Theopedia

Hesed

“The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”

— Exodus 34:6

Definition

Hesed (Hebrew חסד) is the Old Testament term for God’s steadfast, covenant-keeping love: the loyal kindness he shows toward his own people, grounded not in their deserving but in his own character and his commitment to them. English Bibles render it variously as “steadfast love,” “lovingkindness,” or “mercy.”1 It appears throughout the Old Testament, most densely in the Psalms, and stands alongside “faithfulness” (Hebrew emet) as a fixed word pair describing God’s own character.2

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession describes God in the same cluster of terms Exodus 34:6-7 uses for his hesed: he is “most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.”3 The confession does not use the Hebrew term itself, but its list of divine attributes restates the content of God’s self-revelation to Moses, translated into the Reformed confessional vocabulary of love, grace, mercy, and longsuffering.

Biblical Basis

God names hesed as part of his own character when he passes before Moses and proclaims himself “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exod. 34:6-7). The Psalms return to this declaration repeatedly, most plainly in Psalm 136, whose refrain “his steadfast love endures forever” answers every one of its twenty-six lines recounting God’s acts in creation and redemption (Ps. 136:1-26).

God’s hesed also appears bound to his covenants rather than standing apart from them. He swears his hesed to David and his line, promising that even if David’s descendants break the covenant and are punished for it, “my steadfast love I will not remove from him” (Ps. 89:33; 2 Sam. 7:14-15). John Walton reads that promise as hesed functioning as “covenant loyalty” itself: “even though David’s line may fail to the point of not having a representative on the throne, Yahweh’s hesed … will not be granted to another line … It is the essence of the covenant.”4 Psalm 18, a royal psalm, closes on the same note, praising God who “shows his steadfast love to his anointed, to David and his offspring forever” (Ps. 18:50).5

John’s Gospel echoes the same word pair when it declares, “we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14): “grace and truth” carries into Greek the same hesed-and-emet pairing God uses of himself at Sinai (Exod. 33:18-34:7), now embodied in the incarnate Son.6

Historical Development

Reformed scholastic theology treated the terms of Exodus 34:6 as a tightly ordered chain of divine attributes. Petrus van Mastricht built an entire chapter of his systematic theology around the exegesis of that verse, distinguishing love as “goodness as it is communicative of itself,” grace as “love that is not owed,” mercy as “grace toward the miserable,” patience as “mercy toward a sinner,” longsuffering as “patience that is long-lasting,” and kindness as “longsuffering with beneficence.”2 A footnote on that chapter, citing the sixteenth-century commentator Nikolaus Serarius, glosses the underlying Hebrew directly: “the Hebrew word חסד, in its widest sense, is every kindness that embraces and includes anyone, whether living or dead, whether wretched or not, whether deserving or not, whether it is conferred justly and rightfully or liberally and generously.”7

Louis Berkhof likewise treated chesed within his doctrine of God’s mercy, distinguishing it from the Hebrew racham (“tender mercy”) and tracing both into the Septuagint’s and the New Testament’s Greek word eleos.1 More recent biblical-theological work has pressed the covenantal side of the term further, reading hesed less as a felt emotion and more as the loyalty owed within a covenant relationship, the sense at work in God’s unbreakable commitment to David’s line.4 The two accounts describe the same term from different angles: Berkhof’s treats hesed primarily as an attribute of God’s own character, while the covenantal reading emphasizes the loyalty that character produces within a covenant bond.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 58-59. ↩ ↩2

  2. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 17, “The Love, Grace, Mercy, Longsuffering, and Clemency of God,” 385. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  4. Carol Man Fen Chen, “Biblical Covenants in the Old Testament: Unconditionality and Conditionality,” in A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 248, quoting John H. Walton. ↩ ↩2

  5. Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Foreshadowed,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 206. ↩

  6. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 149-150. ↩

  7. Mastricht, 2:420-421n3. ↩