Shema Yisrael

The most important sentence in Judaism has no agreed English rendering, and the ambiguity is in the Hebrew rather than in the translators.

Six words, from Deuteronomy 6:4, and the difficulty is that biblical Hebrew has no copula, no verb "is" in the present tense, so the relationship between the four content words has to be supplied by the reader. The standard candidates: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; the Lord is our God, the Lord is one; the Lord is our God, the Lord alone; the Lord our God is one Lord. The Jewish Publication Society version prefers "the Lord alone", which makes the verse a statement of exclusive allegiance rather than of numerical unity.

That difference is not small. Read as unity, the verse is a metaphysical claim and has been used as such in polemic against trinitarian doctrine. Read as exclusivity, it is a covenantal demand, this God and no other, which fits the surrounding chapter, and fits a religious environment in which the existence of other gods was not in question but loyalty to them was.

The word rendered "one" can carry both senses, and the argument is old. Medieval Jewish philosophers, Maimonides among them, read unity and built on it.

The verse is followed immediately by the command to love God with all one's heart, soul and might, and to teach these words to one's children, speak them at home and abroad, on lying down and rising up, bind them on hand and forehead, and write them on doorposts, which is the origin of tefillin and the mezuzah.

A second line follows the verse in recitation and is not from Deuteronomy: blessed be the name of the glory of his kingdom for ever and ever. In most Jewish liturgy it is said in an undertone, and the reason given is a story.

The Talmud, at Pesachim 56a, explains that Jacob wished to reveal the end of days to his sons and the divine presence departed from him; he feared one of them was unworthy, and they answered him with the verse from Deuteronomy, at which he replied with the blessing. Because the line is Jacob's and not Moses', it is said quietly, except on the Day of Atonement, when it is said aloud, the tradition offering various explanations of the exception.

This is a tradition explaining an existing practice rather than a record of how it started. The Mishnah at Yoma 3:8 describes the formula being used in the Temple as the response of the crowd when the high priest pronounced the divine name, which points to its origin as a liturgical response, and the undertone as a post-Temple accommodation.

The first verse has functions beyond daily prayer. It is recited before sleep, it is what a Jew is taught to say at the point of death, and it was said by people going into the gas chambers, which is a fact about it that no account of the text should omit.

There is also a scribal peculiarity: two letters in the verse are written oversized in Torah scrolls, forming the word for witness. The reason is not recorded and the explanations are all later.