Is Yahweh the same as Allah? 7 questions from the Quran, the Bible and history

The Quran tells Muslims to say: “We have believed in Allah and what has been revealed to us and what has been revealed to Abraham عليه السلام and Ishmael عليه السلام and Isaac عليه السلام and Jacob and the Descendants and what was given to Moses and Jesus and what was given to the prophets from their Lord.”^[1] To the People of the Scripture they are to say, “our God and your God is one”.^[2] The reference is to the God of a particular history, the God who spoke to Abraham and Moses عليه السلام.

The clearest case is the burning bush. In Exodus, it is there that God reveals the name Yahweh: “Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob عليه السلام, has sent me to you. This is my name forever.”^[3] In the Quran, Moses sees a fire, approaches it and is called: “Indeed, I am your Lord, so remove your sandals”; “Indeed, I am Allah. There is no deity except Me.”^[4] Another passage gives the words “O Moses, indeed I am Allah, Lord of the worlds.”^[5] The scene in which the Bible gives the name Yahweh is the scene in which the Quran has God name himself Allah.

Jews writing in Arabic drew the same equation. Saadia Gaon, the tenth-century head of the academy at Sura in Iraq, translated the Torah into Arabic and rendered the divine name with “Allah”.^[6] The Hebrew name and the Arabic word are different words. On the evidence of the burning bush and of Arabic-speaking Jews, they were understood to refer to one God. The meaning of the word Allah itself is discussed in Who is Allah? 5 misunderstandings about the name itself.

The core of Islamic belief is tawhid, the affirmation that God is one and without partner. “Your god is one God. There is no deity except Him, the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful.”^[7] The short chapter of sincerity puts it in four lines: “He is Allah, One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born, nor is there to Him any equivalent.”^[8] The Quran also argues for oneness: had there been other gods in the heavens and the earth, both would have been ruined, and each god would have taken away what it had created.^[9]

From this standpoint, the divine council and the sons of God discussed in part 3 are read in one of two ways. Either they are created beings, angels who serve God, or they are the remnants of the worship of other powers that the prophets came to end. The Quran describes exactly that kind of corruption, and rejects the attribution of kinship to God: “they have made between Him and the jinn a lineage”, and “they have attributed to Allah partners, the jinn, while He has created them”.^[10]

That verse bears directly on the question of this series. The Quran says that Iblis “was of the jinn”.^[11] To make Satan a part of God, or God a form of Satan, is in Quranic terms the very error of joining the jinn to God that the Quran condemns. A Muslim who accepts the Quran cannot hold that the God who spoke to Moses is Satan, because the Quran says that the God who spoke to Moses is Allah and that Satan is one of his creatures.

The Quran says that God “has decreed upon Himself mercy” and, in the voice of God, “My mercy encompasses all things”.^[12] It also says that “Allah does not do injustice, even as much as an atom’s weight”.^[13] In a hadith recorded by al-Bukhari, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said that when God completed creation, he wrote in a book with him: “My mercy prevails over My anger.”^[14] The Hebrew Bible’s self-description of God, “merciful and gracious, slow to anger”, appears at the centre of the Torah, and the overlap is discussed in the same-God article.

The more searching question is whether the Quran describes God doing the things that, in the Bible, prompt the charge of part 1. It does. God tests people “with evil and with good as trial”; he tests Abraham with the command to sacrifice his son, which the Quran calls “the clear trial”; he “sends astray whom He wills and guides whom He wills”; and of the hypocrites who try to deceive him, it says, “He is deceiving them.”^[15] If acts of testing, misleading the wrongdoer and turning a plot back on the plotter made the actor Satan, the argument would apply to the God of the Quran as much as to the God of the Bible.

Muslim theologians did not accept that inference, and their reasons apply to both books. The commentators explain the verses on misleading and deceiving as just requital: God leaves in error those who choose it and turns the scheme of the schemer against him.^[16] The Quran holds both that all things come from God and that the evil a person suffers comes from himself.^[17] In a supplication with which the Prophet opened the prayer, he said to God, “Evil is not attributed to You.”^[18] Islamic theology affirms God’s decree over everything and denies that wrongdoing belongs to him. The questions this raises are discussed in fate and free will.

The Quran tells the story of Iblis several times. God commands the angels to prostrate to Adam; all do except Iblis, who refuses out of pride: “I am better than him. You created me from fire and created him from clay.”^[19] He is expelled, asks for a reprieve until the Day of Resurrection and is granted it, and then vows to lie in wait for human beings on God’s straight path.^[20]

Several features of the story matter here. Iblis is a creature, one of the jinn.^[11] He acts only within the reprieve God allows, and God tells him that over His servants he will have no authority.^[21] He is the one who accuses God: “Because You have put me in error, I will surely sit in wait for them.”^[22] On the Day of Judgement, the Quran says, he will confess to his followers: “I had no authority over you except that I invited you, and you responded to me. So do not blame me; but blame yourselves.”^[23] The Quran calls Satan “an enemy to you; so take him as an enemy”, and tells the believer to seek refuge with God from him before reciting the Quran.^[24]

The Quranic Satan has a role close to that of the accuser in Job: a creature who tests human beings by God’s leave. The Quran’s account of Job keeps Satan’s touch and removes the heavenly wager: Job calls to his Lord, “Satan has touched me with hardship and torment.”^[25] The development traced in part 1, from the satan of the court to the enemy of the New Testament, ends in the Quran with a figure who is wholly hostile and wholly subordinate. That combination rules out the identity the charge proposes. The other hadith reports about Satan that critics cite are discussed in Magic, jinn and Satan hadiths.

The Quran affirms that God “revealed the Torah and the Gospel before, as guidance for the people”, and it calls itself a confirmation of the earlier scripture “and a criterion over it”.^[26] It also says that some of those entrusted with the earlier books distorted words from their places, wrote things with their hands and said “this is from Allah”.^[27] Muslim scholars read that charge of tahrif in two ways: as alteration of meaning by interpretation, or as alteration of the text itself, a debate set out in The Islamic Dilemma: 5 assumptions the argument needs.

Either reading gives Muslims a way to approach the portrayals that trouble readers of the Bible. Where the Bible says that Yahweh “was sorry that he had made man”, or describes Jacob wrestling with a man who turns out to be God, Muslim polemicists such as Ibn Hazm of Cordoba treated the passages as evidence of human alteration.^[28] Others read them as figurative language that later readers misunderstood. The Quran itself answers some portrayals directly. After the six days of creation, “there touched Us no weariness”; and against those who said “the hand of Allah is chained”, it replies, “both His hands are extended”.^[29]

On this view, a troubling description is a problem of the record. It may be a misreading, an alteration or a figure of speech, and the Quran is the criterion by which a Muslim judges it. It does not make the God described into another being. The same principle applies to David. The Quran tells of David being tried and repenting, and it contains no census story; a Muslim reader of 2 Samuel 24 need not attribute to God what the Quran does not.^[30]

The Quran presents Jesus as a prophet of the God of Israel. He says to his people, “Indeed, Allah is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him. That is the straight path.”^[31] From the cradle he declares, “Indeed, I am the servant of Allah. He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet.”^[32] The Quran rejects the claim that he is God: “They have certainly disbelieved who say, ‘Allah is the Messiah, the son of Mary’ while the Messiah has said, ‘O Children of Israel, worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord.’”^[33]

This has a consequence for the Marcionite and Gnostic ideas discussed in part 4. Those teachers separated the Father of Jesus from the God of Israel. The Quran identifies them completely: the God Jesus worshipped and preached is the God of Moses and of the Torah he confirmed.^[34] Islam disagrees with mainstream Christianity about who Jesus is, as explained in 5 reasons why Muslims believe that Jesus is not God. It agrees with mainstream Christianity, against Marcion, that Jesus served the God of Abraham.

Two questions are easily confused. The first is whom a person is speaking about, the question of reference. The second is whether what he says about that being is true, the question of description. Muslims hold that Jews and Christians speak about the one God and describe him partly wrongly. Jews and Christians hold that Muslims speak about the one God and describe him partly wrongly in turn. Each position presupposes a shared subject, which is the point developed in the same-God article.

The name Yahweh adds a further consideration. In the Hebrew Bible it is the personal name of the God of Israel, and Jewish practice long ago ceased to pronounce it, reading “the Lord” in its place. The Quran says that “to Allah belong the best names, so invoke Him by them”.^[35] Muslims address God by the names given in the Quran and do not use the Tetragrammaton in worship. Using a different name in worship is a matter of practice and revelation, and it does not change the being addressed.

The evidence considered in this series leads to a clear Islamic answer. The God who spoke to Moses is, in the Quran’s own words, Allah. Satan is his creature and enemy. Disputed portrayals in the Bible are explained, from the Muslim side, by interpretation or alteration of the record, and in no case by a change of the God described.