Deuteronomy 6:4
Deuteronomy 6:44Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One.
The Shema is the bedrock of JW unitarianism. JWs cite as the cleanest possible refutation of the Trinity: "Jehovah our God is one Jehovah." Where Trinitarians see plurality, JWs hear strict numerical oneness. The verse anchors the Watchtower's case that Jesus cannot be Jehovah and that the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force, since "one Jehovah" leaves no room for additional divine persons. It is also routinely paired with to argue that the NWT's "a god" rendering at cannot mean Jesus is a real god — that would break the Shema by introducing a second divine being.
The Shema is not a numerical claim about how many divine persons exist; it is a covenantal claim about which God Israel belongs to. The Hebrew word echad ("one") is the same word used at of husband and wife becoming "one flesh" — a unity that includes plurality. More decisively, Paul takes the Shema and reformulates it around Christ in : "for us there is one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things." Every key term from the LXX Shema (heis, theos, kyrios) appears, distributed between Father and Son. A first-century Jewish monotheist could not conceivably place a creature in the Shema slot without committing blasphemy — yet Paul does it deliberately. This reformulation is unintelligible unless Jesus is included within the divine identity of YHWH. The Shema is not violated by the Trinity; the Trinity is the apostolic exposition of the Shema. The argument also lands inside the JW polytheism trilemma: if the NWT's "a god" Jesus is a real god, the Shema and ("before me no god was formed") are broken; the only way out is for Jesus to be Jehovah himself.