Theopedia

Shema

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

— Deuteronomy 6:4-5 (ESV)

Definition

The Shema is Israel’s foundational confession of God’s unity, taken from Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and named for its opening Hebrew word, shema (“hear”). It has been recited by observant Jews every morning and evening since ancient times.1 Jesus named it “the most important” commandment in the Law (Mark 12:28-30), pairing its command to love God with the command to love one’s neighbor (Lev. 19:18) as the two commandments on which “all the Law and the Prophets depend” (Matt. 22:40).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession opens its chapter on the Godhead in language that echoes the Shema’s own claim:

The Lord our God is but one only living and true God; whose subsistence is in and of himself, infinite in being and perfection…2

The Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration state the same doctrine in nearly identical wording, differing from the Baptist confession only in incidental phrasing.34 Mastricht reads the Hebrew text itself as commending two articles of the Trinity and of monotheism together: the plural “our God” (Elohenu), which he takes as pointing to a plurality of persons, and “the LORD is one,” which commends the unity of that one divine being.1

Biblical Basis

The full text reads:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 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. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates (Deut. 6:4-9, ESV).

When a scribe asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest, he answered by quoting verses 4-5 directly:

The most important is, “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 mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these (Mark 12:29-31, ESV).

Matthew and Luke record the same episode, each naming the Shema’s command to love God as “the great and first commandment” (Matt. 22:36-38; Luke 10:25-27).

Paul restates the Shema’s monotheism directly: “there is no God but one” (1 Cor. 8:4), then ties that confession to Christ: “for us there is one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 8:6). He states the same doctrine to Timothy: “there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). Jesus himself, in prayer, calls his Father “the only true God” (John 17:3), and James warns against treating the confession as merely notional: “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder” (James 2:19).

Historical Development

Jewish liturgical use

Mastricht records that the Shema was, “by the Jews, not only read daily, but also customarily inscribed on a clean parchment,” and that Jewish prayer books of his own day still opened with the words, “Blessed are we, who morning and evening say, ‘Hear, O Israel…’”1 This twice-daily recitation, along with the practice of binding Deuteronomy 6:8’s words “as a sign” on the hand and “frontlets between your eyes,” follows, on Mastricht’s account, “a most ancient tradition.”5 Watson judged that the Pharisees had taken this same verse “Literally, which [was] meant Figuratively,” wearing “Two Scrolls of Parchment… one on their Left Arms, and binding the other to their Eye-brows,” when the text meant only that they should “meditate in his Law, and put it in practice.”6

Jesus’s use of the Shema

The Gospels connect Jesus to the Shema in two episodes. During his wilderness temptation, he answered Satan three times from Deuteronomy 6-8, the passage that opens with the Shema itself (Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13); McCormick reads the episode as showing that Jesus not only had God’s word “hidden in his heart” but “truly loved God with all his heart, soul, and strength,” the very devotion the Shema commands.7 Later, in his Jerusalem ministry, Jesus quoted the Shema’s opening words directly and named them the greatest of all the commandments when a scribe asked him which one stood first (Mark 12:28-31).

Opposing Views

Mastricht describes a standing objection to the doctrine of the Trinity in his own day, raised by what he calls “anti-Trinitarians”: that the Shema’s flat statement, “the LORD is one,” settles the question of God’s nature against any plurality of persons, on the ground that the text asserts a bare numerical oneness that a Trinity of persons would contradict.5 On this reading, later Trinitarian doctrine sits uneasily with the very text Jesus himself called Israel’s first and greatest commandment.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the Shema’s plain statement that “the LORD is one” rule out the later doctrine of the Trinity? Berkhof notes that the Hebrew word echad, translated “one,” may carry the sense “an only” rather than a bare numerical count, so that the verse’s own force falls on Jehovah’s exclusive claim to the divine name rather than on counting persons within the Godhead.8 Gill argues further that the verse asserts there is but one Jehovah, not that this excludes the Son and the Spirit from that one Jehovah: Scripture elsewhere calls the Son Jehovah (Ex. 17:7; Num. 21:6 with 1 Cor. 10:9; Jer. 23:6; Zech. 12:10) and the Spirit likewise (Isa. 6:1-9 with Acts 28:25-26), so that “our divine persons are one Lord.”9 Mastricht reads the same conclusion out of the Hebrew grammar itself: the word rendered “our God,” Elohenu, is plural, “denoting a plurality in God, which by no means is a plurality of essences, but rather of persons,” while “the LORD is one” then commends the unity of that one divine essence.1 On this reading, the Shema asserts the oneness of God’s being, not a denial of real personal distinctions within it.

Does Deuteronomy 6:8’s command to bind these words “as a sign” on the hand and “frontlets between your eyes” require a literal object, as in Jewish phylactery (tefillin) practice? Watson judged that the Pharisees erred by taking this figure literally, wearing actual scrolls bound to the arm and forehead, when the text’s own sense was figurative: internalizing God’s law well enough to “meditate in it, and put it in practice,” not a ceremonial requirement to wear it as an object.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 8, “The Unity of God,” 206. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  3. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  4. The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  5. Mastricht, 2:207. ↩ ↩2

  6. Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 295-300. ↩ ↩2

  7. Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Fulfilled,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 224-286, at 239-40. ↩

  8. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 48-49. ↩

  9. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 26, “Of the Unity of God.” ↩