, by Greek philosophical categories at the councils, by the flattening of the registers into separate persons, by the translation choices that removed YHWH from the Son’s name and the Father’s name and the body constituted for all flesh. And they examine what the text declares when the coverings are removed and the Sh’ma is allowed to be the foundation it always was. Not 1+1. Not 1+1+1. One. YHWH. Echad. Hear.
Sh’ma Yisrael YHWH Eloheinu YHWH Echad. Hear O Israel YHWH our God YHWH is one. This is the foundation. Not a formula. A declaration. Hear it.
Not 1+1.
Not 1+1+1.
Not three persons in a divine committee.
One.
YHWH.
Echad.
Unified wholeness containing differentiation without fracturing into separate beings.
The same one. In every register. Always.
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
William Ethan Massengill • Michael Lilborn Williams • Daniel Thomas Rouse
Published by Audrey Williams