Why The Qur’an Has 99 Names For One God |
One of the most important lessons Jewish educators should teach; is why there should be so many different names for the One God of monotheistic religions and peoples, both now and even in the Messianic future (“All the nations will walk in the name of their gods, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.” Micah 4:5); when different names for one God seem to produce so many problems.
Anwar Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, (2/17/15) that “Over the first two weeks in February (2015), arsonists and vandals in Malaysia attacked 10 Christian churches and Sikh temples. The attacks were provoked by a controversy over the use of the word “Allah” by Malaysia’s Christian community, which numbers over two million, or about 10% of the Malaysian population.
Ibrahim writes: “In late 2007, the Home Ministry banned the use of the word Allah by the Herald, a Catholic newspaper, and later confiscated 15,000 copies of Malay-language Bibles imported from Indonesia in which the word for God is translated as ‘Allah’. A Dec. 31, 2009 ruling by the Kuala Lumpur High Court overruled the earlier ban, asserting constitutional guarantees regarding the freedom of religion in Malaysia. Since then, an already tense situation boiled over, largely due to incitement by a few reckless politicians and the mainstream media.
“So how did we get to the point where some angry Muslims in Malaysia end up attacking houses of worship of other people of the book; in direct violation of the Qur’an statement: “For had it not been for Allah’s repelling some men by means of others, cloisters, churches, oratories and mosques, wherein the name of God is oft mentioned, would assuredly have been pulled down.” (Qur’an 22:40). All this because of God’s name.”
In the days of Abraham, the religions of the Near East, India and China had hundreds of gods, and hundreds of different names for their different gods. Thus, The Encyclopedia of Gods by Michael Jordan contains over 2.500 entries of individual deities from ancient and modern cultures and societies.
Jordan even includes several entries of important spiritual teachers and miracle working humans who lived and died among their fellow humans, and were then in retrospect elevated into Gods. For example: Asklepios. Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama and Tin-Hau.
Tin-Hau was a young woman who for more than a dozen years had many dream visions of sinking fishing ships that she was able to rescue. Not long after her death at age 28, her story was inscribed on the walls of a sanctuary in Hangchiow (in 1228); and she was deified 50 years later by the Mongol emperor Kublai Kahn. So she became a Goddess.
But for those religions that trace their prophets back to Prophet Abraham, and his two Prophet sons Ishmael and Isaac, the many names of God simply describe different aspects or attributes of the one God’s multifaceted personality.
For monotheists the many names of God are just appellations: titles and descriptions. Thus, to say that God is a King or a Judge describes one of many ways the one God acts; i,e, a job description. To say that God is the Merciful or Compassionate One is to describe one of many character or personality traits of the one God.
While most polytheistic Gods are........