mᵊ'ōḏ: With All Your Very

“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.“ (Deuteronomy 6:5)

Depending on the translation, “strength” can often be replaced with “might.”

Either way, it’s not totally accurate.

Here we see the verse ending with the Hebrew word, mᵊ'ōḏ (pronounced meh-ode), which - for starters - is not a noun, but an adverb.

Adverbs are, by definition, not objects, but intensifiers that enhance the meaning of other words.

In the case of mᵊ'ōḏ, a better translation would be “very” or “much.”

In our syntax, it’d be difficult to understand literally. Love the Lord with all your very? That doesn’t make a ton of sense.

The closest thing we might can get to is loving the Lord with our muchness, or our very being.

And here’s why that shift is so powerful.

Strength and might are forms of exertion, but muchness reinforces the totality of ourselves.

It’s almost as if the writer is saying, “Your entire being cannot be summed up in mere words. The vessel that is yourself is overflowing. The best I can do is say love the Lord with all of it. I can only give emphasis to the indescribable.”

We are not able to muscle our way to loving God with our fullness; we do so by rendering our very to him.

Our very, very, very, very, very muchness is meant for the very muchness of God.