Word studies · Hebrew · Strong's H8085
שָׁמַע · shâmaʻ · appears 1,160 times in the Old Testament
In one line: Hearing that does what it hears.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One.
Deuteronomy 6:4
Shama is to hear — hearing that heeds, so that listening and obeying are one act rather than two.
Shama is the verb of the Shema, Israel's central confession: “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Throughout Deuteronomy, hearing God's voice means doing what He says, and refusing to hear is the standard description of rebellion.
Shama means to hear intelligently, with attention — and Hebrew commonly makes it mean “obey” simply by adding “to the voice of.” The language has no separate everyday word for obedience because obedience is what real hearing produces.
English separates listening from obeying, which lets us imagine we have done the first without the second. In Hebrew that is a contradiction: to say “I heard you” while ignoring the instruction is to say you did not hear.
Shama (H8085) is one of the most common verbs in the Hebrew Bible, appearing 1,065 times — and its imperative gives the Shema its name.
Making hearing the covenant posture puts God's speech first and human response second: Israel exists because it was addressed. It also explains why so much biblical judgment is described as a failure to listen rather than a failure to try.
Take one instruction from Scripture you have heard often and treat this week as the week you actually do it. Hearing, in Hebrew, is not complete until then.
to hear intelligently (often with implication of attention, obedience, etc.; causatively, to tell, etc.)
Then the man and his wife heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the breeze of the day, and they hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
Genesis 3:8When Pharaoh heard about this matter, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and settled in the land of Midian, where he sat down beside a well.
Exodus 2:15[“]If someone sins by failing to testify when he hears a public charge about something he has witnessed, whether he has seen it or learned of it, he shall bear the iniquity.
Leviticus 5:1When Moses entered the Tent of Meeting to speak with the LORD, he heard the voice speaking to him from between the two cherubim above the mercy seat on the ark of the Testimony. Thus the LORD spoke to him.
Numbers 7:89At that time I charged your judges: “Hear the disputes between your brothers, and judge fairly between a man and his brother or a foreign resident.
Deuteronomy 1:16Just as we obeyed Moses in all things, so we will obey you. And may the LORD your God be with you, as He was with Moses.
Joshua 1:17Press and hold hear / obey in any chapter and this study opens on the verse you are reading, with the lexicons, every occurrence and the commentaries beside it. The Bible is free to read.
Scripture quoted from the Berean Standard Bible, public domain. Strong's definitions are public domain. Counts come from The Pillar's own tagged text.