Listen! Here’s how to (accurately) Translate the Shema (Deut 6:4)

Although the Shema (Deut. 6:4) is a mere six words and has doubtless been recited more than any other verse in the Bible, its grammar has been described as “resist[ing] any simple resolution” (Miller 2000:2). The basic problem with analyzing the verse has been how to parse the string of nouns—either as nouns in apposition or as verbless predicates—and this has led to a wide variety of translations. The key to solving this syntactic problem lies in a semantic analysis of the last word אֶחָד ‘one.’ As noted by Borer (2005), ‘one’ in Hebrew has a number of peculiar syntactic and semantic features, and it behaves more like an adjective than a quantifier. As such, it can be used to refer to specific entities just like adjectives in English in the Determiner + Adjective construction (Glass 2019). I show that in Biblical Hebrew, this requirement for the determiner does not hold for adjectives and bare singulars to refer to specific entities, so אֶחָד can be equivalent to ‘the one.’ This, I suggest, is the best translation of אֶחָד: ‘Listen, Israel! YHWH is our God; YHWH is the one.’

After showing that this interpretation is the most likely one, I discuss how it has been translated in the past. While translation accuracy must be meaning-based, I propose more specifically that the meaning in the translation should try to mirror both the semantic (truth-conditional) meaning as well as pragmatic (inferential) meaning as much as possible. With these criteria, I compare the two most popular translations of אֶחָד, ‘one’ and ‘alone,’ with my own translation of ‘the one,’ and I show how my translation better reflects the meaning of the source text.