Clinging in love: Attachment indicators and implications in Deuteronomy 10.12–11.1

Love of God in Deuteronomy has proven to be a complex and contested concept, given its affective, behavioral and political dimensions. This paper argues that the psychobiological theory of attachment, used as a hermeneutical lens, can potentially explain these multiple meanings of love ( aheb ) in Deuteronomy, both validating and elucidating much existing scholarship on the term. Employing a kinship reading of the text, wherein YHWH can be understood as an attachment figure for Israel, creates the conceptual framework for exploring attachment indicators and implications in Deuteronomy 10.12–11.1. This yields a particular vision of love as an inhabited and cultivated attachment relationship, seen most clearly in the semantic intersection of love and clinging ( dabaq ). Deuteronomy, therefore, can be understood to commend conscious attachment to God when it commands love of God.