261103 – Is Allah the God of the Bible or only the Qur’an

by | Nov 3, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts | 0 comments

Allah and the God of the Bible

· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

Christians are often told one of two things about Islam. Some say Muslims worship the same God we do under another name. Others say Allah was an Arabian moon god dressed up by Muhammad as the Creator. I stand on neither side. The moon-god story does not survive the evidence, and Christians should stop telling it. But the God the Qur’an describes is not the God who reveals Himself in the Bible, and the difference is not a matter of vocabulary. It is a difference in who God is and what He has done.

The distinction that makes this clear is between three questions people usually run together: what the word means, where it came from, and whom it describes. Answer them separately, and the confusion clears.

The question under the question

The moon-god claim is reaching for something real. Christians who repeat it are not mainly curious about Arabian astronomy. They sense that the God of Islam is not the Father of Jesus Christ, and they want an argument that says so cleanly. The moon-god story offered one: Allah began as an idol, so Islam is idolatry with better branding.

That underlying sense is correct. The argument built to carry it is not. When a true conviction rests on a false proof, the conviction suffers when the proof falls. A Muslim who knows the history, or an Arab Christian who prays to Allah every Sunday, can dismiss the whole Christian case in a sentence. The better course is to drop the weak proof and state the real difference directly.

The word: a title, not a name

Allah is the ordinary Arabic word for God. It is usually explained as a contraction of al-ilāh, “the god.” Arabic ilāh belongs to the same Semitic word family as Aramaic elah and Hebrew eloah and El. These are sister words, not borrowings of one from another.

Language Word Basic sense
Hebrew El, Eloah, Elohim God, a god, the mighty one
Aramaic / Syriac Elah, Alaha God
Arabic ilāh a god, a deity
Arabic Allāh the God
Hebrew YHWH the personal, covenant name of Israel’s God

The last row is the important one. YHWH is not another form of El. It is the name God gave Moses at the burning bush, after saying “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). El and Allah are titles, like the English word God. YHWH is a name, like a man’s name, and also a title.

Arabic Christians draw the same line. The Smith–Van Dyck Bible, the standard Protestant Arabic translation since 1865, renders Exodus 3:15 with Allah for “God” and Yahweh (يهوه) for the divine name: “Yahweh, the God of your fathers.” In John 1:1 it reads, in effect, “the Word was with Allah, and the Word was Allah.”

The word also predates Islam, and Christians used it first in the written record we have. The oldest inscriptions in the pre-Islamic Arabic script are Christian. The earliest, carved over a church door at Zabad in Syria in AD 512, bears a cross and invokes al-ilāh. So the word cannot carry the argument. An Arab Christian who confesses that Jesus is Allah is saying exactly what an English Christian means by “Jesus is God.”

The moon-god theory and what the evidence shows

The theory has a scholarly pedigree, so it deserves a fair hearing. Julius Wellhausen, the nineteenth-century German critic, reasoned that since the Kaaba was Allah’s house and Hubal was its chief idol, Hubal may have been an older name for Allah. In 1901, Hugo Winckler went further and called Hubal a moon god. Ditlef Nielsen then built a theory that South Arabian religion centered on a triad of moon-father, sun-mother, and the planet Venus as their son.

In 1994, the Christian pastor Robert Morey joined these threads in a pamphlet, The Moon-god Allah in the Archaeology of the Middle East, and later in The Islamic Invasion (2001). He added two observations: Islam keeps a lunar calendar, and crescents appear on mosques and flags. Chick tracts, radio broadcasts, and later internet memes carried the idea to millions of American Christians.

Each link in the chain breaks when tested:

  1. Hubal as a moon god. No Islamic tradition calls him one, and later scholars describe him differently. Mircea Eliade and David Leeming treat him as a god of war and rain. Nielsen’s neat triad has been abandoned as speculation fitted to incomplete evidence.
  2. Hubal as Allah. The earliest Muslim histories set them against each other. At the Battle of Uhud (AD 625), Muhammad’s Meccan opponents rallied to Hubal while his followers answered in Allah’s name. Patricia Crone, no defender of Islamic tradition, observed that if the two had been one god, Hubal should have survived as a title of Allah. He did not.
  3. The archaeology. The statue Morey reproduced came from Hazor in northern Israel, a Canaanite site with no demonstrated connection to Mecca or to Allah.
  4. The moon’s own god. The Semitic moon god’s name was Sîn, and Arabia had its own lunar deities under other names. None was called Allah.
  5. The Qur’an itself. It forbids moon worship outright: do not bow to the sun or the moon, but to God who created them (Qur’an 41:37).
  6. The calendar and crescent. A lunar calendar is a timekeeping choice; ancient Israel’s months were lunar too. The crescent became Islam’s emblem centuries after Muhammad, chiefly through the Ottomans, and appears nowhere in the Qur’an.

So the theory is not merely unproven. Where primary evidence exists, it contradicts the theory.

Why the concern remains plausible

The moon-god proof fails, but the instinct behind it has real ground. Four facts keep the unease alive, and they are worth naming.

Islam’s sanctuary was a pagan shrine. Before Islam, the Kaaba housed Hubal and, by tradition, some 360 images. Muhammad broke the idols in 630 but kept the building, the Black Stone, the circling of the shrine, and much of the pilgrimage. Islam explains this as restoring a house Abraham first built. To an outside eye, it can look like a pagan cult with its idols removed and its rites intact.

Pre-Islamic Allah had a pagan family. Meccan pagans already honored Allah as a high god above the tribal deities. The Qur’an itself records that they called al-Lāt, al-ʿUzzā, and Manāt his daughters, and it rejects the claim (Qur’an 53:19–23). Islam did not invent its God from nothing. It purified a figure already present in Arabian paganism.

The “Satanic verses.” Early Muslim historians, including Ibn Ishaq as preserved by al-Tabari, report an episode in which Muhammad briefly recited words honoring those three goddesses, then withdrew them as Satan’s insertion. Many Muslim scholars reject the account. That early Muslim sources preserved it at all is striking.

A God defined by denial. Much of what the Qur’an says about God’s nature is said against Christians: that He does not beget and is not begotten (Qur’an 112:3), that it is unbelief to say God is the Messiah (5:72), that Christians must not say “three” (4:171). A Christian reading these passages can fairly feel that this portrait was drawn in opposition to Christ.

None of this shows that Allah was a moon. It does show why Christians sense that something other than the God of Israel is being described. The next two sections state that difference on firmer ground.

One Creator, two portraits

There is only one Creator, so in one sense every sincere prayer to “the God who made heaven and earth” is aimed at the same Being. That is the strongest case for the “same God” position, made by Miroslav Volf in Allah: A Christian Response (2011). Volf argues that Christians already say Jews worship the true God while rejecting the Trinity, so they should say the same of Muslims.

The argument fails at one point. The Hebrew Scriptures the Jews hold are the very books in which God revealed Himself, and they point forward to the Messiah. The Qur’an claims to correct those books. Where the Bible and the Qur’an meet on God’s character, they agree. Where they part, the Qur’an does not leave the matter open; it denies what the Bible affirms.

Question The Bible The Qur’an
Is God one? Yes (Deuteronomy 6:4) Yes (112:1)
Does God have a Son? Yes, the eternal Word made flesh (John 1:1, 14) No; God neither begets nor is begotten (112:3)
Is Jesus God? Yes (John 20:28) No; to say so is unbelief (5:72)
Did Jesus die on the cross? Yes, for our sins (1 Corinthians 15:3) No; it only appeared so (4:157)
May we call God Father? Yes, taught by Jesus (Matthew 6:9) Not used of God’s relation to believers
How is sin forgiven? Through the blood of Christ (Ephesians 1:7) By God’s mercy and the weighing of deeds; no atonement

Some Christian scholars note that the Qur’an seems to attack a garbled Trinity of God, Jesus, and Mary (5:116) rather than the Church’s actual doctrine. That is true of that verse. It does not soften the rest. Denying that God has a Son and denying the crucifixion strike at the center, not the edges, of the biblical revelation.

The decisive difference: a God who enters our experience

The deepest gap is not a disputed verse but a different kind of God. The God of the Bible comes inside His creation and suffers with it. The God of the Qur’an remains above it.

Scripture teaches that God does not watch our lives from a distance. He lives them with us. God feels every joy and every wound a man feels, from the inside. In a real sense, we are God’s experience of the world. That is why sin matters to Him: it is not a broken rule in a ledger but pain inflicted on One who is present in every person harmed, including the sinner himself. And that is why we keep His law out of love rather than fear. He feels our choices.

The Cross follows from this. A God who lives inside our experience cannot reconcile us by decree alone. He must take the full weight of what sin has done into His own life. In Christ He did exactly that: the Son entered human flesh, bore its suffering and death, and rose, so that the Father’s presence in us could become a reconciled presence rather than a grieved one.

Islamic theology moves the other way. It holds that God bears no likeness to anything created (Qur’an 42:11). The Qur’an says God is nearer to man than his jugular vein (50:16), and Muslim mystics have prized that nearness. But mainstream Islamic doctrine guards God’s transcendence so strictly that the idea of God taking flesh, suffering, or dying is not a deeper truth to them but blasphemy. Mercy in Islam is real; it is the mercy of a sovereign who forgives, not of a Father who bleeds.

The New Testament treats this as decisive: “Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father” (1 John 2:23). This does not mean Muslims pray to a demon or an idol. It means the Islamic portrait of God omits, and actively rejects, the act by which God showed who He is. A man who denies that his father ever came looking for him knows something about his father. He does not know the most important thing.

Conclusion

Christians should retire the moon-god argument. It is false on the evidence, it insults Arab believers who have called Jesus Allah for fifteen centuries, and it hands Muslims an easy reason to stop listening.

What Christians should say instead is plainer and harder to dismiss. Allah is a good Arabic word for God. Muslims intend to worship the one Creator, and there is no other. But the Qur’an’s portrait of that Creator denies His Son, denies the Cross, and keeps Him outside the human experience He chose to enter. The Bible’s God is the Father who lives our lives with us and came in Christ to carry what we had done to Him. That is the God to point a Muslim neighbor toward, with respect for his sincerity and without compromise on Christ.

The right conversation does not start with Arabian idols. It starts with the question Jesus asked His own disciples: “But whom say ye that I am?” (Matthew 16:15).

Sources and their limits

The historical sections lean on the mainstream scholarly record, much of it gathered in encyclopedia summaries. That record is largely written by Western academics and Muslim apologists, both of whom have reasons to dismiss the moon-god theory. I found no primary evidence that supports it, but curation could hide dissenting material, and the early Arabian record is thin. Islamic tradition about Hubal and the Kaaba was written down a century or more after Muhammad. The epigraphic evidence (the Paleo-Arabic inscriptions) is the most independent source here and the one least likely to be shaped by modern apologetics.

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