Shema is the Hebrew word "Hear." The Shema is a also a prayer which begins with a well know Hebrew verse:
The Shema is made up of three passages:
Deuteronomy 11:13-21—“And if you will indeed obey my commandments that I command you today, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. And he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you shall eat and be full. Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you.
Numbers 15:37-41—The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘Throughout the generations to come you are to make tassels on the corners of your garments, with a blue cord on each tassel. You will have these tassels to look at and so you will remember all the commands of the Lord, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes. Then you will remember to obey all my commands and will be consecrated* to your God. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt to be your God. I am the Lord your God.’”
To be "Consecrated To God" is to be "Set Apart." In Hebrew, the word for Nazirite is Nazir (נָזִיר), which literally means "consecrated" or "separated".
In Hebrew, mezuzah (מזוזה) literally means "doorpost". It refers to a small, decorative case containing a sacred, hand-written parchment scroll (klaf*) that is affixed to the right-hand doorpost of Jewish homes and rooms. The scroll contains biblical passages (Deuteronomy 6:4–9, 11:13–21) proclaiming the oneness of God and the commandment to "write them on the doorposts of your house".
* A klaf (Hebrew: קְלָף) is a piece of specially processed, kosher animal hide parchment used by a sofer (scribe) to handwrite sacred Jewish texts, including Torah scrolls, Tefillin, and Mezuzahs.
Rabbinic sources, midrash and Jewish mysticism all draw a direct line from the blood placed on the lintel and mezuzot in Exodus 12 to the later mitzvah of mezuzah, treating both as a protective sign on the doorway that prevents the “destroyer” from entering. The mezuzah is a present sign of past blood.
The practice of placing a mezuzah on doorposts has both a traditional religious timeline and a distinct historical/archaeological timeline:
Religious Tradition (Biblical Era): According to Jewish tradition, the commandment was given at Mount Sinai in approximately 1312 BCE. While the Israelites were likely exempt during their 40 years in the desert (as their dwellings were temporary), the practice is believed to have become permanent once they settled in Canaan around 1272–1258 BCE.
Archaeological Evidence (Second Temple Period): The earliest physical evidence of mezuzahs—actual parchment scrolls—dates back roughly 2,000 years to the Second Temple era. These were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Qumran caves.
Historical Accounts: The historian Josephus (1st century CE) documented the mezuzah as an established, ancient custom in his time, describing how Jews inscribed God’s blessings upon their doors.
Standardization (Talmudic Era): While the practice was ancient, the specific laws—such as the exact parchment requirements, the slant of the case, and the specific 22 lines of text—were codified in the Talmud several centuries after the start of the Common Era.
Hanukkah (commemorating the rededication of the Temple) is historically connected to the mezuzah through the thematic battle against forced Hellenization, which forbade Jewish practices like the mezuzah and Shabbat. The Maccabees fought to restore these practices and rededicate the Temple, linking the physical defense of Torah, including mezuzahs on doorways, to the freedom celebrated during the eight-day festival.
Key Connections:
The Struggle for Observance: The Maccabean Revolt occurred because the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes outlawed core Jewish observances, including the Shabbat, the study of Torah, and the placing of mezuzahs. The rebellion was not just for the Temple, but for the freedom to practice these commandments.
Rededication: The name Hanukkah means "dedication" or "inauguration". Re-establishing the mitzvah of the mezuzah (placing the scroll on the doorpost) was a direct way to re-sanctify homes and the city after liberation.
In summary, Hanukkah celebrates the victory that allowed Jews to once again openly place mezuzahs on their doors, honor the Shabbat, and maintain their religious identity.
The association of the Mezuzah with the Hanukkah is an important detail as we will see when we get to the Gospel of John chapter 10.
THE ORIGINAL SING ON THE DOORPOSTS
Exodus 12:13 -- The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.
The very first time the word “mezuzah” (doorpost) appears in Torah is Exodus 12, where the Israelites are commanded to put the blood of the Passover lamb on the doorposts and lintel so that the plague of the firstborn will “pass over” their houses and not destroy them. This linking of blood on the mezuzot with protection is foundational for later mezuzah symbolism.
Classical midrash and Zohar explicitly draw a line from that Passover blood to the later mitzvah of mezuzah, presenting both as a protective sign on the doorway, with God promising, in effect, “You mark your doors with the sign of My covenant, and I will stand guard outside and protect you.”
Later Traditional and contemporary Jewish teachers often say that mezuzah “remembers” or “recalls” the Exodus. Instead of lamb’s blood on the doorframes, we now mark our doors with the words of the Shema, testifying to the same God who redeemed us from Egypt and who still guards our homes.
So in Jewish thought, the mezuzah is not only a fulfillment of Deuteronomy’s command but also a standing, daily echo of the Passover night, when marked doorposts were the means by which Israel was spared and brought out from Egypt.
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| Shepfold with Shepherd Guarding the Door |
In the ancient Near East a shepherd would often lie down in the opening of a low stone sheepfold, literally becoming the “door” so that anything had to pass through to reach the flock. This image underscores that that flock’s security from thieves, wolves, and other dangers relied on the shepherd.
John 10:1-3—“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. 2 But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
John 10:27-30—My sheep hear (shema) my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. I and the Father are one.”
John 10 intensifies this logic by making Jesus himself the living locus of that guarding presence: he is both shepherd and door, so that hostile powers must “get past” him to reach the sheep, and they ultimately cannot. In Johannine theology, what the mezuzah signifies on wood and parchment—God’s watchful protection at the threshold—Jesus embodies personally at the boundary between God’s people and the world.
john 10:30 brings the together, and mirrors the first line of the Shema.
John 10:30 (“I and the Father are one”) gathers together everything John has just said about the Shepherd and the Door, and it does so in a way that strongly resonates with the first line of the Shema.
Echo of “the Lord is one”
The Shema begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” declaring the unique oneness of Israel’s God as the basis for exclusive loyalty and love.
In John 10, after describing himself as the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep and as the door through which the sheep are saved and kept secure, Jesus climaxes with “I and the Father are one.”
A number of scholars and teachers have argued that, in a Jewish setting saturated with the daily recitation of the Shema, this claim of oneness in the context of divine care for the flock is best heard as deliberately resonating with, and pressing into, that Shema-confession of God’s oneness.
Bringing Shepherd, Door, and Shema together
In John 10, both Father and Son are portrayed as jointly holding the sheep in a grasp from which “no one can snatch them,” and Jesus immediately grounds that shared protective role in a shared “oneness.”
That means the same One God who was confessed in the Shema as uniquely Israel’s protector and shepherd (cf. Psalm 23; Ezekiel 34) is now being revealed, in Johannine terms, as acting toward the flock through the Son, the Shepherd‑Door who embodies that divine guarding at the threshold.
When you hear John 10:30 next to Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema’s “the Lord is one” and Jesus’ “I and the Father are one” form a deliberate theological rhyme, gathering the themes of covenant protection, shepherding, and unique divine identity into a single new‑covenant disclosure.
The scribal practice around the final dalet of אחד in the Shema visually reinforces exactly the theological move I am tracing. In a kosher Sefer Torah and on mezuzah parchments, the dalet of אחד in “יְהוָה אֶחָד” is traditionally written larger than the other letters and with great care, because if it were mistaken for a resh (turning אחד into אחר, “another”), the verse would read as if confessing “the Lord is another” instead of “the Lord is one.” This enlarged dalet is understood to guard the confession of God’s unique oneness at precisely the point where a tiny graphic change could introduce “another” god.
In that light, the link from John 10:30 (“I and the Father are one”) to the Shema is not only conceptual but visually prefigured in the script itself: the written dalet at the heart of Israel’s doorway confession of oneness anticipates the living “Door” who claims that same oneness in John 10.
The Holy Tongue (Lashon Ha‑qodesh) Chose Echad
In Hebrew, both echad and yachid mean “one,” but they have different typical nuances and are used differently in Jewish thought and in debates about the Shema.
Basic meanings:
Echad (אחד) is the ordinary cardinal “one,” with a broad range: one day, one person, one flock, one stick, or “one flesh” when two become a unified pair. It can describe either a simple “one” or a unity that includes plurality, depending on context.
Yachid (יחיד) usually means “only, unique, solitary,” as in an only child or someone alone. It stresses exclusivity or “only one of its kind” more than it does the bare number one.
Echad can describe a unified plurality and argue that this leaves room for multi‑personal oneness in God.
The Shema uses echad: “YHWH our God, YHWH is one (echad).” Deuteronomy could have used yachid but does not. Jewish interpreters generally read echad here as affirming God’s unique, incomparable oneness—an “absolute” oneness, not merely a “compound unity,” even though echad elsewhere can cover composite unities.
COMPARING AND CONTRASTING ECHAD AND YACHID IN GENESIS 22:
In Genesis 22 God pointedly switches from echad to yachid. Contrast the Shema’s echad is with Genesis 22 and “your only one”.
In Genesis 22:2 God tells Abraham: “קַח־נָא אֶת־בִּנְךָ אֶת־יְחִידְךָ יִצְחָק – Take now your son, your yachid, Isaac…,” and repeats “your yachid” in verses 12 and 16.
Yachid here means “only, unique, one‑of‑a‑kind,” stressing that Isaac is the singular covenant heir, not merely one son among others.
This is a deliberate contrast with Shema’s “echad.” The Shema confesses “YHWH … is echad,” the more broad, flexible “one.”
At Moriah, however, the Torah does not call God yachid but reserves yachid for the beloved son placed on the altar, creating a textual pattern where God is echad, while Abraham’s offered son is yachid.
The Holy Tongue uses echad at the doorway confession (Shema), but yachid at the Akedah, so that when later Scripture speaks of the Father and the Son, the “one” God of the Shema and the “only” Son of Moriah is a carefully differentiated, covenant‑loaded relationship.
John 10:1--“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. 2 But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. 5 A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers. 6 This figure of speech Jesus used with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them."
John 10:6 strongly supports my sense that the “door” language is deliberately symbolic and tightly bound to Scripture rather than a casual metaphor. Furthermore, that Jesus intentionally was making an association to the Shema.
“Figure of speech” as Deliberate Scriptural Imagery
John 10:6 labels the door/shepherd discourse a paroimia—a veiled, allusive way of speaking that expects the hearer to search out its scriptural resonances, much like a mashal or riddle. Mashal is Hebrew for the words "Proverb" and "Parable."
This means Jesus is not merely using a picturesque shepherding image; he is compressing into that “figure” Israel’s whole story of God as Shepherd (e.g., Psalm 23; Ezekiel 34) and the guarded threshold of Passover and mezuzah, then centering it on himself as the decisive Door and Shepherd of the flock.
Why “they did not understand” Matters
The note that “they did not understand what he was saying to them” shows that this imagery demands an interpretive leap: one has to recognize that the familiar door/sheepfold is now being re‑read christologically.
In that light, the association of John 10’s Door with the Shema at the doorway and the Passover-marked posts is exactly the kind of scriptural cross‑reading this paroimia invites, even if Jesus’ original hearers did not yet perceive how fully those threads were converging in him.
If these thoughts interest you, I invite you to visit my blog post regarding DOOR (DALET)
Epilogue:
Shaddia, the Gaurdian of the Doors of Israel
Shepherding and Psalm 23 - hearing the voice of the good Shepherd.
