Deuteronomy 6:4-9
The Lord's redeemed people must love Him with undivided devotion and weave His words into the heart, home, habits, and visible life of the community.
4 Hear, Israel: Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one.
5 You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.
6 These words, which I command you today, shall be on your heart;
7 and 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.
8 You shall bind them for a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.
9 You shall write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates.
The LORD's redeemed people must love Him with undivided devotion and weave His words into the heart, home, habits, and visible life of the community.
Moses summons Israel to confess the LORD as the one covenant God, to love Him with whole-person devotion, to keep His words upon the heart, and to impress them continually upon the household and daily life of the covenant community.
Moses speaks to Israel on the plains of Moab after restating the Ten Words and before Israel enters Canaan. The wilderness generation has perished, a new generation stands at the threshold of the land, and Moses now presses the covenant's central confession and formative household pattern upon the people who must live before the LORD in the land He gives.
The Shema and the Whole-Life Response to the Incomparable God
The Shema — 'Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one' — is the covenant's concentrated heart, calling Israel to an undivided, whole-person love of God that saturates domestic life, memory, and community identity, and that must survive the most dangerous moment: prosperity in the land that tempts Israel to forget the God who gave it.