What doth the LORD thy God require of thee

“What doth the LORD thy God require of thee?” is Moses’ rhetorical question introducing a compact account of Israel’s covenantal obligations. Its answer joins devotion to God with obedience, justice, and care for the stranger, grounding these duties in both divine sovereignty and Israel’s remembered experience.

The Question and Its Answer

Addressing Israel, Moses asks what the LORD requires and answers with a sequence of duties: to fear the LORD, walk in all His ways, love Him, serve Him with all the heart and soul, and keep His commandments and statutes. The question does not leave the requirement abstract; it immediately defines it as a whole way of life, encompassing allegiance, conduct, and observance.

The commandments are described as being for Israel’s good. The appeal therefore connects obedience to the people’s welfare, while presenting devotion not as a single ritual act but as an enduring pattern of life.

Covenant, Election, and Sovereignty

Moses grounds the demand in the LORD’s universal sovereignty: heaven, the highest heaven, the earth, and everything in it belong to Him. Yet the LORD chose Israel’s ancestors in love and chose their descendants, the people addressed, above all peoples. The passage holds these claims together: the God who rules all creation has formed a particular relationship with Israel.

The call to serve and obey thus follows from covenant identity. Israel’s obligations are not detached rules but a response to the LORD, who has chosen the people and acted in their history.

Heart, Justice, and the Stranger

The command to circumcise the heart and cease being stiff-necked turns the passage’s bodily image into an inward demand: Israel must abandon resistance and become responsive to God. Fear, love, service, and obedience are presented as connected expressions of that changed allegiance.

The same passage describes the LORD as impartial, taking no bribe, and as one who executes justice for the fatherless and widow and loves the stranger, providing the stranger with food and clothing. Israel is therefore commanded to love the stranger as well, with the explicit reason that the people themselves were strangers in Egypt. The obligations of the covenant extend beyond worship and law-keeping into the treatment of vulnerable people.

Memory as the Ground of Obligation

Moses recalls that Israel’s ancestors went down to Egypt as seventy persons, while the LORD has made their descendants numerous as the stars of heaven. He also recalls the LORD’s mighty deeds: the signs in Egypt, the destruction of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, the wilderness journey, and the judgment that overtook Dathan and Abiram. The generation addressed is told that its own eyes have seen these acts.

This remembered history makes the question’s answer concrete. Israel’s love and obedience respond to the God who delivered, sustained, chose, and multiplied the people; the recollection of having been strangers in Egypt also supplies the ethical reason to love strangers in turn.