Deuteronomy 6:4–5 · Featured Study
Hear, O Israel
Six Hebrew words, recited twice a day for three thousand years, that Jesus names the first and great commandment: the LORD our God is one LORD, and therefore he is to be loved with the whole person: heart, soul, and might. Deuteronomy binds Israel’s confession of who God is to a command for what to do about it in a single breath.
Rembrandt, Moses with the Ten Commandments (1659) — Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Summary
This page studies three Hebrew words behind the confession, shama, ahav, and echad, compares how Mark, Matthew, and Luke each quote it, and traces Paul's use of the same words for the Father and the Son in 1 Corinthians 8:6.
- Word studies of shama (hear and obey), ahav (love), and echad (one) trace what each term does in the confession
- The echad versus yachid argument is handled carefully: it removes an objection, it does not by itself prove the Trinity
- A table compares how Mark, Matthew, and Luke each quote the Shema, showing what each Gospel keeps or drops
- 1 Corinthians 8:6 is shown splitting the Shema's two names, God and Lord, between the Father and Jesus Christ
- A founder's slot at the close holds Marcus's own position on the passage, left for him to fill
The Confession
Deuteronomy 6:4–5
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
Deuteronomy 6:4–5 →Two sentences, and the whole architecture of biblical religion is in them. The first is a confession about God: that the LORD, uniquely, is. The second is a command about the worshipper: to love that God without remainder. Judaism calls the confession the Shema, after its opening word, and recites it morning and evening to this day, the oldest continuously observed liturgical text in the world.
Hear and Do
shama: a verb that will not stay in the ear
In Hebrew, hearing implies obeying: there is no separate verb for “obey” in most contexts, because to truly hear a command is to keep it. “Hear and do” is not a redundancy in this language; it is one idea. That is why the Shema is not stated as a doctrine to affirm from a distance but issued as a command: Israel does not merely believe this about God, Israel is told to hear it.
The command that follows is bound the same way. Verses 6–9 immediately instruct that these words be kept upon the heart, taught diligently to children, talked of at home and on the road, bound as a sign on the hand, worn as frontlets between the eyes, and written on the doorposts, the origin of the Jewish practice of tefillin (phylacteries) and the mezuzah. Deuteronomy does not want a confession that stays in the mind; it wants one worn on the body and taught to the next generation before it can be forgotten (see 8:11–20).
Love With the Whole Person
ahav: the first command in Scripture to love God
Deut 6:5 is the first place in Scripture a person is commanded to love God, not merely fear, serve, or obey him, but love him, with heart, soul and might named as if no part of a person may be withheld. The same root describes the LORD’s love for Israel (7:8, 13) and the love Israel owes the sojourner (10:19): covenant love flowing down from God and back out to neighbor, the same word doing both jobs.
One
echad: the word the confession turns on
The last word of the confession is echad, the ordinary Hebrew number one. It is the word used when a thing is one, and it is also the word used when several things are counted as one. Evening and morning are one day. A man and his wife become one flesh. Ezekiel takes two sticks, writes a kingdom on each, and they become one stick in his hand. Two, and the count is one.
“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
Genesis 2:24 →“And join them for thee one to another into one stick, that they may become one in thy hand.”
Ezekiel 37:17 →“And there was evening and there was morning, one day.”
Genesis 1:5 →What this argument does, and what it does not do
Christians often point out that Hebrew has another word for one: yachid (h3173), which means solitary, only, the only one of its kind, the word for Abraham’s only son in Genesis 22:2, and that Moses did not use it here. That is true, and it is worth knowing.
But keep the claim honest. Echad is simply the number one; it is used hundreds of times for things that are single and undivided, and it does not by itself teach that God is more than one person. What the word does is remove an objection. If someone says the Shema settles the matter: that “one” forbids any plurality within God, the Hebrew answers that this is not what the word means or how it is used. The Shema rules out other gods. It does not rule out what the New Testament goes on to say about the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
This is a signature point of Chuck Missler, Learn the Bible in 24 Hours (Genesis sessions), cited, not reproduced.
The First and Great Commandment
Jesus names this verse the greatest in the Law
“The first is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.”
Quotes the Shema by name, “Hear, O Israel”, before quoting the command it introduces. Mark's fourfold list (heart, soul, mind, strength) expands Deuteronomy's threefold one.
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment.”
Matthew drops the opening “Hear, O Israel” and states the verdict directly: first and great.
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.”
Placed in the lawyer's own mouth, and already fused to Lev 19:18: the two great commandments as one answer, setting up the parable of the Good Samaritan.
When asked which commandment of the Law is greatest, Jesus does not adjudicate among 613 candidates: he goes straight to the words a faithful Jew had already prayed that morning. Orthodoxy and devotion are not separable in Deuteronomy’s theology, and Jesus does not separate them either: right belief about God (“one LORD”) and total love for him are named as a single command, the first on which everything else in the Law hangs (Matt 22:40).
| Gospel | Hear, O Israel | heart | soul | mind | strength | neighbor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mark | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Matthew | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| Luke | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Mark alone names the Shema by its opening words; Matthew alone drops “strength”; Luke alone adds the neighbor clause of Leviticus 19:18, already fused to it. Read against each other, no two Synoptic writers copy the confession the same way, and none of them disagrees about which commandment is first.
The Shema, Said Again
1 Corinthians 8:6: Paul splits the confession in two, and links it forward
The confession: Deuteronomy 6:4
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”
In the Greek Old Testament every Jew in Corinth read, the two nouns are theos (God) and kyrios (LORD, standing in for the divine name).
Paul, about twenty-five years after the crucifixion: the confession, carried forward
“Yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him.”
1 Corinthians 8:6 →Look at what Paul has done. He is arguing that idols are nothing and that there is only one God, and to prove it he reaches for the Shema, the verse he had recited every morning of his life. Then he takes the confession’s two words apart. God he assigns to the Father. Lord, the word that stands where the divine name stands, he assigns to Jesus Christ. And the sentence is still a statement that there is one.
The date is the point. 1 Corinthians is one of the letters no serious historian disputes Paul wrote, sent roughly twenty-five years after the crucifixion, to a church that would have told him if he had invented this. Whatever Christians later argued at Nicaea in 325, they were not inventing something new here. A Jewish monotheist had already said the Shema with Jesus inside it, and expected his readers to nod.
Two modern studies make this verse the hinge of their argument and are cited, not reproduced: Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, and N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, chapter 6.
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