Semitic totality concept, my friend. A soul to a Hebrew was not merely the spirit, but the spirit and the body united. This is why Heaven as many Catholics seem to imagine it is incomplete; we await the final resurrection of the body.
Notice that later on in that same chapter of Ezekiel, it contrasts the “soul” that sins with the “man” who does righteousness.
As for the Jews, one cannot simply say that they had no concept of anything even remotely related to the Trinity, despite some of their protests to the contrary. Even many Jewish traditions recognized the oneness of God, but that that oneness could be complex.
Examples include the ten Sefirot, the so-called diving emanations that act as “intermediaries or graded links between the completely spiritual and unknowable Creator and the material sub-lunar world.” In this view, God and his Sefirot are just like a man and his body: his limbs are many but He is one. Or, to put it another way, think of a tree which has a central trunk and yet many branches. There is unity and there is multiplicity in the tree, in the human body, and in God too." (Almost verbatim from Simon Herman, “Sefirot,” in the Encyclopedia of Hasidism.)
And what about other Jewish mystical concepts of God, such as “the mystery of the three” (Aramaic, raza’ di-telatha), explaining that in the Zohar there are five different expressions relating various aspects of the three-fold nature of God? What would you make of the references to “three heads, three spirits, three forms of revelation, three names, and three shades of interpretation” that relate to the divine nature? The Zohar even asks, “How can these three be one? Are they only one because we call them one? How they are one we can know only by the urging of the Holy Spirit and then even with closed eyes.” (Quoted in Risto Santala, The Messiah in the Old Testament in the Light of the Rabbinical Writings, trans. William Kinnaird).
Or how about when the Rabbis speak much about the Shekhina, the Divine Presence, corresponding also to the motherly, feminine aspects of God? They taught that the Shekhina went into exile with the Jewish people, suffering with “her” children in foreign lands. According to this concept, God cannot be “whole” again until His people return from their physical and spiritual wanderings and the Temple is rebuilt. The rabis based this idea on verses that spoke of God being with his people (corporately or individually) in trheir trouble, distress, and exile (see Mekhilta deRabbi Yishmael, Massekhta dePishka,14).
Rabbi Akiva went as far as saying that according to the Scriptures, when God redeemed His people, he had, as it were, redeemed Himself (ibid.). Some Hasidic Jews took this one step further by combining the Shekhina with the mystical concept of the Sefirot. They believed that “the purpose of the performance of the mitzvot [commandments] is to help the Shekhinah unite with the *Tiferet *[the Sefira of glory or beauty], the male principle. The sins of Israel hinder this union and prevent the ‘reunification of worlds,’ which is a necessary prerequisite for the coming of God’s kingdom. The hasidim, in accordance with this belief, adopted the formula (much deplored by their opponents), ‘For the sake of unification of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah,’ which they recited before the performance of the mitzvot.” (Dabid Goldstein, “Shekinah,” Encyclopedia of Hasidism, 455).
So according to some concepts the Godhead is complex, God in some kind of disunity; His “oneness” was not an easily explainable concept. After all, the Hebrew word for “one,” 'echad, is also used in Zechariah 11:8 to refer to one month.
These are all some things to take into account. There were many Jewish traditions, most of which have not survived, and their own explanaton of God is not as clear cut as many would try to have you believe. The complexness of God is most certainly not a foreign concept to Judaism.
God Bless.
Just kidding it is good for us to have our beliefs confirmed through exercise!
