Jehovah is one of the most colorful personalities in history!
He is mighty, awe-inspiring, violent, whimsical, repenting of having even created man--yet, capable of bargaining with the likes of Lot and stopping the literal-minded Abram from stabbing his own Isaac to death as a sacrifice.
Jehovah flies into a rage and wipes out thousands in a heartbeat, sends she-bears to tear children apart, drowns millions of men, women, children and pregnant women in a worldwide flood---but, champions one family of 8.
This same super-deity walks in the Garden of Eden in the breezy part of the day, wrestles with Jacob all night and can only manage to get away by crippling him! Jehovah leads the children of Israel to freedom out of Egypt and yet opens up the earth and swallows up many of the same people when Moses delays returning from Sinai and they slip into their old ways.
What a character! Unforgetable! Insuperable! Almighty!
And yet--the best character in the entire Bible vanishes only to be replaced by a rather tepid, milquetoast doppleganger called GOD the Father!
What happened?
This replacement, God the Father, doesn't destroy, curse, maim, threaten and rant---He...um....LOVES......us!
He loves us SO MUCH He wants to save us. YES--SAVE US! He is willing to send his son, Yeshua (Jesus) to die so that we can escape death!
But----WHAT HAPPENED TO JEHOVAH???
Here is what happened.
The Greek conquest!
It brought a tidal wave of Greek culture, mythology, language, philosophy and science that killed off the bad boy Jehovah and rendered him obsolete!
The same language that Jehovah reigned supreme inside off petered out and faded away with Big J right along with it.
Greek replaced Hebrew.
Plato and Greek philosophy brought logic, a whole vivid literature of plural deities and the advent of the DEMIGOD.
Something had to change. JEHOVAH was out----JESUS was in.
The TRINITY is device used to put outrageous JEHOVAH in the closet and allow a new character and Greek Socratic Demi-god, JESUS, to take center stage. No way JEHOVAH would send an only begotten son to die for those miserable worms: human beings!!
No....but....the kinder, gentler God-the-fathe sure would.
Yeshua (Jesus) was a 2nd temple Jew who had never heard of Christianity. (It didn't exist!)
His followers considered him good Messiah material.
He was a wonderful teacher JUST LIKE SOCRATES! (He would answer a question with a question and teach orally confounding the wise.)
And, just like Socrates, he was sentenced to die for misleading and corrupting the population.
Letting JESUS become prominent in a pagan, polytheistic Greek culture requred a huge overhaul in Jewish thinking!
To get pagans to embrace such a character would require he be a LOT MORE than just a Jewish Messianic figure.
The solution? the TRINITY!
We get polytheism to please the pagans and greek-influenced lovers of demi-gods---BUT--we don't lose the monotheistic Jews.
How?
We make the Trinity sort of like a poem with metaphorical implications. God the Father (who use to be Almighty, Powerful, Irrepressible JEHOVAH) fades into a blurred "member" of a triumvirate like Rome had acquired (three rulers with one authority).
The Holy Spirit is the metaphor, of course! God the father, god the Son and God the holy spirit. Polytheists rejoice! We have THREE.
Jews? Rejoice! You have a messiah (Yeshua) but you didn't lose (all) of Jehovah. You lost a ranting bully god but you gained a father and a holy...um...spirit. But---wait for it..........wait for it...........THERE IS ONLY ONE god!!
The Romans could embrace such a chimera, the pagan Greeks could accept the demigod, the Jews could adjust to it.......everybody wins!
Except the first order of business as neo-Christianty spread was ARGUING about the Trinity!
How does this nonsense work? Everybody had an idea. Everybody thought their own explanation was best! The christian-jewish community fought bitterly about it and split into factions, sects and divisions.
The pagan Constantine put the official stamp of approval on it and sudden ORTHODOXY had the power of the state to enforce it.
But....what happened to that pesky, awe-inspiring, overlord JEHOVAH?
The Arabs adopted him years later as ALLAH! He re-emerges and becomes, once again, an ALMIGHTY troublesome deity demanding submission, hurling threats and goading armies into destroying the non-believers! He lives and breathes in a semitic langauge with black and white hot intensity, the master of all he surveys.
Like I said....everybody wins!!