Bible verses for a new mom

Nursing, not expecting

The King James ends Isaiah 40:11 with shall gently lead those that are with young, and in modern English with young sounds like pregnancy. The Hebrew word is ‘alot, which Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses “give suck” (5763), and the Cambridge Bible says plainly: “Render, with R.V., those that give suck.” The Pulpit Commentary agrees, and adds that ewes suckling their lambs “require specially tender treatment” (commentaries on Isaiah 40:11). The verse often handed to expectant mothers is about the weeks after the birth.

The word occurs five times in the Hebrew Bible. Two are cows that have calved, in 1 Samuel 6. One is the ewes David was following when he was chosen, in Psalm 78:71. One is this verse. And one is Jacob, in Genesis 33:13-14 in the list, refusing to be hurried. His brother has offered to travel with him, and Jacob answers that the children are tender and the flocks are nursing, and if they overdrive them one day, all the flocks will die. He will go according to the pace of the livestock and according to the pace of the children. Ellicott sets Isaiah’s shepherd beside “Jacob’s pleas”, and Keil and Delitzsch put the whole picture in one line: “the mothers he does not overdrive”.

The two passages share a verb as well as a noun. Isaiah’s gently lead is nahal, which Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses “lead, guide to a watering-place or station, and cause to rest there” (5095). It is Jacob’s lead on too, and the leads me of Psalm 23:2, on our Psalm 23 page. The word behind pace, said twice, is regel, foot (interlinear): literally, the foot of the children. The modern rendering keeps pace both times; the King James turns it into be able to endure.

Carried at the chest

The middle of Isaiah 40:11, carry them in his bosom, is two Hebrew words: nasa, to carry, and cheq, the bosom, which is where you hold a baby. Moses used the same two words, and he used them to complain:

Have I conceived all this people? Have I brought them out, that you should tell me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a nursing infant, to the land which you swore to their fathers?’Numbers 11:12 · World English Bible

The King James has as a nursing father beareth the sucking child. The Hebrew is ha’omen (interlinear), a masculine word that Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses “foster-father” (539), and the modern rendering makes it a nurse. Moses goes on to say he cannot carry the people alone, and God’s answer is seventy elders to share the load; our page on feeling overwhelmed follows that through.

The feminine form of the same word is in the list, near the end of the book of Ruth. In Ruth 4:16 Naomi, who had come back to Bethlehem a widow, lays her grandson in her bosom, cheq again, and becomes nurse to him, ’omenet, which the same lexicon glosses “foster-mother, nurse” (interlinear). So the picture comes three times. In Numbers it is a load too heavy for one man, in Ruth it is a grandmother taking a turn, and in Isaiah it is said of God.

Isaiah 46:3-4, also in the list, goes back further than the chest: carried from the womb, and still carried to grey hairs. Between them the two verses use a verb for carrying five times, three different Hebrew verbs, and nasa is two of the five (interlinear).

He doesn’t faint, and the young do

Isaiah 40:28-29 is in the same chapter as the shepherd, seventeen verses later. Follow two verbs to the end of the chapter: ya’ef, to faint, and yaga’, to grow weary (interlinear). They come as a pair three times. First they are said of God, and denied: he doesn’t faint, he isn’t weary. Then they are said of the young, and not denied:

Even the youths faint and get weary, and the young men utterly fall; but those who wait for the LORD will renew their strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles. They will run, and not be weary. They will walk, and not faint.Isaiah 40:30-31 · World English Bible

At the end they are denied again, of those who wait for the LORD, in the opposite order: run, and not be weary, walk, and not faint (interlinear). In between, verse 29 uses the adjective from the first verb: he gives power to the weak, in the King James to the faint, which makes four faints in the older translation. The chapter does not tell anyone that young people don’t get tired. It says they do, and says who doesn’t. Our page on strength takes up what renew means in verse 31.

Sleep, then children

Psalm 127:2-3 puts sleep and children one verse apart: he gives sleep to his loved ones, and then children are a heritage of the LORD. The psalm is about work rather than babies. It opens with builders and watchmen, and verse 2 is aimed at rising early and staying up late to get ahead. Our sleep page sets out the two ways verse 2 can be read, with sleep as the gift or as the state in which the gift arrives, and our Father’s Day readings carry the arrows of verses 4 and 5. Here it is enough that one psalm has both.

Things she did not yet understand

Luke 2:19 comes after the shepherds have told everyone what the angels said: Mary kept all these sayings, pondering them in her heart. The verb for pondering is symballo, literally to throw together. Thayer’s lexicon gives “to bring together in one’s mind, confer with oneself” for this verse (4820), and the Cambridge Bible renders it “casting together”, “comparing and considering”, adding that “She did not at once understand the full significance of all these events” (commentaries on Luke 2:19).

Luke says it a second time, twelve years later. The boy has stayed behind in the Temple, his parents have spent three days looking for him, and when they find him his answer makes no sense to them:

They didn’t understand the saying which he spoke to them. And he went down with them and came to Nazareth. He was subject to them, and his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.Luke 2:50-51 · World English Bible

Both of our translations say kept both times. The Greek uses two forms of one verb, synetērei at 2:19 and dietērei at 2:51 (interlinear), and Bengel’s note on the first verse simply points to the second. What Luke records, at the start and again twelve years in, is a mother holding on to things she did not yet understand.

Sorrow, then joy

John 16:21 is the plainest sentence in the Bible about the hour after a birth, and it is a comparison. Jesus says it to his disciples the night before he dies, about their own grief, and the next verse applies it:

Therefore you now have sorrow, but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.John 16:22 · World English Bible

The Expositor’s Greek Testament says the comparison “extends only to the sudden replacement of sorrow with joy in both cases” (commentaries on John 16:21). It is not a promise that the memory goes, and plenty of mothers remember every minute. Two words in it are worth knowing (interlinear). The anguish is thlipsis, and twelve verses later the same word is In the world you have trouble, in the King James tribulation. And the King James has for joy that a man is born into the world where the modern rendering has a human being. The Greek is anthrōpos, which can mean either; both renderings are defensible, and we print both.

Taken in his arms

There are two places in the New Testament where Jesus takes a child in his arms, and both are in Mark. The verb, enankalizomai, occurs nowhere else; Thayer’s lexicon lists Mark 9:36 and Mark 10:16 and glosses it “to take into the arms, embrace” (1723). Mark 10:16 is in the list. Matthew and Luke both tell that story, and neither mentions the arms. This is the other one:

He took a little child and set him in the middle of them. Taking him in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever receives one such little child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, doesn’t receive me, but him who sent me.”Mark 9:36-37 · World English Bible

Hosea 11:3-4 is the Old Testament’s fullest picture of looking after a small child, and it is God speaking about Israel: I taught Ephraim to walk, I took them by their arms, I bent down to him and I fed him. Barnes gives the first verb literally as “I set Ephraim on his feet”, “as a nurse doth her child, teaching it to go with little steps” (commentaries on Hosea 11:3). Brown-Driver-Briggs lists that verb as one made from a noun (7270), and the noun is regel, foot, Jacob’s word for the children’s pace.

The end of verse 4 is where our translations part. The King James has I laid meat unto them; the modern rendering has I bent down to him and I fed him. The Cambridge Bible calls the King James version “impossible” and offers two readings: “and I bent towards him and gave him food”, which needs “one vowel-point” altered, or “and (dealing) gently with him I gave him food” (commentaries on Hosea 11:4). The consonants are not in dispute; the vowel marks are. The Pulpit Commentary names Ewald and Keil for the second reading, which takes the word as ’at, gently, the word Jacob uses in Genesis 33:14 when he says I will lead on gently (328). Either way, someone bends down and a child is fed.

For new dads

Psalm 103:13 is the verse for a new father. The King James has Like as a father pitieth his children, the modern rendering Like a father has compassion on his children, and Barnes gives the Hebrew as “Like the compassion of a father for his children” (commentaries on Psalm 103:13).

The verb is racham, and Brown-Driver-Briggs lists it as a verb made from a noun (7355). The noun is rechem, womb, and Strong’s gives its senses as “compassion (in the plural); by extension, the womb (as cherishing the fetus)” (7356). It is on this page already, in Isaiah 46:3’s carried from the womb. And the same verb is in Isaiah 49:15, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb, which belongs to our Mother’s Day readings. The verse given to fathers and the verse given to mothers use one word, and the lexicons connect it with the womb. We cannot tell you how a Hebrew reader heard it.

Moses used the carrying verb of a father twice. One is the nursing father of Numbers 11:12, above. The other is this, in the King James:

And in the wilderness, where thou hast seen how that the LORD thy God bare thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went, until ye came into this place.Deuteronomy 1:31 · King James Version

In it, bare thee and doth bear his son, in the modern rendering carried you and carries his son, are both nasa (interlinear), the verb of Isaiah 40:11.

When it is more than tired

Feeling low in the first days is common. The US National Institute of Mental Health describes the “baby blues” as “mild and short-lasting mood changes and feelings of worry, unhappiness, and exhaustion that many women experience in the first 2 weeks after giving birth”. It adds that mood changes “that are severe or last longer than 2 weeks after childbirth may be signs of postpartum depression”, which generally does not get better without treatment (NIMH on perinatal depression). If that sounds like you, or like her, NIMH’s advice is to start with a health care provider. The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline, which the same page lists, is free and confidential, day and night: call or text 1-833-852-6262. If it has turned into not wanting to be here, call or text 988 in the US (988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or your local emergency number anywhere else.

What this page is not

• It is not the Mother’s Day page. Honoring a mother, with Proverbs 31, Hannah and Isaiah 66:13, is on Mother’s Day readings.
• It is not the page for sleep or for being overwhelmed, though both will feel close for a while: sleep, overwhelmed and rest are.
• It does not argue from Psalm 139. It is in the list for its wonder. Its harder word, two verses further on, is set out on our birthday readings.