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About this book

Deuteronomy

About this book
Chapter 6

1 Now these are the commandments, statutes, and ordinances that the Lord your God instructed me to teach you so that you may carry them out in the land where you are headed 2 and that you may so revere the Lord your God that you will keep all his statutes and commandments that I am giving you—you, your children, and your grandchildren—all your lives, to prolong your days. 3 Pay attention, Israel, and be careful to do this so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in number—as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, said to you, you will have a land flowing with milk and honey.⁠ 4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!⁠ 5 You must love the Lord your God with your whole mind, your whole being, and all your strength.⁠ 6 These words I am commanding you today must be kept in mind, 7 and you must teach them to your children and speak of them as you sit in your house, as you walk along the road, as you lie down, and as you get up.⁠ 8 You should tie them as a reminder on your forearm and fasten them as symbols on your forehead.⁠ 9 Inscribe them on the doorframes of your houses and gates.⁠ 10 Then when the Lord your God brings you to the land he promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give you—a land with large, fine cities you did not build, 11 houses filled with choice things you did not accumulate, hewn-out cisterns you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—and you eat your fill, 12 be careful not to forget the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, that place of slavery. 13 You must revere the Lord your God, serve him, and take oaths using only his name. 14 You must not go after other gods, those of the surrounding peoples, 15 for the Lord your God, who is present among you, is a jealous God—his anger will erupt against you and remove you from the land. 16 You must not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Massah.⁠ 17 Keep his commandments very carefully, as well as the stipulations and statutes he commanded you to observe. 18 Do whatever is proper and good before the Lord so that it may go well with you and that you may enter and occupy the good land that he promised your ancestors, 19 and that you may drive out all your enemies just as the Lord said. 20 When your children ask you later on,⁠ “What are the stipulations, statutes, and ordinances that the Lord our God commanded you?”⁠ 21 you must say to them, “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt in a powerful way. 22 And he brought signs and great, devastating wonders on Egypt, on Pharaoh, and on his whole family before our very eyes. 23 He delivered us from there so that he could give us the land he had promised our ancestors. 24 The Lord commanded us to obey all these statutes and to revere him so that it may always go well for us and he may preserve us, as he has to this day. 25 We will be innocent if we carefully keep all these commandments before the Lord our God, just as he demands.”

Texts in conversation

Compare Deuteronomy 6:5 and 2 Kings 23:25

Hebrew Bible

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Summary

2 Kings 23 portrays Josiah loving God with all his heart, soul, and strength, echoing Deuteronomy 6. This phrase appears only in these two texts, showing Josiah uniquely obeying the focus of Israel’s covenant and giving him the same praise as Moses.

Passages

Deuteronomy 6:5

Hebrew Bible
3 Pay attention, Israel, and be careful to do this so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in number—as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, said to you, you will have a land flowing with milk and honey. 4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! 5 You must love the Lord your God with your whole mind, your whole being, and all your strength. 6 These words I am commanding you today must be kept in mind, 7 and you must teach them to your children and speak of them as you sit in your house, as you walk along the road, as you lie down, and as you get up.
750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Deuteronomy

2 Kings 23:25

Hebrew Bible
23 But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah’s reign, such a Passover of the Lord was observed in Jerusalem. 24 Josiah also got rid of the ritual pits used to conjure up spirits, the magicians, personal idols, disgusting images, and all the detestable idols that had appeared in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem. In this way he carried out the terms of the law recorded on the scroll that Hilkiah the priest had discovered in the Lord’s temple. 25 No king before or after repented before the Lord as he did, with his whole heart, soul, and being in accordance with the whole law of Moses. 26 Yet the Lord’s great anger against Judah did not subside; he was still infuriated by all the things Manasseh had done. 27 The Lord announced, “I will also spurn Judah, just as I spurned Israel. I will reject this city that I chose—both Jerusalem and the temple, about which I said, ‘I will live there.’”
600–501 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in 2 Kings

References

"... To some extent the northern traditions seen in Deuteronomy reinforced the older focus by Judeans on Jerusalem. Josiah and his people read Deuteronomy’s call for centralized worship at a northern sanctuary as a mere prelude to God’s ultimate choice of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the northern traditions also brought major changes to Judah’s scriptures, changes prompted by Assyrian trauma. Josiah began a shift from a typical Near Eastern focus on royal traditions to a new Judean focus on nonroyal legal traditions, particularly Deuteronomy, now functioning as the “scroll of the covenant.” Even the biblical books of 1–2 Kings, focused as they are on the kings of Israel and Judah, were shaped by Josiah’s scribes so they evaluated the kings of Israel and Judah on one criterion: whether they did or did not fulfill the Deuteronomic call for centralization of the cult in Jerusalem. Indeed, an earlier edition of those books probably concluded well before the current end of 2 Kings. That Josianic edition ended with a verse saying that Josiah did a better job than any other king at obeying the law of Deuteronomy (2 Kings 23:25; compare Deuteronomy 17:14–20) ..."
David M. Carr, Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 64.
"... The words 'none arose like him' are applied to only two people in the Bible: Moses and Josiah. The conclusion of Deuteronomy is: 'And there did not arise a prophet again in Israel like Moses ...' The closing comment on Josiah is: '... and none arose like him after him ...' There arose no prophet like Moses; there arose no king like Josiah ... In Deuteronomy Moses tells the people, 'Love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.' Only one person in the Hebrew Bible is described as fulfilling this: Josiah. The Deuteronomist says that Josiah was 'a king who returned to Yahweh with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might.' This threefold expression occurs nowhere in the Old Testament but in these two places ..."
Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 111–112.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Deuteronomy 6:5 and 2 Kings 23:25

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