Mitzvah 4: Love God.

Deuteronomy 6.5, Matthew 22.37=Mark 12.30=Luke 10.27

Dt 6.5 ‏וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ	You loveα Yahweh your God
‏בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ	with your whole heart
‏וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ	and with your whole breathβ
‏וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ׃	and with your whole greatness.
22.37 ὁ δὲ ἔφη αὐτῷ·	Heγ was telling him,
10.27 ὁ δὲ ἀποκριθεὶς εἶπεν·	Answering, Heγ said,
12.30 καὶ ἀγαπήσεις κύριον τὸν θεόν σου	“You are going toα love your Master God
ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ καρδίᾳ/ἐξ ὅλης τῆς καρδίας σου	with your whole heart,
καὶ ἐξ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς/ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ ψυχῇ σου	with your whole breath,β
καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ ἰσχύϊ σου	with your whole strength,
καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ διανοίᾳ/τῆς διανοίας σου,	with your whole thinking,
καὶ ἐξ ὅλης τῆς ἰσχύος σου.	with your whole strength,
καὶ τὸν πλησίον σου ὡς σεαυτόν.	and your neighbor like yourself.”

People who confuse love with an emotion are regularly confused by this command. How can you command someone to love someone else?—you either have warm fuzzy feelings for them or you don’t. Of course Paul’s definition of love (1Co 13.4-7) describes it with verbs, not nouns; so love is properly understood as a verb, and something we do regardless of what we might feel. But I’ll say more about that at another time.

In Mark, Jesus translates this passage by expanding the idea of “your whole greatness,” which is a pretty vague way of putting it, into “your whole power and your whole thinking.” Matthew only puts it, “your whole thinking.” Luke has a scholar, not Jesus, give the rendering of “your whole power and your whole thinking.”

The point is that each of us is to love God with our whole being. No part of our lives is to be lived in a way that does not show love for God. Selfishness is the opposite of love. Preserving something in ourselves that God is not allowed to be Lord over, or that God cannot touch, condemn, demand, or even allow, means that we have not truly accepted God as our Lord. That thing has become Lord; or we are still holding onto the delusion that we are Lord over our lives.

With your whole heart. The ancients believed they thought with their hearts, not their brains. The ancient Egyptians thought the brain was head-stuffing and little more; Aristotle believed the brain’s job was to cool down the blood. It wasn’t until the late 100s that Galen figured out the brain controlled muscles, but made no guesses about higher brain functions like thought and intellect. So “heart” in scripture is a synonym for “intellectual capacity.” (Not emotions; the ancients believed you felt emotion with your kidneys.) We are to love God with our intellectual capacity.

With your whole breath. Breath was a synonym for life. We often translate נפש and ψυχη as “soul,” but it more properly signified that this was a living being. Dead people don’t breathe; therefore they have no soul, and won’t have one until they are resurrected. We are to love God with our lives. We are to live out this love for God with our actions—after all, faith without works is dead. (Jm 2.17)

With your whole greatness. The Hebrew word ‏מְֹאד/me’od is an adverb, and means “with great feeling.” This is where other translations get “with your whole might” or “whole strength.” Jesus in the Gospels put it “whole strength” but added the idea of “whole thinking” to emphasize the idea that this is intellectual strength. We are to consciously consider how we might actively, not passively, love God. We are to put some thought into it.

As you can see, the sort of love we’re to have for God is pretty all-consuming. But the nature of love is that it doesn’t exclude anything, and I’ll get on to loving neighbors with the 13th mitzvah.

α. In Deuteronomy, love is a regular perfect-tense verb; but in the Gospels it’s in a future tense: you will love, which I translated “You’re going to love” so that it won’t be confused with an imperative.

β. Breath also means soul or life—literally psyche.

γ. Jesus.