HEAR — and, in the same word, OBEY. Hebrew has no separate verb for obeying; to hear a command properly IS to do it, which is why ‘they heard the voice of Jehovah’ and ‘they obeyed’ are the same sentence. ⭐ The imperative shema plus the vocative ‘Israel’ is the most-recited phrase in Judaism, and it names the prayer itself: the SHEMA. Verified across all 929 archived chapters of the Hebrew Bible, the two words stand together in five genuine addresses to the nation and every one of them is in Deuteronomy — 5:1, 6:4, and 9:1, 20:3 and 27:9 (not yet on these pages). ⚠ The first of them is NOT the famous one: Deuteronomy 5:1 says ‘Hear, O Israel’ a chapter earlier, about a set of statutes rather than about God being one. ⚠ The chapter that made the phrase famous says it twice in two grammatical forms — 6:3 is a perfect with waw, ‘and you shall hear’, and 6:4 the bare imperative — and only the second became a prayer. → first discussed at Deut 6:4