The Character of God: 
Steadfast Love = Lovingkindness = Mercy = Goodness

Old Testament, Hebrew chesed
Genesis 24:11-49
Random Walk in a Gallery of Religious Art, Step 39: Genesis 24:1-4, 10-16, Eliezer and Rebecca, by Antoine Coypel
Deut. 7:7-13; Hosea 2:18-20; Micah 7:18-20
Psalm 25:1-22
Psalm 31:1-24
Jeremiah 2:1-3, 9:23-24, 16:5-6, 31:3-5, 32:17-19, 33:10-11

New Testament, Greek eleos
Mark 10:47, Matthew 15:22; 9:27; 17:15
Luke 1:46-55, 63-79
Mark 5:1-19
1 Peter 2:1-10
Ephesians 2:1-5; Titus 3:1-7

Other Aspects of God's Character

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Old Testament, Hebrew chesed

 Genesis 24:11-49 (3/14/2011)

The Hebrew word chesed is a big word, so big that we don’t even have a single good concept, let alone a single good word, to use to translate it into English.  Consequently, the translations we see this week will be all over the map.  Maybe by looking at chesed in these various contexts we’ll be able to get a feeling for the territory it covers.

We’re starting with a story about God and his people, which at this time means Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac, from the Good News translation.  Good News is not alone in using the idea of promise-keeping here in this chapter of Genesis, but other translations use “steadfast love,” “kindness,” and “mercy.”  Something that “steadfast love” and “promise-keeping” have in common is faithfulness, although we’ll wait and see whether we find the concept of faithfulness to be useful by the end of the week.

Random Walk in a Gallery of Religious Art, Step 39: Genesis 24:1-4, 10-16, Eliezer and Rebecca, by Antoine Coypel (7/23/15)

Antoine Coypel finished this painting of Eliezer and Rebecca in 1701. The scripture says that Rebecca was young and very beautiful, and Coypel got that just right. It also says that she watered all of Eliezer’s camels and offered him a place to stay for the night, and I think Coypel also captures that attitude by showing her with a modest and charming demeanor. What’s Eliezer pointing at? Is he pointing out his camels? Is he talking about where he’s come from and what a great family she could be marrying into? We can’t see. What we can see is that Rebecca’s friends are amazed and excited! Scripture doesn’t say that, but Coypel does, and I think he’s probably right.

Previous Step. Next Step. 		Eliezer and Rebecca. Rebekah Chosen as Isaac’s Wife. Click to enlarge. See below for provenance.
"Eliezer and Rebecca" by Antoine Coypel, from the Gamble family Bible,
now in the private collection of Regina Hunter. Photography by Daryl Lee.


Deut. 7:7-13; Hosea 2:18-20; Micah 7:18-20 (3/15/2011)

The Contemporary English Version uses the phrase “steadfast love” to translate chesed – not just love, but enduring love.  Two of the scripture passages for today also refer to the covenant, which is an enduring agreement, and that is probably not a coincidence.    

Yesterday I suggested that maybe “faithfulness” has something to do with chesed, so I was interested to find this line today:  “You will show faithfulness to Jacob and chesed/steadfast love to Abraham.”* 

Now, as a rule, this kind of parallel structure implies that the two ideas are related, just like those word quizzes you took in school:  “dog is to wag as cat is to (yowl, hiss, purr).”  And you think, “Dogs wag their tails when they are happy, so the correct answer must be ‘purr.’ ” 

Since I know that Jacob is one of the patriarchs who come from the family of the patriarch Abraham, this could mean that faithfulness is one of the aspects of chesed.  Then I noticed that all three readings say that God is faithful.  Chesed is too big a word to mean faithfulness alone, but I’m definitely beginning to think that faithfulness and steadfast love are two parts of chesed.  Keep the faith.

* Again we see that my lack of planning is made up for by the consistency of scripture.
Psalm 25:1-22 (3/16/2011)

The King James Version translates chesed in a variety of ways, two of which we see today:  lovingkindness and mercy.  The “mercy” in vss. 6 and 16 are two other Hebrew words.  

In English, at least, lovingkindness could be the same as steadfast love; however, mercy seems to me to be something else.  This is apparently not how it seemed to the rabbis who translated the OT into Greek, however, because they use eleos (the ordinary New Testament word for mercy or pity) twice for chesed and once for one of the other two “mercies.”  Apparently they thought God’s love is intimately related to God’s mercy.
Psalm 31:1-24 (3/17/2011)

David’s prayer and confident expectation is that God will rescue him.  David has been in trouble before, and God has taken care of him.  He is in trouble again – he doesn’t say what kind of trouble – and because of his previous experience he believes that God will rescue him again.  One of the important reasons to study your Bible is to learn from the experience of others what God is capable of doing and willing to do for you.  David attributes God’s willingness and ability to take care of him to God’s chesed.

Today’s translation renders chesed as “steadfast love” all three times it occurs in Psalm 31.  This is interesting, because the Greek Old Testament translates it as eleos, which is almost always translated “mercy” or “pity” in the New Testament. As I said at the first of the week, translators can’t decide on just one word for chesed – it’s too big an idea.  But I think I’m coming to understand chesed as “God’s enduring and merciful lovingkindness.”
Jeremiah 2:1-3, 9:23-24, 16:5-6, 31:3-5, 32:17-19, 33:10-11 (3/18/2011)

Jeremiah preached mostly during the Exile, and he was a troubled prophet.  He always seems to know that God is perfectly capable of saving Israel, but at the same time he seems to fear that Israel has been so sinful for so long that maybe – just maybe – God is not going to save Israel.  So in these passages, chesed seems to be contrasted with God’s justice, in a way we haven’t seen earlier in the week (Jer. 16:5).  I hope for mercy, but I worry that I might get justice.

Yesterday we saw that the Jewish Publication Society Bible translated chesed three times in 24 verses of one psalm as “steadfast love.”  Today we see that the English Standard Version translates chesed three different ways in 15 verses of Jeremiah:  “devotion,” “steadfast love,” and “faithfulness.”  This week we’ve also seen “promise-keeping” and, if you count the Greek Old Testament, “mercy.” 

The important thing to remember is that these are all correct, because we don’t have a word in English that encompasses the whole meaning of chesed in Hebrew.  I finally got around to looking chesed up in the lexicon, which defines it mainly as goodness or kindness, but also as mercy and lovingkindness.  (Given the contexts we’ve seen this week, I understand why the translators feel that goodness and kindness – while they are very fine – don’t completely do the job.)

In the Greek Old Testament, this idea of “God’s enduring and merciful goodness and lovingkindness” is usually represented by the word eleos, normally translated as “mercy” or “pity” in the New Testament.  Next week, let’s pay particular attention to whether we think eleos is bigger than mercy alone.




New Testament, Greek: eleos

 Jesus, Son of David! Have mercy upon us! Mark 10:47, Matthew 15:22; 9:27; 17:15 (March 21, 2011)

Today we’re looking at the verb form of eleos, “mercy,” which is eleeo, “have mercy.”  You remember that last week I said eleos is translated either “mercy” or “pity” in the New Testament; the International Standard Version (ISV) usually uses the former, and the Contemporary English Version (CEV) uses the latter, as we see below. 

Now, in English, pity is “sympathetic sorrow for one suffering, distressed, or unhappy,” and mercy is “compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one's power” (Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary).  English speakers think of them as two different things.

The Old Testament Hebrew word chesed is nearly always translated as eleos in the Greek Old Testament.  I suspect that the rabbis probably dragged all the meanings of chesed that we saw last week into the Greek word eleos.  So the question this week is, do our scriptures from the New Testament seem to carry the idea of “God’s merciful and enduring goodness and lovingkindness”, or do “mercy” and “pity” pretty well cover it?

It’s notable that in three of the verses today, when people were asking Jesus for mercy/pity, they often addressed him as “Son of David.”  “Son of David” is a Messianic title of great power and authority.  They were acknowledging not only that they thought Jesus might have compassion for them (by the act of making a request), but also that he had the power and authority to work a miracle for them (by the title they used).  Both “pity” and “mercy” are completely appropriate. Luke 1:46-55, 63-79 (3/22/2011)

Both Jesus and John the Baptist grew up in families that knew the scriptures.  The speeches of Mary and Zechariah are chock-full of quotations, paraphrases, and allusions to their scriptures, which Jews now call the Bible and Christians call the Old Testament of the Bible. 

Now we are reading from the New Testament book of Luke.  In vs. 50, Mary refers to Deuteronomy 7:9-10 and Jeremiah 32:18-19 (among many other passages saying about the same thing).  Mary’s vss. 54-55 and Zechariah’s 72-73 remind us of Micah 7:20.  In 78-79, Zechariah says the dawn from God brings peace; in Psalm 31, David says that God’s face shines and asks to be delivered from his enemies.  All of these scriptural quotations and allusions use eleos mercy in place of chesed steadfast love.  We read these OT scripture last week, and considering that I just randomly chose scriptures with chesed and eleos in them, I think the similarity of context is striking. 
Mark 5:1-19 (3/23/2011)

Mark tells us one of the New Testament’s funniest stories.  The Gerasenes were Gentiles who lived on the east side of the Jordan River.  The plight of the demon-possessed man is in no way funny, of course.  He not only suffered from the demons, but he suffered from ill-treatment by his fellow-countrymen. 

The demons, however, just like the demon we read about a couple of weeks ago in Mark 1, instantly recognize Jesus as the Son of God and ask him exactly the same question:  “what have we got to do with each other?”  But these demons are a little more on the ball than the first demon – maybe word has gotten around in the demon community.  They negotiate with Jesus and succeed in getting him to send them into a herd of pigs.  Now, as mostly Christian capitalists, we might have some sympathy for the swineherd.  The Jews who heard this story, however, would probably consider this to be a side-splitting comeuppance for the Gentile owners of the unclean pigs.  Demons, pigs; pigs, demons.  Not much to choose between, there.

The entire community comes out to see what’s going on, and when they see the man clothed and in his right mind, they are frightened.  They ask Jesus to please leave.  That has always struck me as hilariously misguided.  Here’s the man who was chained, naked, and a danger to the community:  free at last, dressed, and calm.  Here’s Jesus the miracle-worker, come to pay a visit.  He is recognized and obeyed by demons.  Everywhere else, Jesus is recognized and mobbed by the families of the sick and demon-possessed.  Here, they can’t wait for him to leave.

The man, naturally enough, wants to go along.  But Jesus says to him, "Go home to your family, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how eleeo merciful he has been to you."  Here we see an association between God’s power and authority and God’s mercy.
1 Peter 2:1-10 (3/24/2011)

The prophet Hosea preached during the reigns of Kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah, and of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel.  At some point in his ministry, God told Hosea to take a whore for a wife, because Judah and Israel had been whoring after other gods.  Hosea and his wife Gomer had three children, and God told Hosea what to name them.  The second child, a girl, was named Not-Pitied, or Not-Having-Gotten-Mercy.  The third child was named Not-My-People.  When your prophet starts giving names like this to his kids, you know that you are in deep trouble.  God also said that eventually the children of Israel would be called the “children of the living God.”

Peter, writing to both Jewish and Gentile Christians outside of Palestine, applies Hosea’s prophetic message to his Christian readers.  The first part of vs. 10 applies especially to the Gentiles:  once they were not a people (that is, a nation), but now they are God’s people.  The second part applies especially to the Jews:  once they had received the Law, and judgment under the Law, but now they have received mercy through Jesus Christ. Ephesians 2:1-5; Titus 3:1-7 (3/25/2011)

In Ephesians 2:4-5, eleos mercy sounds much like our English definition of “mercy”; i.e., a commutation of a deserved judgment.  Of the seven translations I looked at, six also have “mercy” in Titus 3:5.  ISV has “steadfast love,” one of the primary translations we saw last week.  The latter seems to me to fit the context better, but I have to admit that the opinion of six translation teams carries a lot of weight.

The main reason we’re reading ISV today is that I like the way it translates Greek poetry into English poetry.  Most translators are unwilling or unable to do that, as we’ve seen before. 

So here’s the question.  Did the ISV translators render eleos as “steadfast love” because the Greek Old Testament routinely uses eleos for chesed, and chesed is frequently translated as “steadfast love”?  Did they use it because “steadfast love” is more appropriate to the context than “mercy”?  Or did they use it because it’s got three syllables instead of two, which wouldn’t work in the poem?
Other Aspects of God's Character
Glory, Old and New Testament
Holiness, Old and New Testament
Longsuffering, Old and New Testament
Steadfast Love, Old and New Testament
Graciousness and Grace, Old and New Testament
Jealousy and Intolerance of Sin, read this topic
Giver of Good Gifts, read this topic

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