A Jewish child learns six Hebrew words before learning almost anything else: Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Eḥad. A Christian child learns that when Jesus was asked which commandment came first, he answered with those same six words. A Muslim child learns a sura of four short lines that says the same thing. This article sets the three side by side and lets them speak.
The Quran's instruction for such a meeting is plain: "Do not argue with the people of the scripture (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) except in the nicest possible manner - unless they transgress - and say, 'We believe in what was revealed to us and in what was revealed to you, and our god and your god is one and the same; to Him we are submitters.'" (29:46). We begin, therefore, with the Torah.
The Shema and the first commandment
The King James Version renders Deuteronomy 6:4: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord." The Hebrew is Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Eḥad. The last word, eḥād, is "one".
Mark's Gospel records the scene in which a scribe asks Jesus which commandment is first of all. Jesus answers (Mark 12:29, KJV): "Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord." He does not add to it, qualify it, or replace it. The creed of Jesus is the creed of Moses, word for word.
Now the Quran's touchstone sura, four lines after the opening word "Proclaim":
"He is the One and only GOD." (112:1) "The Absolute GOD." (112:2) "Never did He beget. Nor was He begotten." (112:3) "None equals Him." (112:4)
The Arabic word rendered "One and only" is aḥad. The Hebrew eḥād and the Arabic aḥad are the same Semitic word in two sister languages. The Shema and Sura 112 open on the same syllable.
This is the whole of the common ground in miniature: a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim can each recite the first line of the others' creed in good conscience, because it is the first line of their own.
Isaiah: none else, and none like Him
The prophets say it with more force. In the KJV, Isaiah 45:5 reads: "I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me." Isaiah 46:9: "I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me." Isaiah 40:18 turns it into a question: "To whom then will ye liken God? Or what likeness will ye compare unto Him?"
Beside these, the fourth line of Sura 112 needs no commentary: "None equals Him." (112:4). Nor does this: "There is nothing that equals Him. He is the Hearer, the Seer." (42:11). Isaiah's question and the Quran's answer are one sentence spoken across a thousand years.
Isaiah also reserves salvation to GOD alone. Isaiah 43:11 (KJV): "I, even I, am the Lord; and beside me there is no saviour." And Isaiah 45:22: "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else." Note the reach of that second verse. Inside the Hebrew Bible itself, GOD addresses "all the ends of the earth", not one nation. The Quran says of its own messenger: "We have sent you out of mercy from us towards the whole world." (21:107). And of GOD's sole lordship: "Did they find other lords beside Him? GOD is the only Lord and Master. He is the One who resurrects the dead, and He is the Omnipotent One." (42:9).
We have quoted nothing from the Talmud and nothing from any Muslim commentary; the agreement is between the scriptures themselves.
The only true GOD, and the one He sent
A Christian reader may ask where Jesus himself stands in this. We let him answer from John's Gospel, in a prayer spoken before his arrest. John 17:3 (KJV): "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."
Two things are said there. GOD is "the only true God". Jesus is the one "whom thou hast sent". The Quran says exactly these two things about him: "The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, was a messenger of GOD, and His word that He had sent to Mary, and a revelation from Him." (4:171). And it puts on his lips the same sentence John 20:17 puts there ("my God and your God"): "He also proclaimed, 'GOD is my Lord and your Lord; you shall worship Him alone. This is the right path.'" (19:36). Khalifa's footnote to 19:36 says simply that this is similar to the statement attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John 20:17.
The Quran's own summary of Jesus' preaching is the Shema in another tongue: "The Messiah himself said, 'O Children of Israel, you shall worship GOD; my Lord and your Lord.'" (5:72). On the oneness of GOD, the Torah, Jesus and the Quran are not in conflict. The differences lie elsewhere, and they are for a later article.
One name in three tongues: El, Elah, Alaha, Allah
Readers sometimes suppose that "Allah" is the name of a different deity. The languages themselves refute this.
The Hebrew Bible calls GOD El, Eloah and Elohim; the Shema's Eloheinu means "our God" and carries that root. Aramaic, the everyday language of Jesus and his first hearers, has Elah, and Syriac-speaking Christians to this day pray to Alaha. Arabic has Allah. These are one Semitic word, ʾ-l-h, in three sister languages. Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians have always said "Allah" in their own prayers and their own Bibles, and still do.
The Quran treats the question of names with a largeness that surprises people who have only heard it described: "Say, 'Call Him GOD, or call Him Most Gracious; whichever name you use, to Him belongs the best names.'" (17:110). And: "To GOD belongs the most beautiful names; call upon Him therewith, and disregard those who distort His names. They will be requited for their sins." (7:180). The project does not ask any reader to change the word they use for GOD. It asks only that the word be used of Him alone.
Two arguments often made at this point are ones we do not make. One is the anecdote about an older edition of the Scofield Reference Bible spelling Elah as "Alah"; a transliteration variant proves nothing. The other is the cry "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" from the cross (Matthew 27:46). The Semitic word is there, but the Quran's account of the crucifixion is this: "In fact, they never killed him, they never crucified him - they were made to think that they did." (4:157), and Khalifa's footnote to 4:157–158 holds that Jesus the real person, the soul, was raised before his enemies crucified his living but empty body. The project therefore cannot present the cry from the cross as Jesus' words, and does not need to. Mark 12:29 and John 17:3 were spoken before the arrest, and they carry the same name.
Why the Quran never says "Father"
The Arabic word for father, abb, is one of the simplest in the language, and the Quran uses it many times of human fathers. Yet in over six thousand verses GOD is never once called "Father". The word that abounds instead is Rabb, "Lord", which carries every sense of nurture that "Father" carries at its best, and none of the sense of begetting. This is not an accident of style. "Never did He beget. Nor was He begotten." (112:3). "It does not befit GOD that He begets a son, be He glorified. To have anything done, He simply says to it, 'Be,' and it is." (19:35). "The Initiator of the heavens and the earth. How can He have a son, when He never had a mate? He created all things, and He is fully aware of all things." (6:101). The Quran protects the oneness of GOD at the level of the word, so that no later generation can turn an endearment into a doctrine. The Bible's own idiom shows why. In the KJV, Adam is "the son of God" (Luke 3:38); GOD says of the nation, "Israel is my son, even my firstborn" (Exodus 4:22); of David, "Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee" (Psalm 2:7); and Jesus himself says, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God" (Matthew 5:9). In Hebrew usage a "son of God" was a servant of GOD, a righteous one, a people He had chosen. Jesus speaks of "my Father and your Father" and "my God and your God" in the same breath (John 20:17, KJV). The Gospel's "Father" is the Torah's idiom for GOD's care; it became a claim about begetting only when the word reached a Greek and Roman world whose gods did beget.
The Quran addresses the idiom directly: "The Jews and the Christians said, 'We are GOD's children and His beloved.' Say, 'Why then does He punish you for your sins? You are just humans like the other humans He created.'" (5:18). And where the idiom hardens into the claim of a literal son, it is firm: "They said, 'The Most Gracious has begotten a son'!" (19:88); "You have uttered a gross blasphemy." (19:89); "It is not befitting the Most Gracious that He should beget a son." (19:92). Isaiah's "there is none like me" and the Quran's "Never did He beget" are the same guard on the same gate.
"Jehovah", and "I am GOD"
The four Hebrew letters YHWH occur thousands of times in the Hebrew Scriptures. Out of reverence the Jews did not pronounce them; they read Adonai, "Lord", and most English Bibles print "LORD" in capitals where the four letters stand. "Jehovah" is a sixteenth-century hybrid, the consonants of YHWH joined to the vowels of Adonai, with a European "J" in front; it was unknown to Moses, to Isaiah and to Jesus. The Greek manuscripts of the New Testament never carry the Tetragrammaton at all; they write kyrios and theos, Lord and God. These are historical facts, and the project states them as such.
What the project does not do is build an etymology on them. The popular readings of YHWH as the Arabic Ya Huwa, "O He!", and of "Alleluia" as "Ya Allah Hu", are set aside; the Hebrew halelu-Yah means "praise ye Yah", and scholars derive YHWH from the verb "to be". That derivation is the better bridge. At the bush, Moses was told, "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus 3:14, KJV). The Quran's account of the same meeting has GOD say: "I am GOD; there is no other god beside Me. You shall worship Me alone, and observe the Contact Prayers (Salat) to remember Me." (20:14). The One who IS declares that He is the only one to be worshipped. That is the Shema again.
A Greek witness: Xenophanes
The thread is Semitic in this article, but it is not only Semitic. In the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ, a Greek poet from Colophon, Xenophanes, was saying in Ionia what the prophets had said in Jerusalem. The project has prepared a Quran-aligned edition of his surviving fragments, rendered from Fairbanks (1898). Its first fragment reads: "God is One, the greatest over all beings in heaven and on earth, like mortals neither in form nor in thought." The second: "He sees wholly, He perceives wholly, He hears wholly." And among his recorded sayings: looking up into the broad heavens, he said, "God is One."
Xenophanes also saw why men make gods in their own shape: "if cattle or lions had hands, so that they could paint with their hands and make works as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own." Isaiah asked, "To whom then will ye liken God?" Xenophanes answered that every likeness is a self-portrait. The Quran: "No visions can encompass Him, but He encompasses all visions. He is the Compassionate, the Cognizant." (6:103).
Xenophanes was a thinker, not a prophet, and the project does not claim him as one. But the Quran says that the knowledge of one GOD is placed in every human being: "Such is the natural instinct placed into the people by GOD." (30:30). A Greek who reached the Shema by reason is a witness to that instinct, and to this: "We have sent a messenger to every community, saying, 'You shall worship GOD, and avoid idolatry.'" (16:36).
What to show first
To a Jewish listener, begin with the Shema in Hebrew, then Isaiah 45:5, 46:9 and 40:18 in their own Bible, and only then read Sura 112 aloud and let them hear eḥād and aḥad. To a Christian listener, begin with Mark 12:29, so that the first voice they hear reciting the Shema is Jesus', then John 17:3, then 112 and 4:171. With both, show next that El, Elah, Alaha and Allah are one word, and close with 17:110, so that no one feels asked to rename GOD. Leave "Father" and "Jehovah" until the common ground is felt; corrections come last and briefly. Do not open with etymologies, and do not mention the cry from the cross.
Where the evidence is strong, and where it is not
Strong: Deuteronomy 6:4 and Mark 12:29 beside 112:1; Isaiah 43:11, 45:5, 45:22, 46:9 and 40:18 beside 112:4, 42:9 and 42:11; John 17:3 beside 4:171 and 19:36; the cognate *eḥād*/*aḥad*; the Semitic root shared by El, Elah, Alaha and Allah; the fact that the Quran never calls GOD "Father"; the history of the word "Jehovah" and its absence from the Greek New Testament. These are plain texts and settled philology.
Moderate: the Eli/Eloi cognate on Jesus' lips. The sound is genuine, but the only passage that records it is the crucifixion narrative, which the project cannot use as Jesus' words; we rest the name-argument on Mark 12:29 and John 17:3 instead. Moderate also is Xenophanes, a philosopher and not scripture, whose fragments survive as quotations in later authors.
Deliberately not relied upon: the Scofield "Alah" anecdote and the claim that later editions "removed" it; the Ya Huwa and Ya Allah Hu etymologies; the argument that Elohim is a numerical plural, when the plural of majesty is standard Hebrew and the project accepts it; and the popular count of "ninety-nine names", which rests on Hadith, whereas the Quran speaks of "the most beautiful names" without a number. "You shall not accept any information, unless you verify it for yourself." (17:36).
The Shema, the first commandment and Sura 112 are one creed; the next article, Ik Onkar, reads the same creed in the Mul Mantra of the Sikhs, and the series will come in time to the Final Testament's own proof, "Over it is nineteen." (74:30).
Sources
- The Holy Bible, King James Version: Deuteronomy 6:4; Exodus 3:14; Exodus 4:22; Psalm 2:7; Isaiah 40:18, 43:11, 45:5, 45:22, 46:9; Matthew 5:9, 27:46; Mark 12:29; Luke 3:38; John 17:3, 20:17.
- Quran: The Final Testament, Authorized English Version, translated by Rashad Khalifa, including the footnotes to 4:157–158 and 19:36.
- The Sayings of Xenophanes of Kolophon, Quran-aligned edition (Theory of Everything project, 2026), rendered from A. Fairbanks, The First Philosophers of Greece (1898).
- One Message, Many Witnesses, the project's master document (strand 1, rows 1.22–1.32, 1.34; section 12, items C3 and C20).
- Popular presentations consulted: Ahmed Deedat, What Is His Name?; Zakir Naik / IRF lectures on the concept of GOD.