"You shall love the Lord your God...."

Help from the NIV Study Bible (Zondervan) on what it means to love God: in its note on Deuteronomy 6:5 it says, “Primarily in view here is the love shown by a subject to a king.... To love King Yahweh is to be his loyal and obedient servant (Israel was the Lord’s kingdom people)….”

And in its note on Ex. 20:6, in the section of the Ten Commandments when it speaks of those who “love God” the Study Bible note says: “In the treaty language of the ancient Near East the ‘love’ owed to the great king was a conventional term for total allegiance and implicit trust expressing itself in obedient service.”