Text: Deuteronomy 30:6
OT Text Referred to: Deuteronomy 6:5
Subject: The Shema's love-command interiorized — Yahweh circumcises the heart so Israel can do it
Source: Daniel I. Block, The Gospel According to Moses; G.K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology (Baker, 2011)
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Promise-Fulfillment
Anchor Text: Deut 6:4-5 — The Shema
Significance: Deuteronomy 30:6 reuses the Shema's own wording — "you will love Him with all your heart and with all your soul" (bəkol ləbābəkā ûbəkol napšəkā) — but transposes it from command into promise. Where 6:5 demands love with the whole being, 30:6 announces that "the LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants" so that this love becomes possible. Moses thus diagnoses the Shema's deepest problem inside Deuteronomy itself: the command is right, but the uncircumcised heart cannot keep it. The same book that issues the imperative anticipates a divine act that will create the obedience it requires — the new-covenant interiorization that Jeremiah 4:4; 31:33 and Ezekiel 36:26 will develop and that Paul attaches to Christ (Rom 2:29). The telos is not heroic effort but glad rescue: the love God commands He pledges to work, so that the Shema's "with all your heart" is finally heard not as crushing law but as the promise of a heart remade to delight in God — fulfilled in the Spirit poured out through Christ, who alone loved the Father with all and gives that love to His own.