Classic Jewish monotheism, then, believed that (a) there was one God, who created heaven and earth and who remained in close and dynamic relation with his creation; and that (b) this God had called Israel to be his special people. This twin belief, tested to the limit and beyond through Israel’s checkered career, was characteristically expressed through a particular narrative: the chosen people were also the rescued people, liberated from slavery in Egypt, marked out by the gift of Torah, established in their land, exiled because of disobedience, but promised a glorious return and final settlement. Jewish-style monotheism meant living in this story and trusting in this one true God, the God of creation and covenant, of Exodus and Return.
This God was utterly different from the pantheist’s “one god.” This is an important point to note: many, including many scholars, have blithely assumed that because Stoics and others talked about “one god” they were saying the same thing as the Jews. This God was also utterly different from the far-away ultra-transcendent gods of the Epicureans. Always active within his world, did he not feed the young ravens when they called upon him?[11]—he could be trusted to act more specifically on behalf of Israel. His eventual overthrow of pagan power at the political would be the revelation of his overthrow of the false gods of the nations. His vindication of his people, liberating them finally from all their oppressors, would also be the vindication of his own name and reputation. In justifying his people, he would himself be justified. In his righteousness, his covenant faithfulness, they would find their own.
This monotheism was never, in our period, an inner analysis of the being of the one God. It was always a way of saying, frequently at great risk: our God is the true God, and your gods are worthless idols. It was a way of holding on to hope. We can see the dynamic of this monotheism working its way out in the manifold crises of second-temple Judaism, with the Maccabees, Judas the Galilean, and above all the two wars of the late 60s and early 130s A.D. revealing how the creational and covenantal theology and worldview remained at work through the period and in different groups.
This God was both other than the world and continually active within it. The words “transcendent” and “immanent,” we should note, are pointers to this double belief, but do not clarify it much. Because this God is thus simultaneously other than his people and present with them, Jews of Jesus’ day had developed several ways of speaking about the activity of this God in which they attempted to hold together, because they dared not separate, these twin truths. Emboldened by deep-rooted traditions, they explored what appears to us a strange, swirling sense of a rhythm of mutual relations within the very being of the one God: a to-and-fro, a give-and-take, a command-and-obey, a sense of love poured out and love received. God’s Spirit broods over the waters, God’s Word goes forth to produce new life, God’s Law guides his people, God’s Presence or Glory dwells with them in fiery cloud, in tabernacle and temple. These four ways of speaking moved to and fro from metaphor to trembling reality-claim and back again. They enabled Jews to speak simultaneously of God’s sovereign supremacy and his intimate presence, of his unapproachable holiness and his self-giving compassionate love.
Best known of all is perhaps a fifth. God’s Wisdom is his handmaid in creation, the firstborn of his works, his chief of staff, his delight. God’s Wisdom is another way of talking about God present with his people in the checkered careers of the patriarchs and particularly in the events of the Exodus. Wisdom becomes closely aligned thereby with Torah and Shekinah.[12] Through the Lady Wisdom of Proverbs 1-8, the creator has fashioned everything, especially the human race. To embrace Wisdom is therefore to discover the secret of being truly human, of reflecting God’s image.[13]
I still find it extraordinary that nobody ever taught me all this when I was in seminary. The word “god” was a given, its meaning assumed, just at the moment when the word was going to explode in our faces. Nor can we look to Jewish scholars for help at this point, since they, by and large, have not been interested in the topic as such. So NT scholars have just assumed that, if first century Jews were monotheists, they could not in any way have anticipated trinitarian thinking. This I believe to be a huge category mistake at both ends. First, as systematic theologians would of course remind us at once, the point of trinitarian theology is precisely that it is monotheistic, not tri-theistic. Second, as I seem to be one of the only people, who keep on saying, first century Jewish monotheism was never in any case a numerical analysis of the being of the one God. Rather, as I have set out extremely briefly here, there were five ways (not to be confused with Aquinas’ five Ways!) in which second-Temple Jews could and did speak of the activity of the one God within the world, and particularly within Israel, without of course compromising their monotheism. I cannot stress too strongly that first century Judaism had at its heart what we can and must call several incarnational symbols, not least the Torah, but particularly the Temple. And, though this point has been routinely ignored by systematic theologians from the second century to the twentieth, it is precisely in terms of Torah and Temple that the earthly Jesus acted symbolically and spoke cryptically to define his mission and hint at his own self understanding.
How many times do I have to repeat myself? Ok I'm gonna go over this one more time. 
