The Fear of the LORD Was Never Fear
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How a single translated word turned awe into dread, and what changes when you read it the way Yeshua did.
I have heard it my whole life. Fear God. Fear the Lord. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It hangs on church walls and lands at the end of sermons, and for most of my life I took it the way it sounded. Be afraid. Stay in line. Do not get too close, because the One you are dealing with could undo you.
Then I began reading the words Yeshua (Jesus) read. The same scriptures, in the same language, before any of it crossed into English. And I found that the word we keep translating as fear was carrying something far larger than dread. Something I had been trained to flinch at, when I was being invited to wonder.
What the fear of the Lord actually means in Hebrew is one of the most consequential translation questions in all of Scripture, and it is the one this post is going to unpack.
What is the Fear of the Lord?
The fear of the Lord in Hebrew is the word yir’ah, from the root yare’, and it carries both terror and awe simultaneously. Unlike the English word fear, which has narrowed almost entirely toward dread, yir’ah describes the reverence that draws you toward God rather than away from him.
The trouble: the word holds both at once. It can mean the terror that makes you run. It can mean the awe that makes you fall silent. Same word. Context decides which one is in the room.
What Is the Difference Between Yir’ah and Pachad?
English has no single word that carries both, so the translators chose fear and moved on. That was not a lie. It was a narrowing. And over a few centuries our ears finished the job, because the English word fear has drifted almost entirely toward dread. When a modern reader hears fear God, he hears be afraid of God. He hears the other Hebrew word, pachad [dread, terror], the one that names the thing you actually flee. He hears the smallest corner of yir’ah and misses the mountain.
I have watched this happen to more than one word. The Exodus story does the same thing with three Hebrew verbs that English flattens into the single word harden, and the moment you flatten them you lose the entire diagnosis. Translation is never neutral. The word you are handed becomes the God you imagine.
One Mountain, One Word, Twice
Stand at the foot of the mountain in Shemot [Exodus] 20. There is thunder, there is smoke, there is a sound like a horn that will not stop. The people are shaking. And Moses says something that should be impossible to translate, because he uses the same root twice in a single breath.
“Do not fear,” he tells them. Al-tira’u. And then, in the very next line, “for God has come so that the fear of him may be before you.” Yir’ato. Same root. Do not fear, so that the fear may remain.
It only sounds like a contradiction in English. In Hebrew it is the whole point. Do not let the pachad take you, the dread that makes you bolt down the mountain and hide. Let the yir’ah stay, the awe that makes you slip off your sandals and stand still. Moses is not telling them to feel nothing. He is telling them which thing to feel. Not the terror that drives you away. The wonder that holds you there.
The Slave and the Son
Here is what I missed for years. The word you are given builds the person you become in front of God.
Tell a man to fear God, and if dread is all he hears, he will build the life of a slave. He will obey to avoid punishment. He will keep his distance, because distance feels safer than exposure. He will read every command as a threat and every silence from heaven as anger. He will call it reverence, and underneath it will be a flinch.
Now hand that same man the awe, and watch what moves. Yir’ah does not make you cower. It makes you curious. It is what happens in front of something so vast and so good that you cannot look away and cannot stop wanting to understand it. Awe does not send you running. It pulls you in.
Sha’ul (Paul) knew the difference, and he put it in one sentence.
“You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba, Father”.
(Romans 8:15)
The slave fears the master. The son runs to the Father. Same God, two completely different rooms, and the door between them is simply which word you were handed.
Yochanan (John) said it just as plainly:
“…perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.”
(1 John 4:18)
Not all fear. The fear that is really dread of punishment. That is the pachad leaving the room. What stays behind when it goes is not a smaller reverence. It is a cleaner one.
What Awe Does That Fear Never Could
This is the part that changed me, and it is why I cannot read the word the old way anymore. Dread never once made me want to know God better. It made me manage him. It made me careful. It made me religious. Awe did the opposite. Awe made me hungry.
When you stop bracing for punishment and start beholding majesty, something wakes up. You want more of him. You want to know what he is like, how he thinks, why he does what he does. You open the same scriptures you have always read, and they stop being a rulebook to survive and start being a door to walk through. The covenant was never meant to be enforced from the outside. It was meant to be written on the inside of you, until knowing him is no longer a duty but a hunger.
That is the yir’ah Yeshua carried up every hill he ever prayed on. Not a slave’s flinch. A son’s wonder, turned all the way up, in front of a Father he could not stop adoring. He read fear of the Lord and saw his Abba’s face.
You were never asked to be afraid of him. You were asked to be amazed. And amazement, unlike dread, will walk you straight into the arms you were taught to keep your distance from.
Selah.
When you read fear God, which word has your ear been hearing all this time: the dread that makes you hide, or the awe that makes you draw near?
Where have you been managing God instead of marveling at him?
What would change this week if you came to him hungry to know him, rather than careful not to anger him?
Shalom v’shalvah, your brother in the Way,
Sergio
About Our Author
Sergio DeSoto is a Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jew who follows Yeshua and holds to Scripture alone. No denomination. No rabbinic tradition. No Talmud. Just the text. He is the founder of The Scholar’s Table, a Hebraic-first biblical scholarship platform at sergiodesoto.com, where the Tanakh speaks first and Western theological frameworks answer to it. He is a high school dropout who outscored the system, a husband of 34 years, a father of six, and the inventor of The Bad Wrap vehicle wrap design software. He built careers without credentials, twice. His life verse is 1 John 2:6. Not as a motto. As a standard. He writes because most people have never been given permission to actually think about what the text says.
CJB – Taken from the Complete Jewish Bible by David H. Stern. Copyright © 1998. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Messianic Jewish Publishers, 6120 Day Long Lane, Clarksville, MD 21029. www.messianicjewish.net.