A COMMANDMENT — a single charge, as against the plural bodies of rule it usually stands beside. Deuteronomy 6:1 opens the Shema chapter with the noun in the SINGULAR (‘and this is the commandment’), with the statutes and the ordinances plural beside it, and closes the same chapter on the same singular twenty-four verses later (6:25, ‘all this commandment’). One obligation, many regulations. ⚠ Only three of the thirteen witnesses this project tracks keep the singular at both ends — the ASV, the NWT 1984 and the TNM 1987 — and each of the last two loses it in its own later revision. The word is the ordinary one behind the modern English borrowing ‘mitzvah’, a good deed or religious duty; the biblical noun is narrower and more legal than the borrowing. → first discussed at Deut 6:1