Hear, O Israel

At the heart of God’s commandments is an all-encompassing desire to love and honor God as the one and only God. Another way to say this is to say that the center of God’s commandments is God himself. We see this in what has been referred to as the Shema. The Shema is a pronouncement affirming the oneness of God that stands as the preface to the commandments God gives to Israel in Deuteronomy 6:4. Let’s see how this gets fleshed out by Eugene Merrill in his commentary on Deuteronomy in the New American Commentary.

The Essence of the Principles

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Deuteronomy 6:4–5

The Decalogue (or Ten Commandments) of Deut 5:6–21 (= Exod 20:2–17) embodies the great principles of covenant relationship that outline the nature and character of God and spell out Israel’s responsibilities to him. It is thus an encapsulation or distillation of the entire corpus of covenant text. The passage at hand is a further refinement of that great relational truth, an adumbration of an adumbration, as it were. It is the expression of the essence of all of God’s person and purposes in sixteen words of Hebrew text. Known to Jewish tradition as the Shema (after the first word of v. 4, the imperative of the verb sûama’, “to hear”), this statement, like the Decalogue, is prefaced by its description as “commands, decrees, and laws” (or the like) and by injunctions to obey them (6:1–3; cf. 4:44–5:5).

The sentence itself commences with the imperative of sûama’ in the second person singular form. “To hear,” in Hebrew lexicography, is tantamount to “to obey,” especially in covenant contexts such as this. That is, to hear God without putting into effect the command is not to hear him at all. The singular form of the verb emphasizes the corporate or collective nature of the addressee, that is, Israel. The covenant was made with the nation as a whole and so the nation must as a unified community give heed to the command of the Lord.

Postbiblical rabbinic exegesis understood the role of the Shema to be the heart of all the law. When Jesus was asked about the greatest of the commandments, he cited this (and its companion in Lev 19:18) as the fundamental tenet of Jewish faith, an opinion with which his hearers obviously concurred (Matt 22:34–39; Mark 12:28–31; Luke 10:25–28). So much so did the centrality of this confession find root in the Jewish consciousness that to this very day the observant Jew will recite the Shema at least twice daily.

The Lord Is One

It is possible to understand v. 4 in several ways, but the two most common renderings of the last clause are: (1) “The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (so NIV) or (2) “The LORD our God is one LORD.” The former stresses the uniqueness or exclusivity of Yahweh as Israel’s God and so may be paraphrased, “Yahweh our God is the one and only Yahweh” or the like. This takes the noun ‘ehad (“one”) in the sense of “unique” or “solitary,” a meaning that is certainly well attested. The latter translation focuses on the unity or wholeness of the Lord. This is not in opposition to the later Christian doctrine of the Trinity but rather functions here as a witness to the self-consistency of the Lord, who is not ambivalent and who has a single purpose or objective for creation and history. The ideas clearly overlap to provide an unmistakable basis for monotheistic faith. The Lord is indeed a unity, but beyond that he is the only God. For this reason the exhortation of v. 5 has practical significance.

Love the Lord

The confession of the Lord’s unique oneness leads to the demand that Israel recognize him as such by obedience to all that that implies. In language appropriate to covenant, that obedience is construed as love; that is, to obey is to love God with every aspect and element of one’s being. This equation has already been made clear in the Decalogue itself, where the Lord said, in reference to the second commandment, that he displays covenant faithfulness (hesed) to the thousands who love him and keep his commandments (Deut 5:10). In covenant terms, then, love is not so much emotive or sensual in its connotation (though it is not excluded in those respects), but it is of the nature of obligation, of legal demand. Thus because of who and what he is in regard to his people whom he elected and redeemed, the Lord rightly demands of them unqualified obedience.

The depth and breadth of that expectation is elaborated upon by the fact that it encompasses the heart, soul, and strength of God’s people, here viewed collectively as a covenant partner. The heart (leb) is, in Old Testament anthropology, the seat of the intellect, equivalent to the mind or rational part of humankind. The “soul” (better, “being” or “essential person” in line with commonly accepted understanding of Heb. nepesû) refers to the invisible part of the individual, the person qua person including the will and sensibilities. The strength (meá’od) is, of course, the physical side with all its functions and capacities. The word occurs only here and in 2 Kgs 23:25 as a noun with nonadverbial nuance, and even here the notion is basically that of “muchness.” That is, Israel must love God with all its essence and expression.

The First and Greatest Commandment

Jesus said that this was “the first and greatest commandment” (Matt 22:38), an observation that is profoundly correct in at least two respects. First it qualifies as such inasmuch as it constitutes the essence of the Deuteronomic covenant principle and requirement. As stated before, the Shema is to the Decalogue what the Decalogue is to the full corpus of covenant stipulations. But it also is first and greatest because it is a commentary on the very first of the Ten Commandments–“You shall have no other gods before me” (Deut 5:7). This affirmation of the uniqueness and exclusiveness of Yahweh as Israel’s Sovereign and Savior finds full endorsement and explication in the Shema, for to recognize Yahweh’s unity and solitariness and to respond to that confession with total obedience is the strongest possible way of demonstrating adherence to the first commandment.

The Shema in Deuteronomy serves as the essence of the Decalogue and, indeed, of all the law. It is first and most important precisely because it encapsulates all of God’s saving intentions and provisions. To love God as it commands is to place oneself within the orbit of his saving grace because the Shema, the heart and core of the Old Testament law, was designed, as Paul said, to be “put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith” (Gal 3:24).

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