Because: Not by Bread Alone

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Eikev ('Because', Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25) promises reward for faithfulness, warns against forgetting God in prosperity, recalls the manna and the lesson that 'man does not live by bread alone' (8:3), and contains the second paragraph of the Shema (11:13-21) on reward and consequence.

Eikev's warning that 'man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord' (8:3) has a long afterlife well beyond the parashah's own Jewish readers: the Gospels of Matthew (4:4) and Luke (4:4) put the same verse in the mouth of Jesus as his answer to the first temptation in the wilderness, one of the clearest instances of a Deuteronomic verse becoming, through direct quotation, part of the New Testament's own scripture. The manna narrative it recalls (8:2-3) is itself widely read by biblical scholars as a Deuteronomic reworking, reframing the wilderness feeding described in Exodus 16 as a deliberate divine test of dependence rather than a simple provision, a shift in emphasis characteristic of Deuteronomy's broader theology of covenant and trial.