Christians, being the excellent scholars of ancient Biblical Hebrew openly admit that Echad is used many times in the Old Testament to mean one and one alone: “Two are better than one [Echad] because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one [Echad] will lift up his companion. But woe to the one [Echad] who falls when there is not another to lift him up. Furthermore, if two lie down together they keep warm, but how can one [Echad] be warm alone? And if one [Echad] can overpower him who is alone, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9–12)

The argument is not with ECHAD being used in Deuteronomy 6:4. The argument is that this word has two meanings: unified and singular one. The argument is that the word YACHID, which always means one and ONE ALONE (not a unified one) is NEVER used of God ANYWHERE in the Old Testament.

The Hebrew word “HEN” means one and only one and is used of God: ““Now, O Lord our God, deliver us from his hand that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that You alone [HEN], Lord, are God.”” (Isaiah 37:20)

But never in the Torah. This fact indeed deeply troubles Jews today. The debate over the implications of the various usage’s of two Hebrew words [Yachid vs. Echad] translated “one” is as intriguing as it is complex. The etymology of the Hebrew word yachid (one) is derived from echad in the same way that the English word “only” is derived from the word “one”. That yachid is from the same root family of words as echad is seen from the similarity of spelling. So “yachid” is to “only”, what “echad” is to “one”. About the only fact that all on both sides of the debate agree on, is that yachid indisputably means an absolute numeric one and is never used to describe God. Jews and Anti-Trinitarians would naturally expect such a word to be commonly used of God. Having said this, when we cross over to the Greek, in parallel passages that use “yachid”, we find a correspondence with the Greek word “mono”. We do find “mono” used of God in the New Testament describing his oneness. So while yachid is never used of God’s oneness in the Old Testament, the corresponding word “mono” is used of God’s oneness in the New Testament. But this is exactly what Trinitarians would expect to be the case because there are three persons in the one God.Hebrew is a very simple language, but Greek is quite complex and specific. Some Trinitarians overemphasize the clear differences between “yachid and echad” in the Hebrew. Yes, “echad” is a unified one, but it is also used of a numeric one as well. Yes, “yachid” is never used in reference to God’s oneness, but the word “bad” is used and it is synonymous with numeric oneness to yachid. When we cross over to the Greek, we find a similar blur in the words used of God that mean unified versus numeric oneness. If the Holy Spirit intended to convey Trinity hidden in the Old Testament in the words “yachid and echad”, we would expect such a distinction to be even more pronounced in the Greek, since it is a more specific language than Hebrew. But we find exactly the same in the New Testament as we do in the old, namely a combination of words meaning unified versus numeric oneness being employed to describe God’s oneness. Having said all this, perhaps the Holy Spirit did want us to look back at the Old Testament and perceive the differences between “yachid and echad”. Add to this plural pronouns like: “let US make man in OUR image” and Trinitarians have irrefutable evidence of the trinity in the Old Testament.Trinitarians can be confident that the word “echad” used to describe God’s oneness, is exactly what we would expect to find. Jews, anti-Trinitarians and Unitarians are nervous about the fact that the most direct and important statements in the Old Testament about God’s oneness (Deuteronomy 6:4) use the unified one [echad] instead of a words that always mean numeric oneness like “yachid” and “bad”. There isn’t a single Jew or anti-Trinitarian today who, given the chance, would not go back in time and tell Moses his choice of ECHAD instead of YACHID in Deuteronomy 6:4 will cause them grief in the future.As we will see, Jews did change words and start using the word YACHID in reference to God after they rejected conversion to Christianity.

Jesus quoted Deuternomy 6:4 in Mark 12:29 and chose the “unified oneness” word “hen” which is the same word used by Jesus in Matthew 19:5, “the two shall become one (hen) flesh. It is significant that Jesus did not use “mono” in Mark 12:29. The word “hen” directly corresponds to “echad” which was used in Deuteronomy 6:4. Both texts used “unified oneness” words rather than absolute numeric oneness to the exclusion of all others.This is a very devastating pattern of using the unified one as opposed to the singular one in both the Old and New Testaments in Deuteronomy 6:4.

Continues …

The Jews, after the rise of Christianity, were compelled to change the Hebrew word for “one” from echad to yachid:

For any Jew to use “Yachid” to refer to the oneness of God is UNBIBLICAL because the Holy Spirit never willed that any scripture in the Bible uses the word YACHID in reference to God.

It is claimed by Jews who attack Christian theology that the use of the word ECHAD in Deuteronomy 6:4 causes them no problem since the word ECHAD is used in other places in the Old Testament to refer to a clearly single person. But this ignores the powerful argument made by Christians, namely that the word YACHID, which always means one and only one, is never used of God.

If the use of “echad” instead of “yachid” in Deuteronomy 6:4 gave no help to the early Christians in proving to the Jews that Yahweh of the Old Testament was the multi-personal God of the Christians (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) then Jews would not have felt compelled replace the word in their dogmas and statements of faith. If it is really that insignificant, then they would have told us the argument Christians were using to prove trinity is invalid to native Hebrews who know and speak the language.

A man named Moses Maimonides who lived in the 12th century A.D., was a Jewish Rabbi and philosopher who compiled a creed in Hebrew using the Aramaic alphabet with 13 articles. While he did use the word echad in Deuteronomy 6:4, in his 13 point creed, he uses the UNBIBLICAL word yachid instead of echad:

Hebrew using Aramaic alphabet: אֲנִי מַאֲמִין בֶּאֱמוּנָה שְׁלֵמָה, שֶׁהַבּורֵא יִתְבָּרַךְ שְׁמו הוּא יָחִיד וְאֵין יְחִידוּת כָּמוהוּ בְּשׁוּם פָּנִים, וְהוּא לְבַדּו אֱלהֵינוּ, הָיָה הוֶה וְיִהְיֶה

# Translation 1: “I believe with a perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be His name, is an absolute one [yachid]”.

# Translation 2: “I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be his name is one and there is no unity like his in any way. He alone is our G-d- He was, he is, and he will be.”
Modern Jewish prayer books use the UNBIBLICAL word “yachid” to describe God.
Remember, by UNBIBLICAL, we do not mean that Yachid is not used in the Bible.

By UNBIBLICAL we mean that YACHID is never used to describe God’s oneness in the Torah or anywhere in the entire Old Testament.