What lovingkindness actually means
Lovingkindness is how older English Bibles render the Hebrew word chesed: love that a person is bound to and gives anyway, long after the obligation could have been dropped. It combines affection with loyalty. The New Ground English Translation prints loyal love, because chesed is kindness owed inside a relationship, not kindness offered at random.
Where the word comes from
Miles Coverdale made the word up. Translating the Psalms into English in 1535, he came at the Hebrew chesed, found nothing in the language that fit, and welded two words together: loving-kindness. The King James translators kept it. Nearly five centuries later it still has no life outside a Bible page, which tells you how badly the gap was felt.
David goes looking for a surviving grandson of Saul, a man with a claim to his throne and two damaged feet, so that he can do chesed to him for Jonathan's sake. Ruth does chesed to Naomi by staying with her. Rahab asks the spies for chesed because she hid them. A large share of the roughly 250 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible work like those, between one person and another before ever reaching God. In every case somebody with the power to walk away does not walk away.
The word keeps company with oaths. Exodus 34:6 sets it beside emet, dependability, in what became the standard description of God's character, and later writers quote that description back at him when they want him to act. Psalm 136 repeats one line twenty-six times, once after each thing God has done: his chesed lasts forever. The refrain works as a legal claim as much as a hymn. The relationship has terms, and this is the term God keeps.
Scholars have argued for a century about whether chesed is owed or given. Nelson Glueck, writing in 1927, made it essentially a covenant duty, conduct required by a relationship that already exists. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld pushed back: in the actual scenes the recipient is desperate, the giver is the only one who can help, and nothing forces the giver to move. Most current work sits between the two positions, which is roughly where the word itself sits.
Why "lovingkindness" gets in the way
Lovingkindness reads as a mood. It sounds like being nice with extra warmth, the sort of thing a person might feel toward a stranger on a good day. The Hebrew runs the other direction. It names what someone does after the warm feeling has run out and the obligation has technically expired.
The word also has a competitor now. Type loving kindness into a search box and the results split between the Psalms and metta, the Buddhist practice of extending goodwill outward to all beings. That is a good thing in its own right, and it is not chesed, which is aimed at particular people you are already tied to.
The older English versions were not consistent with it either. The King James prints mercy for chesed far more often than lovingkindness, roughly 149 times against 30, following the Greek Septuagint, which had used eleos. Mercy in English means going easy on someone who deserves worse. That is a different idea, and readers who meet chesed as mercy come away thinking the main fact about God is that he lets people off.
What this translation prints instead
The New Ground English Translation prints loyal love as its default, forty times across the tagged passages, with faithful love next at thirty. The pairing is deliberate. Loyal carries the binding, love carries the warmth, and chesed does not work without both halves.
Take David's question in Second Samuel 9: "Is there anyone still left from Saul's family that I can show loyal love to, for Jonathan's sake?" Nothing in that scene is sentimental. Jonathan is dead. The promise was made to a man who can no longer collect on it, and the person David finds is a political liability. The phrase has to hold the old promise inside it or the whole episode stops making sense.
Where the setting is ordinary human decency rather than promise-keeping, the translation drops to kindness. Where the weight falls on the sticking rather than the affection, it prints loyalty. Proverbs 3:3 gets the pair the Hebrew gives it: Never let loyal love and faithfulness leave you. Tie them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. The instruction is to wear the thing where other people can see it, the way you would carry a document.
Read it in place
David said, "I want to show kindness to Hanun son of Nahash, because his father showed kindness to me." So David sent messengers to comfort him about his father's death. But when David's men arrived in the land of the Ammonites to comfort Hanun,
1 Chronicles 19:2
"But show loyal kindness to the sons of Barzillai of Gilead — let them eat at your table — because they stood by me when I was running from your brother Absalom."
1 Kings 2:7
Solomon answered, "You showed tremendous loyal love to your servant, my father David, because he walked before you faithfully, doing what was right and keeping his heart straight with you. And you've continued this great loyal love by giving him a son to sit on his throne today.
1 Kings 3:6
and said, "Yahweh, God of Israel — there is no God like you in the sky above or on the earth below. You keep your covenant and show loyal love to your servants who walk before you with everything they have."
1 Kings 8:23
Questions people ask
What does lovingkindness mean in the Bible?
It renders the Hebrew chesed, which means love that holds to a commitment. The word covers how God deals with Israel and also what people owe each other inside a promise: Ruth to Naomi, David to Jonathan's family. Older English Bibles print lovingkindness, steadfast love, or mercy for it. The New Ground English Translation prints loyal love.
What does loving kindness mean in Hebrew?
The Hebrew is chesed, written חֶסֶד and pronounced with a throat-clearing kh at the front. It holds affection, loyalty, and follow-through together in one word. Biblical Hebrew had no separate term for love-that-keeps-its-word, because chesed was that term. English needs two words to reach it, which is why translators keep producing compounds like lovingkindness and steadfast love.
What is the difference between hesed and agape love?
Chesed is Hebrew and agape is Greek, and they overlap without matching. Chesed stresses loyalty inside a relationship that already exists, usually one with a promise attached to it. Agape in the New Testament stresses love directed at someone regardless of what they have earned, enemies included. The Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible usually rendered chesed with eleos, mercy, not with agape.
Is hesed the same as grace?
No, though they stand close together. Grace, Greek charis, is favor shown to someone with no prior claim on you. Chesed usually assumes a claim: a promise, a kinship, a covenant. Grace answers the question why would you help me at all. Chesed answers the question will you still help me now that helping has become expensive.
How many times is loving kindness mentioned in the Bible?
Chesed appears roughly 250 times in the Hebrew Bible. How often lovingkindness appears in English depends entirely on the version. The King James prints it about 30 times and uses mercy for the same Hebrew word about 149 times. Most modern versions use steadfast love or faithful love. The New Ground English Translation uses loyal love.