Do Mus­lims Real­ly Wor­ship Allah The Moon God ?

Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi

Chris­tians who try to claim that the word Allah (Ara­bic : الله) is the name of the moon god are influ­enced by the writ­ings of Dr. Robert Morey, who wrote as such in his book The Islam­ic Inva­sion, alleg­ing that a stat­ue at Hazor rep­re­sents Allah. Regard­less, they (and Dr. Morey includ­ed) are play­ing a sil­ly game. It should be not­ed right from the start that the writ­ings of Dr. Morey are noth­ing more than the thoughts of a mid-West­ern, cre­ation­ist clos­et-fas­cist that were not orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed for a wide audience. 

Lane’s Lex­i­con definesEdward William Lane, An Ara­bic-Eng­lish Lex­i­con (Lon­don : Willams & Nor­gate, 1863), under the entry Allah” (Ar.) the mean­ing of the word Allah” as refer­ring to the only one true God”, and that should have been the end of the discussion :

Do Muslims Really Worship Allah The Moon God? 1

Going back to Morey, his evi­dence” of a so-called moon god Allah” actu­al­ly hurts his reli­gion as much as it does Islam. 

The basic claim of this polemic is that the pre-Islam­ic Semit­ic world (not just Ara­bia) was the home to wide­spread wor­ship of a moon god or god­dess named Allah”. The prob­lem with such spec­u­la­tions about pre-Islam­ic deities, in this case, is the fact that any inscrip­tion pri­or to the advent of Islam is also pri­or to the intro­duc­tion of dia­crit­i­cal marks in the Semit­ic languages. 

Why is this a problem ? 

Well, if one claims to have found evi­dence of a moon god named Allah” in Pales­tine, Syr­ia, or Lebanon, this claim applies to the respec­tive deities of both Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam.

The Moon God Claim Hurts The Bible

The first time the word God” appears in the Bible, it is in Gen­e­sis 1:1, when it states :


Do Muslims Really Worship Allah The Moon God? 2
B’reshit bara ELOHIM et ha-shama’im, V’et ha-arets.
In the begin­ning, God cre­at­ed the heav­ens and the earth.

While Chris­tians will for­ev­er spec­u­late on the word Elo­him”, hon­est Hebrew speak­ers would admit that this archa­ic word for God has a his­to­ry that is lost to us. The roy­al plu­ral­i­ty” hypoth­e­sis may be a pos­si­ble expla­na­tion for why the word is plur­al, but this seems to have been unknown to ear­ly Hebrew speak­ers (such as the Jew­ish mis­sion­ary who, accord­ing to the Kuzari, com­pet­ed with Mus­lims and Chris­tians to con­vert the king of the Khaz­ars in the eighth cen­tu­ry). It is dif­fi­cult how­ev­er to trans­late this word to gods,” as the Hebrew text con­ju­gates the verb to cre­ate” in the singular. 

This word Do Muslims Really Worship Allah The Moon God? 3 (Elo­him) is a plur­al forum of a more basic root-word for God, which is Do Muslims Really Worship Allah The Moon God? 4 (eloh).

How­ev­er, if one were to find the word eloh (alef-lamed-heh) in an inscrip­tion writ­ten in paleo-Hebrew, Ara­ma­ic, or some sort of Nabatean script, it could be pro­nounced numer­ous ways with­out the dia­crit­i­cal marks to guide the read­er. This let­ter com­bi­na­tion (which can be pro­nounced alah) is the root for the verb to swear” or to take an oath,” as well as the verb to deify” or to wor­ship”, as can be seen as follows :


Do Muslims Really Worship Allah The Moon God? 5Milon Ben-Y’hu­daah, Ivri-Angli (Ben Yehu­da’s Hebrew-Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary), under ALEF LAMED HEH (ALH)

The root itself finds its ori­gin with an old­er root, el, which means God, deity, pow­er, strength, etc..

Moon God” In The Ara­ma­ic Language ?

One of the basic Hebrew words for God, eloh, can eas­i­ly be pro­nounced alah with­out the dia­crit­i­cal marks. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the Ara­ma­ic word for GodAccord­ing to the Lex­i­con offered at http://​www​.peshit​ta​.org. is (alah). This word, in the stan­dard script Standard script or the Estrangela script Estrangela script is spelled alap-lamad-heh (ALH), which are the exact cor­re­spond­ing let­ters to the Hebrew eloh.

The Ara­ma­ic is close­ly relat­ed to the more ancient root word for God, eel.Accord­ing to Robert Oshana’s Online Intro­duc­tion to Basic Assyr­i­an Ara­ma­ic, which is at http://​lear​nassyr​i​an​.com/. The Ara­bic word for God, Allah is spelled in a very sim­i­lar way, and is remote­ly relat­ed to the more gener­ic word for deity”: Do Muslims Really Worship Allah The Moon God? 6 (ilah).

The fol­low­ing entry from the B‑D-B demon­strates what has been dis­cussed aboveStrong’s H433 entry /​Gese­nius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lex­i­con, retrieved from https://​www​.bluelet​ter​bible​.org/​l​a​n​g​/​l​e​x​i​c​o​n​/​l​e​x​i​c​o​n​.​c​f​m​?​S​t​r​o​n​g​s​=​H​0433&​V​e​r​s​i​o​n​=​KJV :


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An Ara­bic exam­ple was not­ed fur­ther down in the same entry, which is the sha­ha­da in Ara­bicibid.:


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We are quick­ly start­ing to notice the obvi­ous lin­guis­tic and ety­mo­log­i­cal con­nec­tions between the respec­tive words for God in these close­ly relat­ed Semit­ic lan­guages (e.g. Allah, Alah, and Eloh being relat­ed to Ilah, Il, and El, respec­tive­ly).

Inter­est­ing­ly enough, there is proof from var­i­ous Chris­t­ian sources that clear­ly demon­strates the above.


Do Muslims Really Worship Allah The Moon God? 9W.E. Vine, Mer­rill F. Unger, William White Jr., Vine’s Com­plete Expo­si­tion Dic­tio­nary, Thomas Nel­son Pub­lish­ers, Nashville, TN1996

The above lex­i­cal entry men­tions that Ezra and the Prophet Daniel called their God as Elah”. The pas­sage above is more than enough to counter the alle­ga­tion made by mis­guid­ed Chris­tians about Allah being a moon god. For, if Allah is the moon god, then what were Ezra and Daniel worshipping ?

Con­clu­sions

If mono­lin­gual tri-the­ists want to claim that Allah/​Alah was the name of a trib­al moon god and that wor­ship of such a deity is a gross pagan prac­tice, they should throw their Bibles into the dust­bin for includ­ing this deity in its text. They should also repu­di­ate Jesus(P) for call­ing on a ver­sion of this deity while on the cross (as per the Bib­li­cal account).

A philo­soph­i­cal thinker was report­ed to have once said of the Chris­tians that they are reformed Jews and do not even know it. Indeed, much of Chris­tian­i­ty finds its roots in the Semit­ic world, yet the believ­ers of this reli­gion are noto­ri­ous for their inter­pre­ta­tions of the faith in a Euro­pean worldview. 

This is the rea­son they would actu­al­ly try to find fault with a reli­gion that acknowl­edges the exis­tence of the exact same God they do ; this is the rea­son they would erro­neous­ly claim that Eloh, Alah, and Allah are dif­fer­ent Gods. 

In giv­ing his con­clu­sions on the issue, the Bible schol­ar and mis­sion­ary Rick Brown admit that :

Those who claim that Allah is a pagan deity, most notably the moon god, often base their claims on the fact that a sym­bol of the cres­cent moon adorns the tops of many mosques and is wide­ly used as a sym­bol of Islam. It is, in fact, true that before the com­ing of Islam many gods” and idols were wor­shipped in the Mid­dle East, but the name of the moon god was Sîn, not Allah, and he was not par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar in Ara­bia, the birth­place of Islam.Rick Brown, Who Is Allah”?, Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Fron­tier Mis­sions 23:2 (Sum­mer 2006), p. 79

Michael Abd El Mas­sih, the direc­tor of Ara­bic Bible Out­reach, echoes the same point and asserts that :

It is an unproven the­o­ry, so it may well be false. Even if it turns out to be true, it has lit­tle bear­ing on the Mus­lim faith since Mus­lims do not wor­ship a moon god. That would be blas­phe­my in Islam­ic teach­ings. If we use the moon-god the­o­ry to dis­cred­it Islam, we dis­cred­it the Chris­t­ian Ara­bic speak­ing church­es and mis­sions through­out the Mid­dle East. This point should not be dis­count­ed light­ly because the word Allah is found in mil­lions of Ara­bic Bibles and oth­er Ara­bic Chris­t­ian mate­ri­als.Michael Abd El Mas­sih, The word Allah and Islam”, in Ara­bic Bible Out­reach Min­istries [online document]

The ques­tion of why Islam adopt­ed the cres­cent moon as its sym­bol, or why it uses the lunar cal­en­dar, is addressed in our com­pan­ion arti­cle What is the Sig­nif­i­cance of the Cres­cent Moon in Islam ?

And cer­tain­ly, only God knows best ! Do Muslims Really Worship Allah The Moon God? 10

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