586 BCE (1)

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.  Lamentations 3:22-23  ESV

Never ceases – Lamentations!  Five poems mourning the fall of Jerusalem and the captivity of the Jews.  Exile, abuse, starvation, humiliation, slaughter—all the usual after defeat in war.  But this time, with God’s endorsement.  How?  How can it be that God would allow, even orchestrate the fall of His chosen?  The question echoes through the collection of poems.  It challenges the contemporary belief that once chosen means always protected.  It’s Job on a national scale.

And yet . . . buried in these laments, these heart-wrenching agonies, is another theme.  The faithfulness of God.  In a world turned upside-down with violence and chaos, the people of the Land needed to know they had not been abandoned.  It certainly appeared that way.  Their hubris was put under the Babylonia anvil and flattened.  Now the reality of disobedience slapped the nation in the face.  Did all those promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still ring true?

“Never ceases” lōʾ tām’nû—not finished (completed).  The strong negative.  No conditions attached.  Never!  Tāmam—complete, come to an end, finished, the same word used to describe “perfect” in the sense of finished product, whole-hearted, balanced.  What the poet describes is the unwavering, eternal commitment of God to His people—regardless of apparent circumstances and observable situations. 

What word describes this eternal covenant?  Ah, in the ESV it is translated “steadfast love.”  But that hardly scratches the surface.  Other English Bibles make attempts with “great love,” “faithful love,” “loving devotion,” “lovingkindness,” “gracious love,” or “mercies.”  None suffice.  Chabad renders the word as “kindnesses,” which is not much help either.  Why do all these English suggestions fail.  Because, as you might have guessed, the word is חַֽסְדֵ֤י, ḥesed, perhaps the single most important word about God’s interaction and covenant commitment in the entire Tanakh.  No single English word captures its meaning.  Some history is needed.

For centuries the word ḥesed was translated with words like mercy, kindness, love. The LXX usually uses eleos“mercy,” and the Latin misericordia. The Targum and Syriac use frequently a cognate of ṭob. The root is not found in Akkadian or Ugaritic. The lexicons up through BDB and GB (which said Liebe, Gunst, Gnade, love, goodness, grace) are similar.^[1]

In 1927 Nelson Glueck, shortly preceded by I. Elbogen, published a doctoral dissertation in German translated into English by A. Gottschalk, Hesed in the Bible with an introduction by G. A. LaRue which is a watershed in the discussion. His views have been widely accepted. In brief, Glueck built on the growing idea that Israel was bound to its deity by covenants like the Hittite and other treaties. He held that God is pictured as dealing basically in this way with Israel. The Ten Commandments, etc. were stipulations of the covenant, Israel’s victories were rewards of covenant keeping, her apostasy was covenant violation and God’s hesed was not basically mercy, but loyalty to his covenant obligations, a loyalty which the Israelites should also show. He was followed substantially by W. F. Lofthouse (1933), N. H. Snaith (1944), H. W. Robinson (1946), Ugo Masing (1954), and many others.

There were others, however, who disagreed. F. Assension (1949) argued for mercy, basing his views on the otversions. H. J. Stoebe (doctoral dissertation 1951, also articles in 1952 VT and in THAT) argued for good-heartedness, kindness. Sidney Hills and also Katherine D. Sakenfeld (The Meaning of Ḥesed in the Hebrew Bible, a New Inquiry), held in general that ḥesed denotes free acts of rescue or deliverance which in prophetic usage includes faithfulness.^[2]

What is abundantly clear is that the English single-word attempts to capture this crucial Hebrew term are woefully inadequate.  ḥesed, as we have investigated many times, is understood as 1) a relationship founded on some intimate connection (e.g., tribe, treaty, family, etc.), 2) a demand for reciprocal obligations, 3) an expectation of transitivity, i.e., the necessity of passing this blessing and obligation to the next person, tribe, nation, etc., and 4) an expression not in cognition but in action.  All four—all together.  Any single missing element means that the whole doesn’t apply.  

What the poet expresses as God’s unwavering commitment is God’s self-imposed ḥesed, an unbreakable covenant with explicit obligations.  That never changes!  Never!  And the people, now marching into captivity, need to know that ḥesedstill describes God’s promise to them.  Every morning . . .  as we shall see.

Topical Index: Captivity, lōʾ tām’nû, never cease, ḥesed, Lamentations 3:22-23