You shall fear Yahweh your God; and you shall serve him, and shall swear by his name.
To fear God and stand in awe of His authority
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אֶת־יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ תִּירָא וְאֹתוֹ תַעֲבֹד וּבִשְׁמוֹ תִּשָּׁבֵעַ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להאמין יראתו יתעלה ולהפחד ממנו, ולא נהיה ככופרים ההולכים בשרירות לבם ובקרי אבל נירא ביראת ענשו בכל עת וזהו אמרו את ה' אלהיך תירא, ובגמרא (סנהדרין נ"ו) אמרו על דרך ויכוח באמרו ונוקב שם ה' מות יומת ואימר פירש דכתיב אשר נקבו בשמות ואזהרתיה מן את ה' אלהיך תירא, רוצה לומר אולי אמרו ונוקב שם ה' הוא שיזכיר השם לבד מבלתי שיברך, ואם תאמר אי זה עון בזה נאמר כי הוא עזב היראה כי מיראת השם שלא יזכיר שמו לבטלה, היה המענה על זאת השאלה ודחיית זה המאמר ואמר חדא דבעינא שם בשם וליכא, ורוצה לומר שיברך השם בשם כמו שאמרו יכה יוסי את יוסי, ועוד אזהרת עשה היא וכל אזהרת עשה לא שמה אזהרה, רוצה לומר שזה שאמרת אזהרתיה מאת ה' אלהיך תירא אינו אזהרה כי הוא צווי והוא מצות עשה ואין מזהירין בעשה. הנה נתבאר לך כי אמרו את ה' אלהיך תירא זו מצות עשה. (בפרשת עקב, מדע הלכות יסודי התורה):
That is that He commanded us to believe in His awe, may He be exalted, and to be afraid of Him. And we should not be like the heretics who walk brazen-heartedly and heedlessly, but should be scared with the fear of His punishment at all times. And that is His saying, "And you shall fear the Lord, your God." And in the Gemara (Sanhedrin 56a), they said by way of give and take about His saying, "And if he pronounces (nokev) the name, Lord, he shall be put to death" (Leviticus 24:16) - "Say that [nokev] is to mention, as it is stated (Numbers 1:17), 'who were mentioned (nikvu) by name,' and its prohibition is from, 'And you shall fear the Lord, your God.'" That is to say, maybe His saying, "And if he pronounces," is only that he mention [God's] name [even] without cursing. And if you will say, "What transgression is there in that" - we will say that it is because he neglected fear. For included in the fear of God is not to mention His name gratuitously. The answer to this question, and its rejection, was, "First, you need the name with the name" - as they said, "Yossi should smite Yossi" - "and also, that this is [only] a prohibition of a positive commandment. And any prohibition of a positive commandment is not called a prohibition" - for it is a command and a positive commandment, and we cannot prohibit with a positive commandment. Behold it has been made clear to you that His saying, "And you shall fear the Lord, your God," is a positive commandment. (See Parashat Ekev; Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah.)
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 as the duty to hold God in awe — an awe the sources distinguish from fear of punishment and locate in the sense of God’s exalted greatness.
Maimonides pairs the fear of God with the love of Him: contemplating the vastness of creation, a person feels at once love and a sense of his own smallness before it, and draws back in awe. He counts the fear of God as a distinct positive commandment.
Maimonides (Rambam), Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah 2:1–2; Sefer HaMitzvot, positive commandment 4 (12th c.)
On the words “you shall fear the Lord your God,” the Talmud records that Rabbi Akiva read the extra particle et as widening the verse to include reverence for the Torah scholar, who carries and transmits the teaching.
Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 22b (rabbinic period)Source text: Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 22b — opens the source text at Sefaria in a new tab
In the source’s own words — Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 22b:
We are taught that Simon of Amsuni, and others say, Nehemiah of Amsuni,was accustomed to interpret every word Eth. When he reached the Eth of (Deuteronomy 6:13, Deuteronomy 10:20) "Thou shalt fear the LORD, thy God", he refrained [did not interpret it]. Said his disciples to him: "Why, Rabbi, what will become of those Eth's thou didst interpret?" Whereupon he answered: "Just as well as I will be rewarded for making those interpretations, so will I be rewarded for refraining in this case." But when R. Akiba came, he interpreted: "The Eth [of "Thou shalt fear the LORD, thy God"] includes the scholars."
On this passage: The passage first records Simeon of Amsuni, who interpreted every particle et in the Torah and stopped at this verse, telling his disciples he would be rewarded for refraining as he had been for interpreting. Rabbi Akiva’s reading summarized above reverses that. The gloss added to it here — that the scholar carries and transmits the teaching — is this site’s wording, not the passage’s.
English: En Jacob, trans. Rabbi S. H. Glick (public domain). Via Sefaria; translator’s notes omitted.
The Sefer HaChinuch gives the reason that keeping the awe of God constantly before oneself restrains a person from transgression, since one who feels the presence of the King is slow to rebel against Him.
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 The exclusive loyalty terminology (fear-serve-swear) appears redirected from Neo-Assyrian imperial overlordship to YHWH; per Weinfeld and Otto the vocabulary of vassal fealty owed to the Assyrian great king is co-opted as a subversive assertion that such loyalty belongs to YHWH alone, implicitly polemicizing against both foreign suzerainty and the worship of other gods (cf. Deut 6:14)..
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 1:16-18 affirmed it
Rabbinic aggadah
- Sotah 31a expanded it homiletically
- Mishnah Avot 1:3 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.299-300 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.91 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Matthew 4:10 // Luke 4:8 affirmed it Jesus cites Deut 6:13 against the tempter using the serve/worship clause ('the Lord your God you shall worship and Him only you shall serve'), following the LXX wording rather than the MT fear verb, treating the loyalty obligation as binding.
- Luke 12:5 reinterpreted it divine fear recast within eschatological framework of judgment over body and soul
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 2:40-41 carried a thematic 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 demand that vassals fear and revere the sovereign / crown prince Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast lines 393-396 Parpola & Watanabe, SAA II (1988)
- instruction of amenemope injunction to 'fear god' (ntr) as the foundational posture of the wise person — Egyptian parallel to the Deuteronomic equation of divine fear with right-ordered piety Relationship to the parallel: shared theme prologue and chs. 6-10 (fear-of-god instruction) Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II (UC Press, 1976), pp. 146-163
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 6:13 reads, "YHWH your God you shall fear (תִּירָא), and Him you shall serve (תַּעֲבֹד), and by His name you shall swear (תִּשָּׁבֵעַ)." The verb ירא ('to fear') in Deuteronomic usage functions on two registers simultaneously. On one hand, it carries the everyday meaning of dread or terror — appropriate given the Deuteronomic portrait of YHWH as a consuming fire (Deut 4:24). On the other, it has become a near-technical term in Wisdom literature and Deuteronomic theology for proper reverence, piety, and moral comportment — what we might loosely translate as 'taking God seriously.' The phrase 'fear of YHWH' (יִרְאַת יְהוָה) in Proverbs and Deuteronomy often functions as shorthand for the entire posture of covenantal faithfulness, much as we might say someone 'has integrity' without meaning a single specific act.
The triad of fear-serve-swear in this verse maps neatly onto the obligations of a vassal in ancient Near Eastern treaty relationships. To 'fear' the sovereign is to acknowledge his power; to 'serve' him is to fulfill treaty stipulations (עבד in Hebrew covers both cultic service and political servitude); to 'swear by his name' is to make him the guarantor of one's oaths, which in the ancient world meant recognizing him as the ultimate enforcer. Moshe Weinfeld noted that this precise cluster of loyalty terms appears in Neo-Assyrian texts, where vassals are expected to fear, serve, and invoke the name of the overlord in legal proceedings. The Deuteronomic authors appear to have deliberately adopted the political vocabulary of their Assyrian overlords and redirected it toward YHWH — a subversive theological move that effectively says: the loyalty Assyria demands for itself belongs to Israel's God alone.
Comparative material from Mesopotamia shows that 'fear of the gods' was a widespread concept, but it typically referred to anxiety about divine punishment or to general piety. The Babylonian 'Counsels of Wisdom' and the 'Ludlul Bel Nemeqi' ('I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom') both emphasize fear of the gods as a component of the well-lived life. However, these texts do not frame divine fear as an exclusive loyalty obligation the way Deuteronomy does. In Egyptian wisdom literature (the Instruction of Amenemope, for instance), 'fear of god' similarly denotes moral caution and humility, but again without the covenantal, exclusive demand. What distinguishes the Deuteronomic formulation is its embedding within a treaty framework: this is not generic piety but a specific obligation owed to a specific deity who has entered into a binding relationship with a specific people.
The relationship between 'fearing God' and 'loving God' (Deut 6:5, the previous commandment in this enumeration) generated extensive rabbinic discussion. Are they complementary or contradictory? The Talmud (b. Sotah 31a) distinguishes between one who serves God out of love (a higher motivation) and one who serves out of fear (a lower but still valid motivation). Maimonides elaborated this hierarchy, placing intellectual love of God above fearful obedience (Mishneh Torah, Teshuvah 10:1–2). Interestingly, the original Deuteronomic text does not rank them — love and fear appear side by side as twin aspects of proper covenantal posture, much as a vassal might both love (be loyal to) and fear (respect the power of) his suzerain. The later theological separation of these concepts into competing motivational frameworks reflects philosophical developments far removed from the Deuteronomic authors' worldview.