Is Allah the God of the Bible?
By (Former Congressman) Mark Siljander www.adeadlymisunderstanding.com
I wanted to preface this as I have had conversations around this topic before which created some misunderstandings that had to be worked through. I believe it is important to know about the author, former Congressman Mark Siljander. God has used Mark to create meaningful and life changing dialogue between leaders and communities that include Christians, Muslims and Jews. My prayer is that you see the importance of communication and seeing what Father will do, when we engage in love and understanding. I also recognized that even mong Christianity, our individual views of who One God is, covers a wide spectrum. I recommend the book Mark wrote, and it can be found along with other great resouces on His website www.adeadlymisunderstanding.com.
Second Bridge to the Common Ground
Is Allah the God of the Bible?©
(Taken from Chapter 9 of a manuscript dealing with the “Seven Bridges to the Common Ground”
written by Mark Siljander)
This is one of the most painful misunderstandings among Christians. Most laymen and leaders feel that Allah is not the same God as the God of the Hebrews, or Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Ishmael. In fact, they argue Allah is a moon-god. Televangelist Benny Hinn has commented, “This is not a war between Arabs and Jews. It's a war between God and the devil."
It would be wonderful if Christians and Muslims could get beyond the basics of respecting another’s name for God and reach a consensus. It would open doors to desperately needed dialogue and communication, allowing the Holy Spirit to reveal common ground as to the nature of God. Let us make sure this “feeling” towards Allah is not merely a trained cultural response and/or an emotional one, but instead cultivate a view founded on fact and linguistics, seated in an understanding of the history and culture surrounding the origins of the names for God. Let us also approach this issue asking God to reveal the truth to us, as much as we are able to understand.
Seminary Students Finally Accept It, But Not Without a Fight!
I recall speaking to an assembly of seminary students in Lancaster, PA a few years ago. When questioned, their view was unanimous that Allah was a false god and in fact, derived from a moon-god of ancient times. They were ready and had a prepared statement to read:
During the nineteenth century[1], then later in the 1940’s[2], and finally during the 1950's[3], archeologists’ digs gathered from both North and South Arabia depict evidence of a moon-god (called Hubal[4] during pre-Islamic times). This deity was worshiped even in the Prophet Muhammad's day. According to inscriptions, while the name of the moon-god was not Allah, his title was al-ilah, i.e. "the deity," meaning that he was the chief or high god among the gods.
The moon-god was called al-ilah, “the god.” However, this name (Arabic: Il or Ilah) did not originate as a title for the moon-god. Thousands of years before that, Semites used variations of Il/El and Alah to refer to their high gods.
Noted Christian historian Philip Hitti also feels the designation of Allah as a moon-god is not correct. [5][6] The Islamic symbol of the crescent moon is often raised as evidence reflecting a moon god. However, history reveals that the Ottoman invaders of the Byzantine Empire simply adopted their defeated Christian foe’s symbol of the crescent moon and continued using it.[7]
Muhammad viewed monotheists in history such as Abraham and those in his time as haneef, believers in the One Supreme God, creator of the heavens and universe, inspirer of the prophets through the Rouh Qudus, the “Holy Spirit.”
I shared with the seminary students,
“If Allah was indeed one of the 360 gods represented in the Kabba in Mecca prior to Muhammad, it does not preclude one of them being the One True God of the Old and New Testament. It could be considered similar to Paul on Mars Hill in Acts 17, identifying the true God from all the false idols. Muhammad did the same by destroying all the other idols in the Kabba, leaving the one ilah. The Apostle Paul faced similar push back with the Greek pagans as Muhammad did with the Arab pagans. After gaining their attention by quoting various Greek philosophers, Paul announced that he knew the name of this ‘unknown god’ and proceeded to teach of the one true God. The scripture says that while ‘some mocked…many followed and surrendered’ to God. The point being, that the origins of a name do not always reflect on the later application.”
The seminary students were listening, but I could tell they were not with me yet.
To emphasize the point, I delved further into the origins of the name “God” from a linguistic viewpoint.
Is the English “God” Pagan?
If one argues the name “Allah” is pagan-based, what about the origins of the English word “God?” I personally was stunned to learn that it actually has more historic baggage than Semitic words such as Allah. “God” is derived from a proto-Germanic pagan word (possibly Zoroastrian) for a water god, water spirit, or idol (pronounced “gut”). It held no gender until the Germanic tribes adopted Christianity, when the male gender was later included.
Is the Greek and Latin for “God” also Pagan?
Next we reviewed the history of our theologically favored Greek and Latin words for “God.” The Greek Theos (from whence we derive “theology,” “theologian,” etc.) has a heathen Greek origin, from the Indo-European root dhes. The popular Latin word deus –along with the Spanish dios and French dieu–is also pagan-based. The Greek god Zeus has the root dyeu and is the origin of the word for God used in the early Latin Vulgate version of the Bible.
So, let's say that thousands of years ago, the ancient word Allah may have been based on a moon-god (which as we have seen is itself an open question). Perhaps the more relevant question is: what meaning does the present use of the word evoke for people today and to which god is it referring? Would any English speaking person think when they say “God” that they are referring to a Germanic water-spirit? Of course not! The English word is commonly used by Christians for false gods, simply inserting a capital “G” when referring to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Ishmael. When Latino believers speak of Dios, are they referencing the origin of the name, and speaking of the Greek god Zeus? Certainly not!
For over 500 years before the Muslim Prophet Mohammed, Arab Christians and even some Jews in the Arabian Peninsula used the Arabic word Allah for God. 10-12 million Christian Arabs currently use Allah every day as their Arabic word for God. Are they praying to a moon-god? What of the five million Assyrian and Chaldean Christians who pray to Alaha, a derivative of Allah?[8] Rev. John Booko, one of the officiating pastors at my wife’s and my wedding, who is an Assyrian Evangelical Christian, always prays “in the Aramaic/Syriac name of Alaha.”
The Hebrew Name for “God”
Are the Jews who pray to the Old Testament’s Elohim praying to the same God as all the rest? Is it, or is it not, the same God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Ishmael, whether spoken in any language?
An Israeli Semitic language scholar once told me:
In Canaan El was the chief deity of the Canaanite pantheon and was worshipped as a bull deity (which is where the whole idea of the golden calf in Exodus came from). The Israelites were worshipping the true God in a proscribed form. The Aramaic form of this was Alah, which under the influence of a linguistic shift known as the “Canaanite Shift” in Hebrew became Eloah. The plural form of the latter, which is also used in the Hebrew Bible, is Elohim. But the Aramaic Alah was how one said “God” in that language, even in Jesus’ day. Thus if Jesus spoke Aramaic, then he also called God Alah; Arabic came up with nothing new when it referred to the one true God as Alah. In fact, Arabic-speaking Christians would have used this word for God long before Mohammed was born.[9]
The general Hebrew term for God is El. The Israeli airline is named El Al, where El also means “up” in the air. El is a shortened version of Elohim,[10] which is the plural of Eloah, as we touched on before. It is used throughout the Old Testament over 2,300 times. Ironically, even Elohim has pagan roots. Elohim as well as El were ancient Canaanite, Phoenician and Amharic/Ethiopian names for deity.[11]
Perhaps the most specific Hebrew name for God is YHWH, also mistakenly referred to as Yehovah, meaning self-existent and eternal. YHWH is rooted from ‘Hayah’, the to be verb, which is from ‘Hava’, to breathe, or to be, which connects to ‘Ayil’. Finally ‘Ayil’ leads us back to ‘El’, which is the root of all the Semitic names for God. YHWH is spoken aloud on rare Jewish celebrations as just “Ya.” Jews often replaced the actual name of God for Adonay (Lord) orally and in their written scripts.
The Arabic Name for “God”
As we have discussed, the Arabic word for God is Allah. It also is derived from the Aramaic Hebrew word, El. It is a contraction of Al and Ilahi, which literally means “the God.” (Al is Arabic for “the” as in Isa al-Mesiah “Jesus the Christ.”) The Arab “Ilahi” is the same word for God as used in the Hebrew and Aramaic.[12] In fact, if one were to remove all the vowel markings (Semitic languages are all consonants and use markings to make vowels) from the Arabic Al-Ilahi and Hebrew El-Elohim (both meaning “the God”), remove the plural of the words and they are transliterated nearly identically as Al-Alh and A-Alh. Both words correspond back to the Aramaic Alah and the Syriac Alaha.
The definition afforded by The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia is as follows:
“Allah (ăl'ə, ä'lə), [Arab.=the God]. Derived from an old Semitic root referring to the Divine and used in the Canaanite El, the Mesopotamian ilu, and the biblical Elohim, the word Allah is used by all Arabic-speaking Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others. Allah, as a deity, was probably known in pre-Islamic Arabia. Arabic chronicles suggest a pre-Islamic recognition of Allah as a supreme God, with the three goddesses al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat as his “daughters.” The Prophet Muhammad, declaring Allah the God of Abraham, demanded a return to a strict monotheism.”[13]
Aramaic: Could Jesus Have Used the Same Word for “God” as the Muslims?
The Aramaic word for God is Elah, or Alaha,[14] also derived from El.[15] The ancient Hebrew word Elah, means “something strong,” like trees of the oak, rooted in Elijah, meaning God of YHWH, which again leads us to its root, El.[16]
Elah[17] is used about 70 times in the Old Testament. When combined with other words, we see different attributes of God. Some examples: Elah Yerush'lem - God of Jerusalem: (Ezra 7:19); Elah Yisrael - God of Israel: (Ezra 5:1); Elah Sh'maya - God of Heaven: (Ezra 7:23); Elah Sh'maya V'Arah - God of Heaven and Earth: (Ezra 5:11).[18]
There are also several verses in the Qur’an using Elah and its derivatives, Il or El. These words are specifically referred to in the Qur’an (see Sura 9:8 and 10). While some Islamic scholars understand it to mean blood ties, most others take it as short for the Arabic word Ilah, meaning “Lord.” It could also be the Arabicized Aramaic Hebrew for EL as in Ismael (Ishmael), which means "God listens" and/or Elah, or Deity, from its original Aramaic or Syriac. It may surprise some people to know that even Jesus used this form for God in Matt. 24:47 when he cried out in the Aramaic language, “Eli, Eli”, meaning “my God, my God.”
Jesus, an Aramaic speaker, would naturally use Alaha just as Aramaic speakers do today. It is simply the Aramaic version of the identical Arabic word Allah. “The cognate Aramaic term appears in the Aramaic version of the New Testament, called the Peshitta, as one of the words Jesus used to refer to God, e.g., in the sixth Beatitude, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see Alaha.’ The Arabic Bible uses the same word in Matt. 5:8, for instance, translated Allah.”[19]
While all this may seem confusing, simply stated and confirmed by Brown, Driver, and Briggs Hebrew Lexicon, El is the root word for God in Hebrew, Elohim; in Aramaic, Alaha; and in Arabic, Allah. Furthermore, they connote the same God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Ishmael. In addition, the prophesied Messiah in Isaiah 9:6 of the Tenach is referred to as El.
After speaking at a peace conference in Egypt, I approached the heads of the Lutheran and Coptic (Egyptian) Churches who were in attendance. I asked these two Christian leaders what name they used for “God” in their churches. They looked at me very puzzled and responded “Allah, of course!” They would be shaken to know that probably 99 percent of Western Christians do not think Allah is the same God as the Christian God. Their response to my seemingly stupid question is a microcosm of the answer; it is simply the Arabic word for “God.”
The “Correct” Name of God
Eventually the seminary students clearly understood the different forms of “the name of God” used in the Holy Books. Hebrew El, Aramaic Alaha and Arabic Allah are identical words derived from the same linguistic root, using the Semitic letters Alef-Lamed-He, pronounced ila. Such names should not be the focus of scorn, or the cause of division and war. The slight modifications among each of the language groupings simply reflect different pronunciations conforming to the historical pattern of cognate shifts in each tongue, not different words. To put it simply, the Latin, Spanish, and Italian words for God (Deus, Dios, and Dio) and the English and German words (God and Gott) all mean the same as do the Semitic Allah, Alaha and Elohim.
Islam and Judaism do not have a problem seeing the God of each tradition as the God of Abraham, so why should we? The students lined up after the presentation to express their shock and excitement.
Christian vs Islamic View of God
One student, in a last effort to refute the presentation, conceded “Islam may be referring to the same God as the Jews and Christians linguistically, but Islam sees God very differently than Christianity.” I responded that while this may be true to a degree; in my work I have found that those differences are much narrower than we might first suppose.
There are indeed differences of perception about God, just as there are many views people may have of you! Some view you as a friend, others as an enemy. Some may look at you as someone who is fair, others as a scoundrel. My wife views me as a partner, lover, etc, much differently than my children; they in turn see me differently than my siblings. Moreover, each of them has their individual understanding of me, my character, nature and directives. But I am the same person, viewed differently by different people.
Christians demand that Muslims view God in the context of our particular doctrine alone as evidence of following the “true” God. One needs to be careful as this premise negates Jews of the Torah as believing in the same God. After all, Jews do not accept Jesus as Messiah, let alone see Him as God’s Word, Spirit and supernaturally conceived like the Muslims do. Perhaps enforcing our respective dogma on others is why Christians are themselves so divided into 33,000 sects and denominations. Do any of the 147 varieties of Baptists view God exactly the same? What about Pentecostals, Catholics, Methodists, or Quakers?
From another standpoint we cannot assume that current struggles with extremism within Islam represent the whole of its history or its future. Who did the Christian church claim as God when engaged for centuries in Crusades, enforcing the Inquisition or rising up in violence against each other, Protestant and Catholic? That behavior was unconscionable, but do we say that those being misled at that time did not pray to the same God as we do now? Clearly, the performance of the human family does not define who God is.
However unlikely it seems, a careful review of the Muslim Holy Book reveals Christians share much more with Muslims in our concept of who God is than we might think. After reading the Qur’an, most would agree we are all referring to the one God: magnificent and omnipresent, omnipotent creator of heaven and earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Ishmael. He is the God of the prophets, such as Abraham, Moses, Daniel, Noah and John the Baptist.
He is the same God who sent the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary, who birthed a sinless Messiah named Jesus through the Holy Spirit. The same Jesus, who could heal the sick, raise the dead, was taken up to God and is coming back on Judgment Day. There is of course much more to discuss, but what other God could all this be referring to?
In the end, the seminary students were nearly unanimous, agreeing that the three major faiths do pray and refer to a monotheistic god, and that linguistically they are the same “God.” While many left changed in attitude, most confessed discomfort using Allah in place of “God.” Western bias against it is difficult to break.
I must confess that after extensive Western/Christian training myself, it has taken time for me to feel comfortable using the Arabic term, Allah, for God in conversations. My mentor, who has been a pastor for 50 years, helps me break my dogmatically negative feeling about Allah when he prays in the name of Alaha in his Aramaic language.
Do we not all fancy ourselves on a path seeking revelation of the “true” God? None of us has to scratch very deeply to find out that our concept of God is different from another’s concept of God. My concept of God is not the same as when I first believed. Some days it is not even the same as it was the day before. God is revealing himself from day to day through dialogue, reading of the Scriptures and through experiences. Because some have not arrived at what each of us might believe is His true nature, let us not condemn another, and cut ourselves off from others in the process of their search.
What I have hoped to outline here is evidence that the Abrahamic faith traditions share the same linguistic name for God and describe God’s character similarly, despite each of our defined differences. When Muslims open a door to explore common ground we should not slam it in their face.
I have run out of space, but allow me to share one last thought. In interfaith relations, the nature, person and mission of Jesus of Nazareth is often seen as the crux of the problem, when ironically, he is in fact the extraordinary solution. These “differences” are explored further in the other six “Bridges to the Common Ground” chapters.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face.
1 Cor. 13:12
[1] Amaud, Halevy and Glaser went to Southern Arabia and dug up thousands of Sabean, Minaean, and Qatabanian documents that depict Allah as a moon god. Robert Morey, The Islamic Invasion: Confronting The World’s Fastest-Growing Religion (Harvest House Publishers, 1992)
[2] Archeologists G. Caton Thompson and Carleton S. Coon made discoveries in Arabia. Morey.
[3] Wendell Phillips, W.F. Albright, Richard Bower made similar discoveries as they excavated sites at Qataban, Timna, and Marib. Morey.
[4] Tracing the origins of ancient gods is often tenuous. If the name Hubal is related to an Aramaic word for spirit, as suggested by Hitti, then Hubal may have come from the north of Arabia. Philip K. Hitti, History Of The Arabs (1937), 96-101.
[5] Welllhausen indicates that Hubal was regarded as the son of al-Lat and the brother of Wadd. Wellhausen (1926), 717, as quoted by Hans Krause, Hans Krause’s Research Reports, http://hanskrause.de/HKHPE/hkhpe_32_01.htm.
[6] Attempts to identify Hubal with Allah have been notably popular among evangelical Christians, but even they acknowledge that this hypothesis is speculative, and it is contradicted by the Islamic-period texts from which most knowledge of pre-Islamic Arab religion derives. Answering Islam, Moon God, http://www.answering-islam.org/Index/M/moongod.html (Jul. 29, 2009).
[7] Rick Brown, “Who is ‘Allah’?” International Journal of Frontier Missions, 23:2 (Summer 2006), 80 (http://www.commonpathalliance.org).
[8] The Aramaic word Alaha is also spelled Elaha. “The –'a' at the end is the determined form, which originally meant 'the' in regular Aramaic. By the time the Syriac language was in its heyday, the determined forms were otiose, as occurred in the East Aramaic dialects in general, including Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Mandaic.” Dr. Eldon Clem, private communication to author.
[9] Dr. Eldon Clem, Syriac scholar of Jerusalem, Israel, Quote from a private conversation, February 2006.
[10] The Hebrew word translated "God" ('elohim) is a plural noun denoting majesty, and the writers of Scripture used it as an honorific title. Though it is plural in form, it is singular in meaning when referring to the true God. This name represents the Creator's transcendent relationship to His creation. Dr. Thomas L. Constable, “Notes on Genesis” Dr. Constable’s Expository Notes, 2009 Ed., http://www.soniclight.com/constable/notes.htm (Jul. 29, 2009).
[11] M. James Sawyer , Th.M., Ph.D., Lecture Notes on The Names Of God, Bible.org, http://bible.org/article/lecture-notes-names-god (Jul 29, 2009).
[12] “Jewish Arabic translation of the Torah was translated by the Jewish scholar Saadia Gaon before 1000 AD and has been used by Middle Eastern Jews until the present time…There were other Jewish Arabic translations as well, notably the one made by the Karaites at the same time as Saadia. All of these Jewish translations use Allah as the name of God, using it to translate both Elohim and YHWH. There are multitudes of ancient Christian Arabic translations of Scripture, from the seventh century until now, and they all without exception use Allah.” Brown, 80-81.
[13] "Allah," The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. (Columbia University Press, 2003), Dec. 9, 2005 (http://www.answers.com/topic/allah).
[14] The determined form, meaning “the God,” although in later Syriac when the determined forms lose their force, “Alaha” becomes the normal way of saying “God.”
[15] Dr. Imad Nicola Shehadeh, President and Professor of Theology, Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary, private communication to author, Feb. 2006: “I agree with you that the term ‘Allah’ comes from the Aramaic/Syriac ‘Allaha’ (from now on, when I say Aramaic, I mean Aramaic/Syriac). The evidence is overwhelming. I have published an article on this in order to show that Allah was not originally a moon-god as some have suggested, but came from the Aramaic Allaha used by Jews and Christians of Muhammad's day. (If interested, please see Bibliotheca Sacra journal, volume 161, issue 641, 2004).”
[16] Associated with this name in the OT (Old Testament) is the idea of power, “The Strong One.” http://bible.org/article/lecture-notes-names-god.
[17] “Elah” is Aramaic, corresponding to the Aramaic sections of Ezra.
[18] Tracey R. Rich, The Name of G-d, Judaism 101, http://www.jewfaq.org/name.htm (Jul. 29, 2009).
[19] "Allah," Wikipedia, 2005, http://www.answers.com/topic/allah, Dec. 9, 2005.
