A Rhetorical Analysis Of Deuteronomy 6: 1-12

When religious pedagogy is traced down to its purest roots, if it were not for someone who had carried out the exhortations of Deuteronomy 6:1-12, you and I would most likely not be Christians today. To an extent, the rhetoric of values in the famous passage of the Shema (verses four through nine) can be applied to the passing down of any religion. It is no wonder that in Matthew 22:37-38 and Mark 12:29-30, Jesus quoted the Shema when asked what the greatest commandment is. To this day, Jews take praying the Shema so seriously that it is recited twice daily by pious Jews and used as their foundational confession of faith every single Sabbath day in the synagogues. It may seem like the culture that the Israelites lived in produced a completely

The structure of these twelve verses can be split up into four groups of three verses, each taking on a different resemblance to a student’s classroom presentation of his persuasive paper. The first three verses serve as the introduction to the author’s “paper” in which he sets up why his audience should pay attention to his persuasion. The next three verses take on the “thesis” of Moses’ pedagogy, and the following three verses provide instructions for how to carry out this thesis. To put it simply, this thesis is that each generation of Israelites should never cease to educate the next generation to remember the Lord their God through the way that they love Him. Although the rest of chapter six goes on with more rhetoric, verses ten through twelve can conclude the first twelve verses into a comprehensive unit by looking to the future of what will happen as this thesis is being carried out. The section wraps up by humbling the Israelites to shift their gaze to God’s actions, not what the people have achieved, in order to urge them to never forget what He has done for

Each generation is responsible for each other. When Jesus was crucified, he took on the sins of a generation that wasn’t his own. This may seem unfair that someone is punished for something that happened before they were born, but this shows how seriously God takes on the unity of generational succession. Throughout the Canon, the Israelites have been a patriarchal culture of genealogies. Instances in both the Old and New Testament show that one didn’t just introduce himself using his own name alone, but by including who he was the son of in his identity. This emphasis on a generational covenant theology can be seen in the way that the Lord refers to himself in verse ten and also throughout the rest of the Pentateuch as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. However, we see in verse ten that a twist is put on this common phrase in order to make it more personal than just a tradition for people of the past. God’s covenant is also for your fathers and is meant to be passed down to you. The style of the point of view in which Deuteronomy was written serves a compelling rhetorical purpose. It would have made sense if this text would have been written from the third person point of view in the past tense, saying “Moses told the Israelites that God said they should do this.” Instead, the author chooses a literary