Monotheism
Monotheism, the belief that one God is the only or at least the dominant deity, is one of the most contested ideas in the history of religion. The word itself is younger than most people assume: Henry More coined it in 1660, and no equivalent term existed in the Greco-Roman world before that. When More introduced it, he used it as a weapon as much as a description. He condemned Islam as having hypocritical monotheism, called Muslims still truly Pagans, and decided pantheists did not qualify because making the world God is making no God at all. Ralph Cudworth, writing not long after, called Greek Platonism monotheistic seemingly out of sheer admiration for Plato. From its first moment, the concept was doing more polemical work than analytical work. Who really counts as a monotheist? Did the idea evolve gradually from animism, or was it humanity's original condition? And why does the same belief system get praised as the foundation of ethics by one scholar and blamed for centuries of violence by the next?
Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott's Greek-English Lexicon documents the components: monos meaning single, theos meaning god. But the compound monotheism is current only in Modern Greek, and there is just one attestation of it in a Byzantine hymn before More's coinage. Scholars working in the 17th and 18th centuries were, as the source puts it, similarly lax in applying the term. Many definitions in wide circulation today are inherently modern and Christian-centered, and they do not map easily onto the diversity of ancient sources.
The concept fractures into at least two major types. Exclusive monotheism holds that one God is a singular existence with nothing alongside. Inclusive or pluriform monotheism recognises multiple gods or divine forms but treats them as extensions of the same God. Narrowing further, narrow monotheism disallows any other deities, while wide monotheism acknowledges one supreme deity but permits lesser ones. Narrow monotheism tends to view rival traditions as simply worshipping the same God under a different name. Wide monotheism tends to rank those rivals' deities as lesser figures.
Just outside these borders sit two related categories. Henotheism allows worship of one god while accepting that others may legitimately worship different gods. Monolatry recognises the existence of many gods but worships only one consistently. The distinction between monolatry and monotheism turns out to be historically crucial: the difference between refusing to worship other gods and denying they exist.
Amenhotep IV introduced Atenism in Year 5 of his reign, estimated at 1348 or 1346 BCE, during Egypt's 18th dynasty. Aten had been a relatively obscure solar deity. Amenhotep elevated it to Supreme God, wrote Aten's name in the cartouche form normally reserved for Pharaohs, and began constructing a new capital called Akhetaten at the site now known as Amarna. The date of his official name change to Akhenaten has been estimated to fall around the 2nd of January of that year.
In Year 9 of his reign, roughly 1344 or 1342 BCE, Akhenaten declared a more radical position: Aten was not merely supreme but the only God of Egypt, with Akhenaten himself as the sole intermediary between deity and people. He banned idols; the only permitted image was a rayed solar disc with rays ending in hands. He addressed Aten in prayers as O Sole God beside whom there is none. Alongside his capital he built massive temple complexes at Karnak and at Thebes.
Scholars nonetheless hesitate before calling this true monotheism. Akhenaten did not actively deny the existence of other gods; he simply refused to worship any but Aten. That places him, technically, in monolatry rather than monotheism. After his death, Egypt reversed course entirely. His successors reverted to traditional religion and Akhenaten was eventually remembered as a heretic. His experiment left a trail of influence on later belief systems, though: Zoroastrianism, credited to a prophet who may have lived as early as the middle of the second millennium BCE, is thought by many scholars to have shaped Second Temple Judaism and, through it, later Abrahamic faiths.
Zoroaster is credited with founding what many scholars call the first true monotheistic religion in history. Zoroastrians have believed since at least the 6th century BCE in Ahura Mazda as the Maker of All and as the first being before all others. The Yasna scripture calls him Creator of All and Creator of Life. The prophet's legacy is significant: his tradition influenced Second Temple Judaism and, through that, Christianity and Islam.
Yet the classification is disputed, even among Zoroastrians themselves. Ahriman functions as a central opposing or complementary force to Ahura Mazda, giving the tradition a dualistic character. Scholar Gherardo Gnoli argued that after the Islamic conquest of Persia, Zoroastrians, especially the Parsis who migrated to India, adopted monotheistic framing under pressure from Islamic and Christian critique. Maneckji Nusserwanji Dhalla described these shifts as attempts to mitigate the dualism that has always been the essence of Zoroastrianism. A 15th-century Persian book cited in the sources records that the Magi believed Allah and Iblis were brothers, showing how far the theological negotiations could travel.
Post-exilic Judaism, after the late 6th century BCE, is identified as the first tradition to conceive a personal monotheistic God within a strictly monist framework. Up to the 8th century BCE, Israelite worship had included El, Baal, Asherah, and Astarte. Yahweh was originally the national god of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Some scholars date the move toward strict monotheism to the late 8th century BCE, partly as a response to Neo-Assyrian aggression. The reforms of King Josiah imposed strict monolatrism. Among the exiled community in Babylon, a small circle of priests and scribes first developed the concept of Yahweh as the sole God of the entire world, a step the source identifies as the founding of what it calls ethical monotheism.
Islam, which emerged in the 7th century CE in the context of both Christianity and Judaism, encodes its monotheism in the concept of tawhid: the strict singularity of God. The central profession of Muslim faith states there is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God. Attributing divinity to a created entity is the only unpardonable sin named in the Quran. Medieval philosopher Al-Ghazali offered a logical proof from omnipotence: if two omnipotent beings existed, one would either have power over the other, making the second non-omnipotent, or not, making the first non-omnipotent. Only one omnipotent being is possible.
Christianity's position is more contested. The First Council of Nicaea, convoked by Roman Emperor Constantine I in 325 CE, produced the Nicene Creed, which begins I believe in one God. The Council resolved that the Son is of the same substance as the Father. The Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus, completed Trinitarian doctrine by the end of the 4th century. Judaism and Islam have historically declined to accept this formulation as pure monotheism. Judaism applies the term shituf to worship that is neither purely monotheistic nor polytheistic. Islam treats the ascription of divinity to Jesus as an instance of shirk.
Sikhism, which arose in the Punjab region during the 16th and 17th centuries, opens its 1430-page Guru Granth Sahib with the Mul Mantra. The Gurmukhi digit 1 opens the text, combined with onkar to form Ik Onkar: One Universal creator God. God in Sikhism is called Akal Purakh, the Immortal Being, or Vaheguru, the Wondrous Enlightener. Sikh scripture uses names drawn from Islam and Hinduism, including Allah, Rahim, Hari, and Raam, treating them as referring to the same Supreme Being.
China's orthodox faith, practiced by most dynasties since at least the Shang dynasty in 1766 BCE, centered on Shangdi, literally Above Sovereign, or Heaven, as an omnipotent supreme being. The ruler of China in every dynasty performed annual sacrificial rituals to Shangdi, including the slaughter of a healthy bull, at shrines culminating in the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Smaller local gods and spirits were also worshipped, which is why scholars stop short of calling this strictly monotheistic. The Mohist school, active from 470 BCE to roughly 391 BCE, came closest: it taught that lesser gods and ancestral spirits simply carry out the will of Shangdi, a structure explicitly parallel to angels in Abrahamic religion.
Along the Nile, Cushitic-speaking populations of the central Nile Valley worshipped Waaq, a singular sky deity, as early as the 5th millennium BCE. This tradition still persists: the Oromo people of Ethiopia practice Waaqeffanna, and the annual Irreechaa festival honoring Waaq draws tens of thousands of people near bodies of water in Addis Ababa. The Somali word barwaaqo, meaning prosperity, still contains Waaq's name, and the city of Abudwak translates as worship Waaq in Somali.
Tengrism, historically the religion of the Bulgars, Turks, Mongols, Hungarians, Xiongnu, and Huns, combined monotheism and polytheism around the sky god Tengri. It served as the state religion of six ancient Turkic states, including the Göktürks Khaganate and the First Bulgarian Empire. In the Irk Bitig, Tengri is named Turuk Tangrisi, God of Turks. Byzantine chronicler Procopius, writing in the 6th century CE, recorded that the Slavs acknowledged one god, creator of lightning, as the only lord of all. That deity was the storm god Perun, whose name derives from the Proto-Indo-European Perkwunos.
David Hume, who lived from 1711 to 1776, argued that monotheism is less tolerant than polytheism because it forces believers to pigeonhole their beliefs into one tenet. Auguste Comte went further, writing that monotheism is irreconcilable with the existence in our nature of the instincts of benevolence because it compels devotion to a single Creator. Biblical scholar Mark S. Smith described monotheism as a totalizing discourse that tends to co-opt all aspects of a social belief system and exclude others. Jacob Neusner stated simply that the logic of monotheism yields little basis for tolerating other religions.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan connected this intolerance to historical violence, writing that the intolerance of narrow monotheism is written in letters of blood across the history of man from the time when first the tribes of Israel burst into the land of Canaan. He argued that Western civilization would have developed better if Greece, rather than Palestine, had shaped its religious inheritance. Regina Schwartz explored the same theme in her 1997 book published by the University of Chicago Press. Both have drawn scholarly criticism. The source notes that neither presents quantitative data showing polytheist states waged less aggressive wars, and that according to academic consensus the Israelites were not yet monotheistic at the time of the Canaanite encounters, nor did they burst into Canaan as the phrase implies.
The Yazidi tradition illustrates how singular-God theology can produce unexpected shapes. Yazidis believe God created the world and entrusted it to seven Holy Beings, with Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, serving as ruler of the world. Yazidi hymns called Qewls attribute either 1,001 or 3,003 names to God depending on which hymns one consults: a number range that captures, in miniature, how much room exists inside the idea of one God.
Up Next
Common questions
Who coined the word monotheism?
Henry More coined it in 1660. No equivalent term existed in the Greco-Roman period. More's usage was not rigorous by later standards; he condemned Islam as having hypocritical monotheism and excluded pantheists from the category.
What is the difference between monotheism, henotheism, and monolatry?
Monotheism holds that only one God exists or is dominant. Henotheism allows worshipping one god while accepting that others may validly worship different gods. Monolatry recognises many gods but worships only one consistently.
Was Akhenaten a true monotheist?
Most scholars classify him as a monolatrist rather than a monotheist. He refused to worship any god but Aten and banned idols, but he did not actively deny the existence of other gods. After his death, Egypt reverted to traditional religion and he was remembered as a heretic.
When did Judaism become strictly monotheistic?
Up to the 8th century BCE, Israelite worship included El, Baal, Asherah, and Astarte. Some scholars date the push toward monotheism to the late 8th century BCE, partly as a response to Neo-Assyrian aggression. The concept of Yahweh as sole God of the entire world first emerged among priests and scribes during the Babylonian exile after the fall of Judah.
Why do Judaism and Islam sometimes not accept Christianity as a pure monotheism?
Both traditions object to the Trinitarian doctrine that God is three persons. Judaism uses the term shituf for worship that is neither purely monotheistic nor outright polytheistic. Islam considers attributing divinity to a created being the only unpardonable sin named in the Quran.
What is Waaq?
Waaq is the singular sky deity of many Cushitic peoples in the Horn of Africa, with roots traced to at least the 5th millennium BCE. The Oromo still practice Waaqeffanna, and the annual Irreechaa festival dedicated to Waaq draws tens of thousands of people in Addis Ababa.