You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.
To love God with all one's heart, soul, and resources
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו באהבתו יתעלה. וזה שנחשוב ונתבונן במצותיו ומאמריו ופעולותיו עד שנשיגהו ונהנה בהשגתו בתכלית ההנאה, וזאת היא האהבה המחוייבת, ולשון ספרי לפי שנאמר ואהבת את ה' אלהיך איני יודע כיצד אוהב את המקום תלמוד לומר והיו הדברים האלה אשר אנכי מצוך היום על לבבך שמתוך כך אתה מכיר את מי שאמר והיה העולם. הנה בארנו לך שבהתבוננות תעלה בידך ההשגה ותגיע ההנאה ותבא האהבה בהכרח. וכבר בארנו שזאת המצוה גם כן כוללת שנהיה קוראים לבני האדם כולם לעבודתו יתעלה ולהאמין בו, וזה שאתה כשתאהב איש אחד תספר בשבחיו ותרבה בהם ותקרא בני האדם לאהוב אותו וזה עד"מ כן בשתאהב אותו יתעלה באמת כאשר הגיע לך מהשגת אמתתו אתה קורא בלי ספק הסכלים והפתיים לדעת ידיעת האמת אשר ידעתו. ולשון ספרי ואהבת את ה' אהבהו על הבריות כאברהם אביך שנאמר ואת הנפש אשר עשו בחרן ור"ל כמו שאברהם מפני שהיה אוהב כמו שהעיד הכתוב אברהם אוהבי וזה בעוצם השגתו קרא בני האדם להאמין בשם מרוב אהבתו כן אתה אהוב אותו עד שתקרא אליו בני האדם. (בפרשת ואתחנן, מדע הלכות יסודי התורה פרק ב'):
That is that He commanded us about loving Him, may He be exalted. And that is that we think about and contemplate His commandments, His statements and His actions until we comprehend Him and derive the greatest pleasure from that comprehension. And that is the love that is obligated. And the language of the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 33:1) is, "Since it is stated, 'And you shall love,' I would not know how a man is to love the Omnipresent. [Hence] we learn to say, 'And these things that I command you today shall be upon your heart' (Deuteronomy 6:6) - that through this, you will recognize the One that spoke and the world [came into being]." Behold we have explained to you that comprehension will come to you through contemplation and you will [then] come to pleasure, and perforce the love will come. And we have already clarified that this commandment also includes that we call all people to His service, may He be exalted, and to believe in Him. And that is since when you love a person, you will recount his praises and magnify him, and call on other people to love him. And this is, by way of analogy, the same with true love of Him, may He be exalted: When comprehension of His truth comes to you, you without a doubt call out to the fools and silly ones to know the true knowledge that you know. And the language of the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 32:2) is, "'And you shall love the Lord, your God' - cause Him to be loved by the creatures, like your father Avraham (did); as it is stated (Genesis 12:5), 'and the souls that they had made in Charan.'" And it means to say: Like Avraham who loved [God] - as Scripture testifies, "Avraham, who loves me" (Isaiah 41:8), and this was from his great comprehension - to the point that he called people to Him. (See Parashat Vaetchanan; Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 2.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: a flat, unconditional command
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Recorded as practiced today
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding
- Conservative Binding
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Binding
Two readings, side by side
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this is one of them.
In the traditional Jewish reading How the Jewish legal (halakhic) tradition reads and defends this commandment, in its own developed voice — the classical reasons given for the commandments (ta’amei ha-mitzvot).
The tradition reads this verse as the affirmative duty to love God — a love the halakhic sources tie to the knowledge of Him and measure “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your resources.”
Maimonides counts the love of God as a positive commandment and roots it in knowledge: when a person contemplates God’s works and creations and sees in them His boundless wisdom, he is at once drawn to love Him. In the Mishneh Torah he ties the measure “with all your heart and all your soul” to a love that fills the whole of a person’s thought.
Maimonides (Rambam), Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah 2:1–2; Sefer HaMitzvot, positive commandment 3 (12th c.)
The Mishnah reads the verse’s three measures in turn: “with all your heart” — with both the good and the evil inclination; “with all your soul” — even if He takes your soul; and “with all your might (me’odekha)” — with all your resources.
Mishnah, Berakhot 9:5 (rabbinic period)Source text: Mishnah, Berakhot 9:5 — opens the source text at Sefaria in a new tab
Linked rather than reproduced — Mishnah, Berakhot 9:5: The shortest public-domain or CC0 English span carrying this citation is longer than this panel sets out in full.
The Sefer HaChinuch gives the reason that a person who reflects on the commandments and on the created world is moved to love their Author, and that this love is the ground from which wholehearted observance grows.
Sefer HaChinuch (13th c.)
Rabbinic citations here link to the source text at Sefaria, a free online library of Jewish texts. Where a public-domain or CC0 English translation — one anyone may reuse — of the exact passage cited has been verified and is short enough to set out in full, the passage is also reproduced here in the source’s own words; where it is not, the citation says which of those conditions it missed. Which passages are reproduced is a matter of licensing, length and verification — never of how much a source matters.
Modern critical scholarship How modern academic biblical scholarship reads this text — the source-critical and form-critical school. Its hedges are shown as it states them; nothing here is presented as settled fact.
Modern source-critical scholarship assigns this text to the Deuteronomic source (D).
Scholarly confidence in this reading: scholarly consensus.
The catalog reads this law as plausibly aimed against Divided or syncretistic loyalty — the worship of YHWH alongside other deities (cf. the monolatrous thrust of the Shema); per Moran and Weinfeld the love-demand polemically transposes Neo-Assyrian vassal-loyalty rhetoric onto the exclusive YHWH-Israel relationship, displacing both the suzerain-king and rival cults.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 1QS 1:1-11 The catalog describes this reception as: allusion
- CD-A 2:14-16 expanded it homiletically
Rabbinic aggadah
- Sifre Deuteronomy 32 expanded it homiletically
- Sifre Deuteronomy 31 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.299-300 read it spiritually
Josephus
- Ant. 4.212-213 reinterpreted it
The New Testament
- Mark 12:29-30 affirmed it Cited as the foremost commandment; the addition of 'mind' (dianoia) to the triad is a Synoptic expansion not directly derived from the LXX triad (kardia/psyche/dynamis), commonly argued to reflect Hellenistic anthropological categories, though the precise origin of the Markan tetrad remains debated
- Matthew 22:37 affirmed it heart/soul/mind triad
- Luke 10:27 affirmed it paired with Lev 19:18
The Church Fathers
- Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 1.22-26 read it spiritually
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 2:165 carried a parallel
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- neo assyrian vassal treaties treaty-loyalty 'love' command ('love Ashurbanipal as yourselves') Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence lines 266-268 Parpola & Watanabe, SAA II, no. 6 (1988)
- hittite vassal treaties loyalty stipulations demanding that the vassal serve the great king wholeheartedly; offered as a broader comparative analogue for covenant-loyalty rhetoric (direct dependence on Deuteronomy is contested, contra the Neo-Assyrian-focused argument of Moran/Weinfeld) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Treaty of Mursili II and Duppi-Tessub (CTH 62), stipulation §§3-4; Treaty of Suppiluliuma and Huqqanas (CTH 41.I), stipulations Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2nd ed. (SBL, 1999)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.
Deuteronomy 6:5 commands, "You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart (לְבָבְךָ), with all your soul/life (נַפְשְׁךָ), and with all your might/resources (מְאֹדֶךָ)." The verb אהב ('to love') here is not primarily about emotion — a point that consistently surprises modern readers. In ancient Near Eastern treaty language, 'love' is a technical term for political loyalty. When Assyrian treaties demand that vassals 'love' the great king, they mean unwavering allegiance demonstrated through action, not warm feelings. William Moran's seminal 1963 article, 'The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,' demonstrated this conclusively by comparing Deuteronomic language with the Amarna letters and Neo-Assyrian vassal treaties, where 'love' and 'fear' are covenant loyalty terms.
The three terms — heart (לֵבָב), soul/life (נֶפֶשׁ), and might (מְאֹד) — deserve careful unpacking. In biblical anthropology, the 'heart' (lev/levav) is the seat of intellect and will, not emotion (that role belongs more to the 'kidneys' or 'bowels' in Hebrew idiom). 'Soul' (nefesh) does not mean an immortal, disembodied soul in the Greek sense; it refers to one's life-force, vitality, or entire being — sometimes simply 'throat' or 'appetite.' 'Might' (me'od) is an unusual noun form of an adverb meaning 'very' or 'exceedingly'; it is often interpreted as 'resources' or 'abundance,' i.e., one's material wealth. The Mishnah (Berakhot 9:5) famously interprets these three terms as: love God with both your inclinations (good and evil), even if He takes your life, and with all your possessions. This rabbinic reading acknowledges the totalizing demand: loyalty with mind, life, and property.
The Deuteronomic context places this command immediately after the Shema (6:4), making it the practical outworking of the loyalty declaration. Deuteronomy repeatedly uses the vocabulary of love, fear, and clinging to describe the ideal covenant relationship (Deut 10:12, 11:1, 11:13, 11:22, 13:4, 30:6, 30:16, 30:20). This density of relational language is distinctive within the Pentateuch and is part of what Weinfeld identified as Deuteronomy's humanization of the covenant concept — moving from the Priestly source's emphasis on holiness and ritual purity to a more 'personal' covenantal rhetoric. Parallels to this totalizing love-demand in other ancient Near Eastern cultures are limited: Mesopotamian piety involved loyalty to a personal god, but we have no comparable command to love a deity 'with all your might.' The closest analogy remains political: Esarhaddon's Succession Treaty demands that subjects love Ashurbanipal 'as yourselves' — a phrase strikingly reminiscent of the biblical command.
This verse became one of the most theologically generative in all of scripture. Jesus cites it as the 'greatest commandment' (Mark 12:30, Matthew 22:37), combining it with Leviticus 19:18 (love your neighbor). The rabbis placed it at the center of daily liturgical practice through the Shema recitation. Maimonides devoted the opening chapters of the Mishneh Torah to elaborating what 'love of God' means philosophically — he understood it as an intellectual love born of contemplation of the created order (Yesodei HaTorah 2:1–2), heavily influenced by Aristotelian thought. The tension between love-as-loyalty (the original treaty context) and love-as-emotion (later devotional readings) has never been fully resolved and continues to animate Jewish and Christian theology alike.