The Meaning of "Strength" in Hebrew (Shema 06)

We’re in our final week of this series, studying the Shema. We’ve looked at six key words in this important ancient Jewish prayer. The Shema is a prayer of allegiance. If you were Jewish, you knew this from childhood. Faithful Jewish believers would recite it twice a day.

• Deuteronomy 6:4-5 Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.

Today we look at the sixth and final word, the word “strength.” In Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, the word is “me’od.”  What does that word mean? What does it mean to love God that way? 

Let’s set the stage with the historical context. Deuteronomy is the final message of Moses to the people of Israel. They are about to enter the promised land, to set up homes, a society, a community in this new land. Moses wants to give them both information and motivation to convey how to live in this land, and what it would look like for them to succeed. His message was: God should be everything to you. He should impact every part of your life. 

Maybe you’re a Christian. Or maybe you haven’t yet made a commitment to follow Jesus. Either way, we want you to understand that this prayer is not about being a religious person. It’s not just about the spiritual part of your life. It’s about your WHOLE life, your everything. As we talk today, I want you to ask: “Does God impact every part of my life?” Or do I just go to church, give God one hour of my week? So may people who claim to be Christians habitually separate their spiritual life from the rest of life. Their relationships, emotions, finances, family, marriage are lived out separately from their relationship with God. Moses is calling Israel to a life greater than that.

“Strength” Is Not Muscle Power, But “Muchness”

When you first read, “Love God with all your strength”, some of you might think of physical power, like the person you know who lifts weights. That’s not what this word is about. This is a word used to modify another word. When combined with another word, it gives the idea of “muchness.” We can see that in the biblical account of creation. 

• Genesis 1:31 Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good!

The word “very” is our word “me’od.” On the first five days of creation, God said, “It was good.” The sun was good. The birds were good. And all the rest. But not until the sixth day, when God was done, did he say it was “me’od” good. It was VERY good. There was “much” goodness in what God had made. 

Now let’s look at the story of Cain and Abel. They were brothers, sons of Adam and Eve. They both brought offerings for God. 

• Genesis 4:5 …but [God] did not accept Cain and his gift. This made Cain very angry, and he looked dejected.

Again, “me’od” is translated “very”, in this case, “very angry”. That’s the same word “strength” in Deuteronomy 6. 

Let me show you one more.

• Genesis 30:43 As a result, Jacob became very wealthy, with large flocks of sheep and goats, female and male servants, and many camels and donkeys.

“Me’od” here refers to the “muchness” of Jacob’s wealth. He had a lot. The point is that this word in Deuteronomy 6 doesn’t mean “strong” in the way we typically think about that. So let’s explore what it does mean.

“Strength” Means What You Trust In or Rely On

The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, but in ancient times, it was translated into other languages. This gives us some insight into how people understood those words. We’re going to look at two examples that date from before the time of Christ. One is the Greek Old Testament, and the other is the Aramaic version. 

Greek-speaking scholars translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek (called the Septuagint). When they got to Deuteronomy 6, they came across the word “me’od” and translated it using the Greek word for “power” (dunamis). The New Testament was also written in Greek, and it uses this word as well.

• Acts 1:8 “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere - in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

The Greek word translated “power” in this verse is the same word used to translate Deuteronomy 6:5.  Where the Hebrew Bible said: Love the Lord with all your “me’od”, the translators said, “With all your power.”

The other example is Aramaic. This was the language Jewish people in Palestine spoke in Jesus’ time. It was probably Jesus’ native language. When Aramaic-speaking interpreters got to “me’od” in Deuteronomy 6, they translated it with the word for “wealth”. It’s the word “Mammon” in older New Testament translations. You can see that word in Matthew 6.

• Matthew 6:24 “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other, you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”

The word here for “money” is the same word Aramaic translators used to convey “me’od” in Deuteronomy 6:5. In other words: Love the Lord your God with all your wealth, or all your means. Again, “me’od” means “very” or “much”. It intensifies the idea it is attached to. That’s why it can be translated as “strength”, “power”, or “wealth.”

Speakers of English are understandably confused by this. What is the connection between “very” and “power” or “wealth” or “strength”? The Aramaic word “wealth” can also mean “what a person trusts in”, because if you have wealth, you trust in that.  Likewise, if you have power, you trust in that. So Deuteronomy 6 is saying: Love the Lord your God with all you’ve got. With your best, with everything that empowers you, with everything you draw on in your life.

As we’ve seen in this series, Jesus quotes from the Shema. He does so twice. So the most important lessons we can learn about the words here come from him.

All the Abundance of Life Offers a Chance to Love God and Others

Jesus was once asked by a religious leader: what is the most important commandment, out of all God’s commandments in scripture?

• Mark 12:29-30 Jesus replied, “The most important is this: ‘Listen, O Israel! The Lord our God is the one and only Lord. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.”

Did Jesus make a mistake? It sounds like he misquoted Deuteronomy 6:5? Because he uses four words instead of three. No, what he’s doing is helping us think about how to follow God. Where Deuteronomy says “all your strength”, Jesus understands “me’od” as “all your mind AND all your strength.”

So what does this all add up to, when it comes to our relationship with God? It’s not about checking a box on Sundays. 

“I’m done with the God thing for another week. Now I can go on with the rest of my life. I can do whatever I want and live however I want, I can be my own person and follow my own heart, for the next 6 days. Some day, I will come back to church again for 60 or 90 minutes. That’s the part of my life God can have.”

We saw in recent weeks: the Shema calls us to love God with our HEART: our entire inner being, our mind, will and emotions. It calls us to love God with our SOUL: with our whole, essential person. Finally, it calls us to love God with all our mind and wealth and power and energy and muchness - with our everything. In our generation, we might say it like this: Love the Lord your God with all your time, all your talents, all your treasure.  

Now let’s go back to Mark 12. Jesus said something else very important there, as he answered the question about the greatest commandment of God.

• Mark 12:31 “The second commandment is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”

One thing we’ve been saying in this series: Shema isn’t just about your relationship with God, but also about your relationship with others. Jesus says: if you love the Lord your God, it will impact your relationship with your neighbors. The two are interconnected. 

This quotation is not from the Shema. It’s actually from Leviticus 19. 

• Leviticus 19:18 …love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

The book of Leviticus was given a generation earlier than Deuteronomy. It has all the instructions God gave Moses for Israel’s priests. It’s filled with detailed laws, regulations, and rituals. When you read Leviticus, it seems like God is all about rules and laws. But that would miss the deeper point. Leviticus 19 shows us what the rules are all about. If you read the rest of that chapter, you’ll see what it means.

• Verse 11 - Do not steal. Don’t deceive or cheat one another.
•  Verse 13 - Don’t defraud or rob your neighbor. Don’t make hired workers wait to receive their pay.
• Verse 15 - Don’t twist justice in legal matters by being partial to the rich and powerful.
• Verse 16 - Don’t spread slanderous gossip. Don’t stand idly by when your neighbor’s life is at risk.
• Verse 17 - Don’t nurse hatred for any of your relatives.
• Verse 18 - Love your neighbor as yourself.

In Leviticus 19, we see that when you give your everything to God, when you’re loving the Lord your God with heart and soul and strength, that will spill over into your relationships.  

The Takeaway

If you are a Christian, you might be wondering if it is really possible to live out the Shema. How can I love God in that way? God has provided the source of power through the Holy Spirit. As you develop a daily dependence on him, through practices like prayer and Bible study (see the series called Breakthrough Disciplines), you can experience his leading and power to transform you into Jesus’ vision of the best kind of life.

Or maybe you have never put your faith in Jesus before. You’ve never trusted in him to become one of God’s people. Understand that the answer Jesus gave to the religious leader who asked about the greatest commandment is not about moralism. It’s not about trying to become a better person. It’s not about doing the right things so God will like you, accept you, and reward you. 

What Jesus said there about loving your neighbor makes perfect sense in light of the cross. Jesus willingly gave his life for US on the cross, because every single one of us is broken. Every one of us struggles to obey these basic commandments. On our own, we can’t live the Shema. But Jesus paid for our sins, for all the ways we fall short, to bridge the gap between us and a holy God. When you trust in Jesus to be right with God, he forgives all your sins. Then he begins to change you from the inside out. He changes your heart. He changes your soul. He gives you HIS “muchness” in place of your own “not very muchness.” The result is that we CAN love the Lord, and we CAN love our neighbor, as a result of God’s work in us.

If you have never made a personal response of faith in Jesus, why not do that today? I can’t think of a better way to cap off this series than to offer you an opportunity to know and follow the one true God - the God of the Shema. You can learn more about this at The Pursuit, Lesson 6: Getting Right with God.