Bible verses for disappointment

Hope deferred is hope drawn out

Proverbs 13:12, at the top of the list, chooses its verbs carefully. Deferred is mashak (4900), the ordinary verb for drawing or dragging something, which Brown-Driver-Briggs renders here “hope postponed, deferred”: a hope pulled out longer than you can bear. Makes the heart sick is the verb for falling ill. Benson: “The delay of that which a man eagerly desires and expects is such an affliction, that it differs little from a lingering disease” (commentaries on Proverbs 13:12).

The word for hope is tocheleth (8431), from yachal, to wait, and it occurs six times in the Hebrew Bible. One of them is the verse just before the most quoted lines in Lamentations:

I said, “My strength has perished, along with my expectation from the LORD.”Lamentations 3:18 · World English Bible

Three verses later the same poet writes therefore I have hope, and that verb is yachal, the root of the word he has just said was gone (3:18 and 3:21). What comes between them is remembering, and our verses about hope print what he remembered. The refrain of Psalms 42 and 43, in the list, uses the same verb: Hope in God! is yachal again, an instruction the writer gives his own soul, and he has to give it three times (42:5, 42:11 and 43:5).

The second half of the proverb is where our two translations part. The King James has when the desire cometh, which is word for word: in the Hebrew the desire arrives. The modern rendering has when longing is fulfilled. What it is on arrival is a tree of life, which both translations say four times in Proverbs (3:18, 11:30, 13:12 and 15:4). The Cambridge Bible notes that the tree of Genesis 2 and 3 is referred to again in that book, “and only besides in the Bible in Revelation” (commentaries on Proverbs 3:18). The tree the cherubim were set to guard in Genesis 3:24 comes back in Proverbs as wisdom, as the fruit of a good life, as a gentle tongue, and as a longing that comes true.

“We were hoping”

Luke 24:21, in the list, is said on the road to Emmaus on the third day after the crucifixion, by two followers of Jesus to a stranger who has fallen into step with them. The reader knows who the stranger is; they do not. We were hoping is one Greek word, êlpizomen, in the imperfect tense (interlinear): a hope that had been going on, and has stopped. The King James’s we trusted is the same word. The Expositor’s Greek Testament glosses it “were hoping; the hope dead or in abeyance now” and calls the two of them “these disappointed ones”. Jamieson-Fausset-Brown reads the rest of their sentence as the last blow: “He had been two days dead already, and this was the third” (commentaries on Luke 24:21).

Before that sentence comes a question. The stranger asks what they are talking about, and then, when they are amazed he has not heard, What things? Then he listens to the whole of it (24:19-24) before he answers. Their sadness is in the question that opens the conversation:

He said to them, “What are you talking about as you walk, and are sad?”Luke 24:17 · World English Bible

That is the text both our translations follow. The Greek editions of Westcott and Hort, Nestle and the SBL end the verse differently, with the two of them stopping in the road: “and they stood still, looking sad” (the editions side by side). It is a manuscript difference, and the toggles cannot show it to you, because both our translations sit on the same side of it. Either way the word for sad is skythrōpos, and it occurs twice in the New Testament. The other is Matthew 6:16, the hypocrites’ sad faces, put on to be seen fasting. In Matthew it is a face worn for show. On the Emmaus road it is real, and someone asks about it.

“You did well that it was in your heart”

David wanted to build a temple and was told he would not; his son would. 1 Kings 8:18-19, in the list, is that son, Solomon, at the dedication of the finished building, repeating what God had said to his father. It was in your heart comes twice in one verse, in both translations and in the Hebrew. The Pulpit Commentary points out that the words are not in 2 Samuel 7, where the refusal is told: “The Divine approval was implied … The narratives of Scripture are necessarily greatly condensed”. Keil and Delitzsch: “God approves the intention of David as such” (commentaries on 1 Kings 8:18). The sentence appears twice in the Bible, here and at 2 Chronicles 6:8, and both times it is the son who says it. David’s own account, with the reason he was given, is in Chronicles:

Then David the king stood up upon his feet, and said, Hear me, my brethren, and my people: As for me, I had in mine heart to build an house of rest for the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and for the footstool of our God, and had made ready for the building: But God said unto me, Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast been a man of war, and hast shed blood.1 Chronicles 28:2-3 · King James Version

He gathered the materials anyway. In 1 Chronicles 22:14 he says he prepared them in my affliction, the King James’s in my trouble. Ellicott renders it “by my toil or pains” and says the Septuagint and Vulgate were wrong to make it his poverty, while Barnes and Benson take it as the troubles of his reign (commentaries on 1 Chronicles 22:14). On any reading, he spent it on a building he would not live to see.

“Enough”: Moses and the land

I pray thee, let me go over, and see the good land that is beyond Jordan, that goodly mountain, and Lebanon. But the LORD was wroth with me for your sakes, and would not hear me: and the LORD said unto me, Let it suffice thee; speak no more unto me of this matter. Get thee up into the top of Pisgah, and lift up thine eyes westward, and northward, and southward, and eastward, and behold it with thine eyes: for thou shalt not go over this Jordan.Deuteronomy 3:25-27 · King James Version

The answer is one Hebrew word, rav, enough, with “for you” attached. The King James has Let it suffice thee; the modern rendering has That is enough! The Pulpit Commentary gives both readings it can bear, “Thou hast said enough; say no more, or Be content; let what I have done, and the grace I have given, be enough for thee”, and notes the same formula at Deuteronomy 1:6 and 2:3, where it tells the people they have stayed at the mountain long enough. Matthew Poole compares 2 Corinthians 12:8-9 (commentaries on Deuteronomy 3:26), the refused request our page on 2 Corinthians 12:9 is about, where the answer was also that something would be sufficient.

One more thing in those three verses. Let me go over, was angry and you shall not go over are written with the same three Hebrew consonants (interlinear). Strong’s numbers all three as one verb, avar (5674), to cross over; Brown-Driver-Briggs lists the angry one as a separate verb altogether. So whether a Hebrew reader heard a play on words we cannot tell you. Moses saw the land from Pisgah, as he was told he would (Deuteronomy 34:4, in the list), and died there. Ellicott records Rashi’s paraphrase of let it suffice thee, “Far more than this is reserved for thee”, and goes on to see Moses standing on another mountain in the Gospels, at the Transfiguration. That is a reading, and we leave it as one.

The word under “disappointed”

Count the word in our two translations and they barely meet. The modern rendering says disappointed 56 times in 53 verses of the Old Testament, nearly all in the Psalms and the prophets, and in every one of those verses the King James says something else: ashamed, confounded, put to shame, put to confusion. In 52 of the 53 the Hebrew of the verse has bosh (954), which Strong’s defines as “to pale, i.e. by implication to be ashamed; also (by implication) to be disappointed or delayed”. Our pages on shame and hope each take one verse of this, Romans 10:11 and Romans 5:5.

The King James itself says disappoint only three times, and never about a feeling. Each time it is something done to a plan or a person: He disappointeth the devices of the crafty (Job 5:12), Arise, O LORD, disappoint him (Psalm 17:13), and Without counsel purposes are disappointed (Proverbs 15:22), where the modern rendering just says plans fail.

What bosh looks like as a picture is in Job, in what Ellicott calls “one of the most celebrated poetical similes in the book” (commentaries on Job 6:15). Job compares his friends to a desert stream:

My brothers have dealt deceitfully as a brook, as the channel of brooks that pass away;Job 6:15 · World English Bible

The caravans of Tema and Sheba, in the list, come looking for water and find the bed dry. They were confounded because they had hoped, says the King James, and the verb is bosh (interlinear). Barnes: it “represents the state of feeling which one has who has met with disappointment”. Ellicott points to Jeremiah 14:3, also in the list, where servants are sent to the cisterns and find no water (commentaries on Job 6:20), and there the modern rendering does say disappointed. Twice, the picture for it is arriving at water that is not there.

And in one form, bosh means to be late. Brown-Driver-Briggs lists two uses, glossed “delay (in shame)”: Exodus 32:1, Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, where the people’s answer to the delay was to ask Aaron for gods they could see, and Judges 5:28, where Sisera’s mother watches from her window and asks Why is his chariot so long in coming? The same verb covers waiting too long, and finding nothing at the end of it.

What this page is not

• It is not a promise that the thing will still happen. Hebrews 11:13, in the list, says of Abraham and the others that they died in faith, not having received the promises, and the chapter says it again at its end (11:39). Moses saw the land and did not enter it; David gathered the gold and did not build. If you are still waiting, our verses about patience are about the wait itself.
• It is not regret, grief or heartbreak. If what went wrong was your own doing, our verses for regret start there. If someone has died, see grief; if it was a relationship, heartbreak; if someone let you down on purpose, betrayal.
• It is not a rule against saying so. Psalm 42 asks why three times, and Naomi, in the list, renamed herself Bitter. If a long disappointment has turned into weeks of feeling flat or hopeless, that can be depression, which is common and treatable; the National Institute of Mental Health explains the signs and the help available.