What Did the Shema Originally Mean?

 

According to a rabbinic tradition, when the “men of Jericho” recited the Shema, they would say it in a slightly different way from that followed by Jews nowadays. They would recite the first verse, “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God the Lord alone,” and then go on to the next verse in the Torah, “And you shall love the Lord your God…” without inserting anything between them.

 

Nowadays, Jews customarily insert between these two verses the words, “Blessed be the Name of Him whose glorious kingship is eternal” (see Mishnah Pesaḥim 4:8, Tosefta Pisḥa 3:19). We don’t know exactly why the “men of Jericho” insisted on skipping these words (except for the fact that they aren’t in the biblical text itself), but whatever their reason, according to the Mishnah, the Rabbis did not consider this practice improper, even though they did not follow it.

 

What the “men of Jericho” did or did not do might seem like a minor matter, but it isn’t at all. It addresses the very essence of this part of the Shema and its significance in Judaism.

 

Since ancient times, the Shema has been treated as Judaism’s great confession of faith, the assertion that there is only one God: “Hear O Israel: the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone” (or, in some translations, “The Lord is one”). These six words in Hebrew are considered a concise statement of the belief that lies at the very heart of the Jewish religion, monotheism. And yet, there may be reason to conclude that this was not how this first verse of the Shema was originally understood.

 

To begin with, there is little evidence before the time of the Rabbis (that is, before the first century CE) that the proclamation “the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone” was understood as the basic teaching of the Torah. For example, the anonymous author of the book of Jubilees, a Jew who lived around 200 BCE, was apparently unaware of any special significance attributed to what we call the Shema. He was a careful reader of the Torah, and as such he referred to many of the Torah’s laws in his book, including the duty to love God that is mentioned right after the opening verse of the Shema (see Jub 20:7). But he never mentions or even alludes to the verse preceding it, “Hear O Israel, the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone”—not once in a work of some 50 chapters. If it was so important, how could he just leave it out?

 

What is more, the earliest sources that do allude to the practice of reciting the Shema never describe it as a proclamation that there is only one God, or that God is “one” or anything similar. For example, the “Letter of Aristeas,” a Hellenistic Jewish work of the second century BCE, reports that God commanded “that on going to bed and rising, men should meditate on the ordinances of God,” that is, they should think about God’s commandments. This says nothing about God’s unity or uniqueness.

 

Similarly, the “Community Rule” discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls asserts that “With the entrance of day and of night, I shall enter into the covenant of God, and with the going out of evening and of morning, I shall speak His laws…Before I move my hands and feet, I will bless His name; I will praise Him before I go out or enter, or sit or rise, and while I lie on the couch of my bed I will extol Him; I will bless Him with the offering that comes from my lips in the company of men” (1QSerekh col. 10: 10-14). Here, the recitation of the Shema is conceived as many things: an enactment of entering into the covenant, an act of speaking of divine laws, of blessing and praising and extolling God—everything except proclaiming monotheism and God’s utter oneness.

 

Josephus, at the end of the first century BCE, restates a commandment in Deuteronomy 31:10-11, which requires the public reading of the Torah every seven years at the time of Sukkot. Josephus says that the reading should be performed by the High Priest standing on a raised platform, so that “all Israel”—men, women, children, and slaves—will be able to hear. The first commandment that Josephus mentions in this public reading is the recitation of the Shema: “Two times each day, at dawn and when it is time to go to sleep, let everyone acknowledge to God the gifts that He has bestowed upon them through their deliverance from the land of Egypt, the offering of thanks being by its nature praiseworthy, and something that is done both in response to past favors and so as to invite future ones” (Jewish Antiquities IV 212). That the recitation of the Shema is the first commandment mentioned by Josephus in this context is certainly significant; obviously it had already gained its central place in Judaism. How much more surprising, then, is His description of its significance: the Shema is an “offering of thanks,” not a proclamation of monotheism.

 

All this suggests that people back then understood the Shema rather differently. It seems altogether probable that they were not reading those first six words in isolation, as a declaration of monotheism, but that they read that first verse as connected to all that follows, the duty to love God and to think and talk about His laws—just as the “Letter of Aristeas” and the “Community Rule” say explicitly.

 

In fact, this may also explain why the “men of Jericho” did not want to break the connection of the first verse to the one that follows it: the two can indeed be construed as a single idea, “Hear O Israel: the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone, and you shall [therefore] love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and all your strength.” What does this mean? To rephrase these two verses slightly: “Understand, O Israel, that the Lord our God is the only God, and you shall therefore love Him with all your heart.” How so? Since He is the only God, your devotion to the divine need not be shared between Him and some other deity, but you shall love Him with your whole undivided heart and soul and might.

 

How did this ever change? It would seem that the Rabbis of the first and second centuries CE quite consciously set out to stress the independence of Deut 6:4 as an affirmation of monotheism: “Hear O Israel, the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone,” period. This may not have been the original intention behind the insertion of “Blessed be the Name of Him whose glorious kingship is eternal,” but it certainly had the effect of creating a full stop after the word eḥadh (“alone”)—and this was apparently what the “men of Jericho” objected to.

 

The same sort of full stop is reflected in various other customs connected with the Shema (see b. Talmud Berakhot 13b): drawing out the “d” in the word eḥadh at the end of this verse;* covering the eyes while saying the first verse; being pores ‘al Shema, an ancient practice explained in various ways today, but which seems to have resulted in isolating the first verse from the rest; and so forth. In short, it seems that the first verse of the Shema gradually acquired a new role: it became an isolated assertion of the truth of monotheism.

 

If so, what were people originally meant to understand by reciting the first paragraph of the Shema? Probably something like this: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is the only God; therefore, you shall love Him with your undivided heart and soul and might.” Indeed, the Rabbis themselves referred to this first paragraph as the “acceptance of the kingship of Heaven,” which involves something more than monotheism—but more about this, God willing, in next week’s reading.

 Shabbat shalom!

*Actually, the sound that is to be drawn out is not that of our letter “d,” but rather the sound represented in English by “th” as in those or that. This pronunciation of the last letter of the Hebrew word eḥadh (“alone”) is represented in Tiberian Hebrew by the letter daleth without a dagesh (a dot) in the middle of it. You can’t draw out a dental plosive like “d”; its sound stops as soon as it is articulated.