“These words, which I am ordering you today, are to be on your heart; and you are to teach them carefully to your children. You are to talk about them when you sit at home, when you are traveling on the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”-Deuteronomy 6:6-7
Deuteronomy 6:7 is a rousing exhortation to Israel to make sure they teach their children God’s commands.
However, there is an unfortunate reason behind this instruction.
Moses isn’t spending all this time and energy expounding on the law as some kind of initiation or celebration prior to the taking of the Promised Land.
No…the reason he is painstakingly going over the Law again for the second generation is because their parents failed them!
That’s right.
The original Exodus generation, now dead and gone, failed in their duty to teach their children the Torah.
Not only did they fail to teach their children but they themselves weren’t too diligent in keeping the Law themselves.
Moses wants to make darn sure the second generation doesn’t make the same mistake.
After verse 7 we come to series of verses that form a great deal of traditional Jewish liturgy.
“You are to talk about them when you sit at home,
when you are traveling on the road,
when you lie down and when you get up”
These verses actually form a literary device called a “merism” that was common at the time and wasn’t necessarily restricted to Hebrew culture.
However, we will find this type of word pattern often in Scripture.
The first time we actually encounter this literary device is in Genesis with these verses.
“In the beginning
God created the
heavens and the earth.”
This opening statement of the Bible is a poetic statement meant to convey the overarching idea that ultimately God is the Creator of EVERYTHING in existence.
This statement doesn’t mean that God literally only created the “heavens” and then literally only created the “earth“.
No…because to the Hebrew mind, the heavens represented the infinite while the earth represented the finite.
So combined together, the heavens and the earth are referring to absolutely everything in existence.
And in the same way, when Moses instructs the second generation to meditate on God’s commands “when home or away, lying down or getting up, etc”, it means at all times, in every situation, no matter what you’re doing.
That is how important God’s commands are.
The Hebrew word, “Shinantam” means “to sharpen (upon) them.”
So we are to Sharpen these Mitzvot to our children.
This implies our needing to have a much more thorough knowledge than they have: and how many of us are doing this job as responsible adults??
Thank you for sharing Rabina. Be blessed and Shalom!