How We Know that the Trinity is Not in the Torah?

September 7, 2020 - 18 Elul 5780

Introduction

The first and most basic answer is that God did not explicitly reveal the Trinity in the Torah.

What Christians claim to be God's explicit revelation of the Trinity in the Torah are in fact implicit references to what they assume to be explicit revelations. There is a difference between the words "explicit" and "implicit." God explicitly tells the Jews that His Nature is Unified. He explicitly tells them that He expects them to keep His commandments, and explicitly tells them what will happen if they do not. He does not explicitly tell them that He is a Trinity. When God wants to make something understood clearly and imminently He explains it in an explicit fashion so as to remove any possibility of doubt of what He is referring to. He does not leave it up to conjecture or interpolation. This does not mean that the Torah is low on mystery or enigmatic passages, for any student of the Tanakh knows it contains many. Instead, those passages tend to be found in association with particular details related to narratives and not when describing His true Nature, or His expectations of the Jews or humanity.

The question becomes, if God wanted to reveal Himself as a Trinity why did all Jews up until the first century fail to realize that God had revealed Himself as such?

Some Christians like to make the claim that appearances of particular angels throughout the Torah are in fact appearances of the Second Person in the Trinity before he manifested himself as Jesus. Some common examples are Genesis 18 (and 21) in which three angels visit Abraham's tent, and another is Judges 13, each of which will be examined independently.

  1. Genesis 18 - Point 1
  2. Genesis 18 - Point 2
  3. Judges 13













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