Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Yesterday, Moses transitioned out of telling the new generation of Israelites about their history

and seguade into telling them about their future. He'll do a little back and forth

like this throughout this conversation. When we left off, he was giving an introduction to the laws,

and today he continues that conversation, starting with the Ten Commandments. And here's an

interesting thing about these two tablets mentioned in 522. We often see them as having five commandments on each tablet. But the way

treaties were written back then usually involved making two copies of the treaty, one for each party.

So we can't know for sure unless one of you has access to the Ark of the Covenant and just didn't

tell me, but all Ten Commandments were probably on both tablets.

Before Moses goes over the Ten Commandments, he starts out by telling them that God's

covenant is not with their fathers. It's with them. And yes, of course, it was also with their

fathers, but Moses is emphasizing here that they have their own relationship with God. This is not

a thing to be received

secondhand. God is also making the covenant with their generation directly. And even though for many

of these people, God didn't technically rescue them out of Egyptian slavery, still, he did. Because if he

hadn't rescued their parents, they would have been in slavery as well.

Moses reiterates the Ten Commandments to this new generation and tells them how their parents had received these words with joy and gratitude. They had a proper awe and fear of God in that

moment, even though, as we know, it was temporary. In Chapter 6, we encounter the beginning of a prayer that has become the chief

prayer of the Jewish people. It's called the Shema. Shema means here, and here is the first

word of the prayer. And it's also what we're being called to do in the text. Religious Jews usually

pray this prayer twice a day, in the morning and in the evening,

and they often cover their eyes with their right hand when they pray to increase their focus during the prayer. The Shema includes two other paragraphs from elsewhere in scripture,

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