To love — and its FIRST appearance in the Bible is Genesis 22:2, 'your son, your only one, whom you LOVE.' Love enters scripture at the exact moment it is asked to be surrendered. The Greek Bible softened yachid ('only one') to agapēton, 'beloved' — the very word the voice at Jesus' baptism will use of a son. ⭐ The imperatival form ve-ahavta, 'and you shall love', is rarer than its fame suggests: verified against all 929 archived chapters, it stands in exactly FOUR verses. Two of them command love of a person — Leviticus 19:18 and 19:34 (already on these pages), the neighbour and the resident alien — and two command love of God, Deuteronomy 6:5 and 11:1. ⚠ When Matthew 22:37-39 (already on these pages) reports Jesus naming the greatest commandment and the second like it, the two verses named are one from each pair. The grammar differs between them: Deuteronomy 6:5 marks its object with et, the ordinary direct-object marker, while Leviticus 19:18 uses the preposition le — Hebrew loves God transitively and the neighbour datively. → first discussed at Gen 22:2