"To Hear is to Obey"

Shema Yisrael at the Knesset Menorah in Jerusalem

“And at the end of that time she said to Janshah, 'I wish to go with thee to thy mother land, where thou shalt marry me and we will abide there.' 'To hear is to obey,' answered he and took counsel with Shaykh Nasr who said to him, 'Go thou home, I commend her to thy care.'”

A Thousand and One Nights, The Story of Janshah (Volume 5, chapt. 74)

A few years back, at a time when my wife and I struggled daily to help our younger son, Kent, learn to follow instructions, I would often respond to his frequent misbehavior by putting him in timeout and reviewing his choices with him. On some of these occasions, especially those days when he had succeeded at wearing me down to the point I didn’t have the energy or will to creatively address his misbehavior, I would just repeat my default phrase “Kent, you need to learn to listen.” Eventually he caught hold the saying himself, and after a few seconds in timeout he would emphatically declare “I will listen!”

My wife and I know now as we knew then that Kent really didn’t have an issue with hearing or listening. In most cases, he had heard exactly what we had asked him to do (or not to do) - the problem was his failure to respond to our instructions.

It’s always interested me that in Biblical Hebrew the verbs “to listen/pay attention/hear” and “to obey” are one and the same: leesh-MOH-ah לִשְׁמוֹעַ. Not surprisingly, the same linkage exists in other regional, archaic languages. The following are some examples where I’ve listed the language followed by the single verb that expresses both “to hear” and “to obey”.

Persian – اطاعت کردن

Turkish – dinlemek

Armenian – հնազանդվել

Macedonian – слуша

The linguistic connection between hearing and obedience was so well understood in ancient Middle Eastern and Central Asian culture that for centuries the automatic response to a command was either “To hear is to obey” or "I hear, and I obey." This phrasing can be found throughout the famous compilation of Islamic Golden Age stories known as A Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), as illustrated by the citation at the top of this post. The scriptures also point to this concept in various places. I’ll start with the Old Testament and finish with one example from the Book of Mormon.

In the Book of Genesis the connection hearing = obedience and vice versa is made as Jehovah speaks with Abraham:

“That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies. And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.” (Genesis 22:17-18) 

First line of "Shema" in Hebrew (Deut. 6:4)

Some of the best known examples of the verbal connection between hear and obey are from King David’s writings. Notice that each time the King of Judah says “hear,” he follows up with a request for the Lord to act upon or respond to (obey) his petition:

“Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness: thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress; have mercy upon me, and hear my prayer.” (Psalms 4:1)

“Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer.” (Psalms 61:1)

My favorite example from the Book of Mormon is found in Mosiah 21:15.

“And now the Lord was slow to hear their cry because of their iniquities; nevertheless the Lord did hear their cries, and began to soften the hearts of the Lamanites that they began to ease their burdens; yet the Lord did not see fit to deliver them out of bondage.”

Obviously God isn’t slow to hear our petitions in the sense that there’s a time delay between when we say our prayers and when He hears them; He knows all things from the beginning, even our thoughts and words before we express them. The verse above uses the Semitic language meaning of “to hear” to communicate the idea that God was slow to respond to (obey) the cries of His people because of their prior failure to hear (obey) Him.