שמע ישראל, Annotated

Deuteronomy 6:4 and the paragraph that follows it are among the most-recited sentences in Hebrew: verse 4 is the declaration recited twice daily in the traditional liturgy, and verses 5–9 are the first of the three paragraphs written inside tefillin and inside a mezuzah. What this page is for is the grammar, and the passage happens to be a compact tour of what Biblical Hebrew does that Modern Hebrew does not.

Read it cold and the largest trap is invisible: וְאָהַבְתָּ looks like a past tense and functions as a command. So do six more verbs in these six verses. Nothing in modern Hebrew prepares you for that, and this page's main job is to explain why.

How the text is set on this page

Everywhere else in this guide the displayed Hebrew is modern bare ktiv male. Here it is not: every quotation below is the consonantal text of the Masoretic Bible, verified against Sefaria's Miqra according to the Masorah, and the classical text spells defectively — מזזות for modern מזוזות, לטטפת for modern לטוטפות. The reading line carries the Masoretic pointing with the cantillation marks (טעמי המקרא) removed, since those encode chant rather than sound. The ׃ ending a verse is the sof pasuq, classical Hebrew's full stop; on it and on the maqaf ־ see the maqaf.

Verse 4: an imperative and two clauses with no verb in them

שְׁמַע is the masculine singular pa'al imperative of ש־מ־ע. The root's third letter is a guttural, and that is why the vowel is not where you expect it. Compare the ordinary strong-root paradigm and this one side by side:

The feminine and plural forms are perfectly parallel. Only the masculine singular diverges, and only in its vowel: a guttural ע will not sit under a cholam, so the o of שְׁמֹר becomes the a of שְׁמַע. This is not a special rule for this verb — every lamed-guttural root does it, which is why the imperatives שְׁלַח, פְּתַח and קְרַע all take a where a strong root takes o.

The rest of verse 4 is where the divine name stands, so it is set here as text rather than as an audio example — traditional practice does not vocalize the four-letter Name, and pointing it for a synthesizer would force a reading the tradition specifically avoids.

The pointing printed on the Name in a Masoretic Bible is not its own. It is the ketiv/qere convention: the consonants written are one word, the vowels printed under them belong to the word actually said aloud (אֲדֹנָי, or הַשֵּׁם outside prayer). Reading the printed dots against the printed letters produces a hybrid that is a misreading of a deliberate device, not a Hebrew word.

Grammatically the clause is the interesting part. יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ and יְהֹוָה אֶחָד are two verbless clauses stacked with nothing between them — no is, no conjunction. Hebrew has no present-tense copula, and here that is a genuine ambiguity the language cannot resolve, which is why the translations split over it. "The LORD is our God, the LORD is one." "The LORD our God, the LORD is one." "The LORD is our God, the LORD alone." All three are available from the same four words, because the piece that would disambiguate them in English — the placement of is — does not exist in the Hebrew.

Two more words. אֱלֹהֵינוּ is the plural-shaped noun אֱלֹהִים on its bound base אֱלֹהֵי־ plus the first-person plural suffix ־נוּ; the plural ending ־ִים does not survive into a suffixed form, which is exactly what happens in modern בָּנֵינוּ or חַיֵּינוּ. And אֶחָד here is a predicate, not a count. Hebrew uses the same word for the numeral and for "one and only", and the sentence is not saying how many of something there are.

Verse 5, and the hinge of the whole passage

Verse 5 also contains the Name, so it is given here as text:

Take וְאָהַבְתָּ apart. Strip the וְ and you have אָהַבְתָּ — the ordinary suffix conjugation, second person masculine singular: you loved. It is the same form a modern Israeli uses in אהבת את הסרט? "did you like the film?". And yet in this verse it is a command.

Biblical Hebrew has a conjugation Modern Hebrew no longer has: weqatal, the suffix conjugation with a prefixed וְ, used for commands, future events and repeated habits. It is the mirror image of the wayyiqtol narrative past at Genesis 1:1–3, and both are treated as a system at ו ההיפוך. Calling it "the past used as a future" produces the wrong instincts: it is a separate conjugation that happens to be spelled like the past one, and the language later lost it.

Here is the evidence that this is systematic rather than a one-off poetic licence. The seven main verbs of verses 5 to 9 are all weqatal — every one of them.

Note items 5 and 7: before a שווא or a labial (ב, ו, מ, פ) the וְ surfaces as וּ — the same rule behind modern וּשניים and וּמה. The prefix has changed shape, not identity.

Verse 6: אשר, and a participle carrying an object

Three items. אֲשֶׁר is the relative pronoun; modern Hebrew replaced it wholesale with ש־, and אשר survives only in formal and literary prose — register label (formal/literary). אָנֹכִי is the long "I" beside ordinary אֲנִי, (Biblical) and absent from speech. And מְצַוְּךָ is a pi'el participle of צ־ו־ה with a fused second-person object — modern Hebrew writes two words, מצווה אותך.

Verse 7: four infinitives where modern Hebrew says כשאתה

That second line is six words long, and four of them — בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ, וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ, וּבְשׇׁכְבְּךָ, וּבְקוּמֶךָ — are ב + infinitive construct + possessive suffix. Each is a whole temporal clause packed into a single word: literally "in your sitting", meaning "when you sit".

The infinitive constructs are the irregular ones: שֶׁבֶת from י־שׁ־ב and לֶכֶת from ה־ל־ך both lose their first radical, exactly as the modern infinitives לָשֶׁבֶת and לָלֶכֶת do. And בַדֶּרֶךְ is pointed with a soft ב — vadérekh, not badérekh — because classical pointing keeps a בגדכפ״ת letter spirant after a word ending in a vowel. Modern Hebrew abandoned that and says badérekh.

The ־ם that is not a plural

וְשִׁנַּנְתָּם, וּקְשַׁרְתָּם and וּכְתַבְתָּם all end in ־ם, and every one of them is second person singular. The ־ם is a fused object suffix, "them" — the words mean "and you shall drill them", "and you shall bind them", "and you shall write them". Read that ם as a plural verb ending and the sentence dissolves.

Modern Hebrew does not fuse objects onto verbs in speech; it uses את plus a pronoun — וּכְתַבְתָּם is וכתבת אותם. The fused forms survive in writing at a (formal/literary) register.

One vocabulary note: מְזֻזוֹת simply means "doorposts". The object nailed to them took its name from the architecture, not the other way round.

Common Mistakes

1. Translating וְאָהַבְתָּ as a past tense. A reasonable error, because the form really is the past-tense form.

2. Reading אֶחָד as a count. English "one" is a numeral first, so the last clause gets read as a headcount.

3. Parsing בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ as an unknown noun. It looks like ב plus a noun plus a possessive, and it is — but the "noun" is an infinitive, so the whole thing is a clause, not a thing.

4. Reading the ־ם of וְשִׁנַּנְתָּם as a plural subject. ־תֶּם is drilled into every learner as "you (pl.)", and the resemblance is close.

5. Deploying these forms in modern Hebrew. Writing ואהבת or ובלכתך in an email is not a grammatical error; it is a register error of about three thousand years.

Key Takeaways

• The passage's seven main verbs are all weqatal — suffix conjugation plus וְ, reading as a command. This is a separate conjugation Modern Hebrew has lost, not "the past used as a future".
• שְׁמַע is a regular lamed-guttural imperative: the guttural ע forces a where שְׁמֹר has o. The feminine and plural forms, שִׁמְעִי and שִׁמְעוּ, are perfectly regular.
• Verse 4 is two verbless clauses, and the missing copula makes the translation genuinely undecidable in Hebrew, not merely difficult.
• בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ and its three companions are ב + infinitive construct + suffix, a temporal clause in one word; modern Hebrew rebuilds them all as כשאתה plus a participle.
• The ־ם on וְשִׁנַּנְתָּם, וּקְשַׁרְתָּם and וּכְתַבְתָּם is a fused object, "them", on a second person singular verb — modern Hebrew says אותם separately. Every construction on this page is (Biblical): recognize them, do not write them.