Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Deuteronomy 6:4
Hear, O Israel. In Hebrew, hearing that does not change anything is not hearing.
Deuteronomy 6:4, in every translation this tool compares.
Are you listening to me? A parent saying that to a child is not asking about the child's ears. English already has a sense of hear that includes doing what you were told, and you use it without noticing. Hebrew has only that sense.
Because it is the sentence Judaism recites twice daily and the one Jesus calls the first of all commandments, and its opening verb does not mean what English hear means. The verse also carries a second problem in its final two words that most readers never learn about.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD.
Versions divide on the last clause. Some read the LORD our God, the LORD is one. Others read the LORD is our God, the LORD alone. The JPS reads the LORD alone. The difference is whether the verse is about God's oneness or about Israel's exclusive loyalty.
שָׁמַע shama · H8085
Shema means to hear, to listen, to obey, with no boundary between them. Hebrew has no separate verb for obey; it uses this one. So the command is not asking for attention, it is asking for compliance, and the name the whole prayer is known by is that verb. The closing clause has four Hebrew words and no verb, which is why translators have to supply one and why the two readings both work.
English split hearing from obeying. Once you have two verbs, the first one becomes optional and the second becomes the demand. In Hebrew you cannot obey without hearing or hear without obeying, because there is nothing else to be.
When a Hebrew command uses a verb of perception, check whether the language has a separate verb for the response. Where it does not, the perception verb is already the command.
One LORD makes the verse a statement about God's nature and has fifteen hundred years of Christian reading behind it. The LORD alone makes it a demand for exclusive allegiance, fits the covenant context of Deuteronomy, and is the reading Jewish tradition largely carries. Both are grammatically available because the Hebrew has no verb in the clause.
- Shama used for obedience: Genesis 22:18; Exodus 19:5; 1 Samuel 15:22
- The four-word Hebrew clause and its possible renderings are footnoted in the NET, NRSV and JPS
