Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
Hear, Israel
Deuteronomy 6:1-9
1 Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the ordinances, which Yahweh your God commanded to teach you, that you might do them in the land that you go over to possess; · WEB
The central command is to love God entirely, and the method of passing it on is ordinary conversation at four times of day.
Hear, Israel: Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one Deuteronomy 6:4.
The sentence is the shortest creed in Scripture and the most consequential. It is not primarily an arithmetic claim about how many gods exist; it is a claim about singleness — that the God of Israel is not one power among several, not divided into local versions with different names at different shrines, and not to be worshiped in parts.
And the command that follows is what a single God requires: you shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might Deuteronomy 6:5.
The three terms are not a psychology. They pile up to say everything, in the way Scripture does elsewhere with four terms Mark 12:30 — and the Lord names this verse the first of all the commandments when asked.
What is being commanded is affection, which sounds impossible to command. But the setting explains it. This is not addressed to strangers; it is addressed to people who have been carried out of slavery, fed for forty years, and carried as a man carries his son Deuteronomy 1:31. Love is asked for as a response to something already done, and the book has spent five chapters establishing what was done.
Then the transmission, and it is the most practical passage in the book.
First, location: these words... shall be on your heart Deuteronomy 6:6. Before anything is taught to anyone else, it has to be somewhere in the teacher.
Then the method: you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up Deuteronomy 6:7.
Four settings, and none of them is a classroom. Sitting at home, walking somewhere, going to bed, getting up — the whole day, in the intervals between everything else. The verb is talk. No institution is founded, no teacher is appointed, and no curriculum is set. What is prescribed is conversation, and the responsibility falls on parents.
The last two verses take it further out. Bound on the hand and worn between the eyes; written on doorposts and on gates Deuteronomy 6:8–9. Whether these were meant as figures or as objects, the direction is the same: the words are to be attached to the body a person works with, in the line of sight, and on the entrance every member of the household passes through.
It is the opposite of a religion kept in a building. Nothing here happens at a sanctuary, and the tabernacle is not mentioned.
settled What this mark means