The Loyalty God Keeps

There are some Hebrew words that have a hard time getting through customs at the English border. They show up at the checkpoint, hand over their papers, and the agent looks at them for a long moment and says: I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t have a category for what you’re carrying. The word stands there, holding everything it means in the original language, and the agent waves it through with whatever rough English approximation is closest. Some of the freight makes it. Some doesn’t.

חֶסֶד (hesed) is the word that has the hardest time at that checkpoint. It carries more than English knows how to hold.

You may not have heard the Hebrew word, but you’ve read it hundreds of times in English. Hesed appears around 250 times in the Hebrew Bible, and the English translations have tried at least a dozen different words for it. Mercy. Steadfast love. Lovingkindness. Faithful love. Unfailing love. Loyalty. Kindness. Goodness. Devotion. None of them are wrong. None of them are quite enough. The trouble isn’t that we don’t know what hesed means. The trouble is that English doesn’t have a single word for what hesed means.

The English word lovingkindness — the one you might recognize from older translations of the Psalms — wasn’t even a real word until 1535. A translator named Miles Coverdale was producing the first complete printed English Bible, and he came to the Hebrew word hesed, and he couldn’t find an English word that fit. So he made one. He stuck two existing English words together — loving and kindness — and put them in his translation. Lovingkindness. The word entered the English language because Coverdale had a Hebrew word he couldn’t carry across, and he had to build something new to hold it.

That should tell you something about what hesed is.

So what is hesed, exactly? Here’s the best short answer I can give: hesed is the quality of durable, costly loyalty inside a relationship that has stakes. It’s the kind of commitment that keeps going when the other person has done nothing to deserve it. It’s the kindness that arrives without owing you, and stays without leaving you, and acts without being repaid. Hesed is what binds the loving party to the loved party when nothing else is binding them anymore. It’s love that has decided to be loyal — and loyalty that has decided to be love. The two aren’t separable in the Hebrew. They are the same word.

The biblical scholar Katharine Doob Sakenfeld — Old Testament scholar at Princeton, author of the most thorough scholarly study of the word that exists in English — has spent her career on hesed. Her definition, which has shaped how a generation of scholars reads the word, runs something like this: hesed is the loyal action one takes for someone in real need, when one is in a position to help, and when one’s relationship with the person gives one a reason to act — but the action is freely given, not forced by law or contract or fear. The relationship is the soil from which hesed grows. But hesed is more than what the relationship requires. Hesed is what the relationship sometimes makes possible at its very best, when one party shows the other a loyalty that goes beyond duty.

When the original Hebrew-reading audience heard hesed, this is what they heard. Not a vague love. Not a generic mercy. They heard a specific and recognizable thing: durable loyalty in a real relationship, freely chosen, and showing up when it was needed most.

And once you can hear it that way, certain passages in the Hebrew Bible become enormous.

Consider Psalm 136. If you’ve never sat with this psalm, it’s worth doing. The psalm is built around a single refrain repeated twenty-six times — once after every line. Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His hesed endures forever. Give thanks to the God of gods. His hesed endures forever. Give thanks to the Lord of lords. His hesed endures forever. On and on, for the length of the psalm. To him who alone does great wonders, his hesed endures forever. To him who made the heavens, his hesed endures forever. To him who struck down great kings, his hesed endures forever. The psalmist walks through the whole history of God’s relationship with Israel — creation, the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the wilderness, the arrival in the promised land — and after every single line, the same refrain comes back. His hesed endures forever. His hesed endures forever. His hesed endures forever.

The English translations usually render the refrain as his love endures forever or his steadfast love endures forever or his mercy endures forever. Read those translations again, and the psalm is beautiful but somewhat repetitive — God’s love is being praised at length. Now read the psalm with hesed in your ear. His durable, loyal commitment to his people endures forever. His faithfulness that doesn’t depend on what they’ve done endures forever. His love that has decided to stay endures forever. The repetition stops feeling like a chorus and starts feeling like a hammer driving a stake into the ground. He stays. He stays. He stays. Through everything you can think of, he stays. That’s what the psalm is doing. It isn’t just praising God’s love. It’s naming the specific quality of God’s love that holds when nothing else would. Hesed endures because hesed is the kind of love that decides to.

The book of Ruth is the other place this word does its work plainly. Ruth is a short book — four chapters — and hesed appears in it three times. But the whole story is hesed in motion. Naomi loses her husband and her sons in a foreign land and decides to go home to Israel as an old woman with nothing. Her two daughters-in-law start to go with her, but Naomi tells them to turn back — there is nothing for them in her future, and they should go find new husbands among their own people. One daughter-in-law obeys. The other one, Ruth, refuses. Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. Ruth has no obligation to stay with Naomi. She has every reason to leave. She stays anyway. That is hesed.

And then Naomi and Ruth arrive in Bethlehem — two destitute widows — and a relative of Naomi’s named Boaz notices Ruth working in his field. He doesn’t have to do anything. He could let her glean and forget about her. Instead, he tells his workers to leave extra grain for her on purpose. He invites her to eat at his table. He protects her from harm. He eventually marries her and gives her a son. The word hesed appears at three key moments in this short book. Naomi blesses her daughters-in-law early on by asking the LORD to show them his hesed in return for the hesed they’ve shown her. Later, Naomi sees Boaz’s kindness to Ruth and says of God, he has not abandoned his hesed. And later still, Boaz tells Ruth that her hesed in choosing to take care of Naomi was even more remarkable than the first kindness she had shown. By the end of the book, the line that started in nothing — a foreign widow with no future — has produced the great-grandfather of King David, which means it has produced, eventually, Jesus. The whole book is hesed stacked on hesed on hesed, and the story carries through history because of it.

This is what the original audience was hearing every time they came across the word.

And then there is the moment in the Hebrew Bible where hesed gets said about God himself in the most concentrated way it ever gets said. After the golden calf — after Israel has betrayed God in the most public possible way, melting their jewelry into an idol while Moses was still on the mountain getting the commandments — Moses asks to see God’s glory. And God passes by Moses on Mount Sinai, and as he passes, he names himself. He says his own name out loud. And here’s what he says:

The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. (Exodus 34:6–7, NIV)

The English says love twice. The Hebrew says hesed twice. Abounding in hesed and faithfulness, maintaining hesed to thousands. God is naming himself, and the word he reaches for — twice in two sentences — is the word for durable, loyal commitment that goes beyond what the other party deserves. He has just been betrayed by his people in the worst possible way, and the first thing he says about himself when he names his own character is I am the God of hesed. The kind of love that decides to stay. The kind of loyalty that keeps going. The kind of commitment that holds when nothing else would.

That moment becomes the most-quoted self-description of God in the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Other writers in the Hebrew Bible reach back to this passage again and again, in psalms and prophets and prayers, all the way through to the end. The LORD is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in hesed. It is, in a real sense, the verse the Hebrew Bible builds its understanding of God around. And the word at the heart of it is hesed.

So when we read those English words — mercy, steadfast love, lovingkindness — we can hear what the Hebrew was already saying. Not a vague warmth. Not a soft religious feeling. The specific, hard-edged, costly, freely chosen loyalty of a God who has decided to stay. The kind of love you can build a life on, because it isn’t a feeling that might leave when the wind changes. Hesed is what holds when nothing else would. Hesed is what God names himself by. And hesed, the Hebrew Bible says again and again and again, endures forever.

Reading this yourself

The next time you read a verse with steadfast love or lovingkindness or unfailing love or mercy — pause and ask whether the Hebrew word underneath might be hesed. (In the Psalms, in Genesis, in Exodus, in Ruth, in the prophets, the answer will very often be yes.) Then read the verse again, holding in your mind the fuller meaning the Hebrew was carrying — durable, costly, freely chosen loyalty inside a real relationship. The verse will sit differently. You’ll start to notice that the Hebrew Bible has a particular word for the quality of God’s commitment that doesn’t depend on you, and that word shows up everywhere. It’s the spine the rest of the Hebrew Bible’s understanding of God is built around.

The text didn’t change. The Hebrew didn’t change. Hesed is what it always was — a word richer than English can carry, a word the Hebrew writers built their picture of God around, a word that endures forever. The English translations have done their best. They’ve given us mercy and steadfast love and lovingkindness, and each of them is true as far as it goes. But the Hebrew reader heard one word. And the one word, the whole way through, said the same thing: he stays. He stays. He stays. That is the older reading. That’s what was there the whole time. And once you can hear it, the Hebrew Bible’s quiet refrain — his hesed endures forever — starts sounding less like a chorus and more like the deepest thing the Hebrew writers knew how to say about the God they served.