Bible verses for when you feel overwhelmed

Water over your head, or strength running out

In everyday English, being overwhelmed is usually a water picture: everything comes in at once and goes over your head. The Bible has that picture too, and Psalm 69 in the list above opens with it. Psalm 124 uses the word itself:

Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul: Then the proud waters had gone over our soul.Psalms 124:4-5 · King James Version

That verb is shataph (7857), to gush or flood, the same one under Psalm 69’s the floods overflow me. But it is not the usual word. The King James says overwhelmed eight times in the Psalms, and five of them are a different verb altogether, ataph (5848): Psalm 61:2, 77:3, 142:3, 143:4 and the heading of Psalm 102. The other two, 55:5 and 78:53, are kasah, to cover. The modern rendering says overwhelmed in all eight as well, so this is one of the places where the two translations above cannot show you the difference.

Outside the Psalms, ataph is not a word for water at all. It is the weaker animals in Jacob’s flock:

But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in: so the feebler were Laban’s, and the stronger Jacob’s.Genesis 30:42 · King James Version

It is people wandering in the desert, Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them (Psalm 107:5). It is children who swoon in the streets of the city in the ruin of Jerusalem (Lamentations 2:11). And it is Jonah inside the fish, in the list above. Feeble, fainted, swoon: in Hebrew they are the same verb the Psalms use for overwhelmed. The picture is not of too much coming in. It is of strength running out.

What the verb pictures exactly is argued over, and the two standard lexicons part company. Strong’s treats it as one word meaning “to shroud”, and “hence (from the idea of darkness) to languish”. Brown-Driver-Briggs lists three separate verbs spelled alike, one meaning to turn aside, one meaning to wrap yourself (Psalm 65:13, where the valleys are covered over with corn) and one meaning “be feeble, faint”, and it files all five of the Psalms’ overwhelmed under the third (both entries). The commentators on Psalm 61:2 divide along the same line. Ellicott gives it as “in the covering of my heart”, “the garment of heaviness” that “wraps a sad heart”; the Cambridge Bible and the Pulpit Commentary both give “fainteth” (commentaries on Psalm 61:2). One lexicon keeps them apart and the other joins them, and we cannot tell you what a Hebrew reader heard. What none of them reads into the word is water.

The difference matters for what helps. If it is the water kind, someone has to pull you out, and Psalm 18:16 in the list says so: He drew me out of many waters. If it is the fainting kind, look at what happens in the stories below. Nobody in them is told to try harder.

A rock too high to climb on your own

The second half of Psalm 61:2 is easy to read as a wish to rise above your problems. The commentators read it the other way round. The words higher than I are yarum mimmenni, and the same shape can mean “too high for me”: Moses uses it in Numbers 11:14, below, when the people are too heavy for me. Ellicott, the Cambridge Bible and the Pulpit Commentary all read it that way, a rock “too high for me to reach by my own unaided efforts”, in the Cambridge Bible’s words. It adds that the rock “denotes an asylum to be reached, not an obstacle to be surmounted”, though Ellicott records that others do take it as a difficulty to be got over. On the first reading, the prayer is not for the strength to climb. It is to be led up somewhere you could not reach alone.

“Too heavy for you”

Moses spent his days settling disputes while the people stood around him from morning to evening, and his father-in-law, Jethro, watched and asked Why do you sit alone (Exodus 18:13-14). Then he said what is in the list above: The thing that you do is not good. His word for wear away is nabel (5034), said twice over, which is how Hebrew leans on a word and where both translations get their surely. It is the verb for a leaf wilting: Psalm 1:3’s leaf that does not wither, and Isaiah 64:6’s We all fade like a leaf, which our fall post is built on. Jethro’s answer was other people:

Let them judge the people at all times. It shall be that every great matter they shall bring to you, but every small matter they shall judge themselves. So shall it be easier for you, and they shall share the load with you.Exodus 18:22 · World English Bible

In Numbers 11, Moses says it himself, to God, with the same three Hebrew words: not able, alone, too heavy (interlinear).

I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me.Numbers 11:14 · World English Bible

And the answer is the same: seventy of the elders, to carry it with him.

I will come down and talk with you there. I will take of the Spirit which is on you, and will put it on them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, that you don’t bear it yourself alone.Numbers 11:17 · World English Bible

Count the word alone across the two stories and it comes four times, in both translations: Exodus 18:14 and 18:18, Numbers 11:14 and 11:17. It is one Hebrew word, levad, every time. Elijah hears the same kind of sentence from an angel, the journey is too great for you (1 Kings 19:7), and our verses for anxiety tell what came before it: food and sleep before any conversation. Not one of the three is told to try harder. Mark 6:31, in the list, is the same instruction in the Gospels: there were so many people coming and going that they had no leisure so much as to eat, and Jesus told the disciples to come away and rest.

Remembering, which can go either way

Three passages on this page put the same two Hebrew verbs side by side: ataph and zakar, to remember. In Psalm 143:4-5 the psalmist is overwhelmed, and then I remember the days of old. In Jonah 2:7, inside the fish, the fainting comes first: When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the LORD. And in Psalm 77 the order runs the other way, and the remembering is what does it (Psalm 77:3, Jonah 2:7):

I remember God, and I groan. I complain, and my spirit is overwhelmed. Selah.Psalms 77:3 · World English Bible

It is an honest thing to find in a songbook: thinking about God made it worse. The psalm does not stop there. Eight verses on, it remembers something more specific,

I will remember the LORD’s deeds; for I will remember your wonders of old.Psalms 77:11 · World English Bible

and it ends at the sea: Your way was through the sea, your paths through the great waters. The water comes back, and this time there is a way through it.

What this page is not

• It is not a diagnosis. The National Institute of Mental Health puts the difference simply: stress is a response to an external cause, and anxiety can come even when there is no current threat. If you are struggling to cope, or it will not go away, its fact sheet on stress and anxiety says it may be time to talk to a professional. If being overwhelmed has turned into thoughts of not wanting to be here, call or text 988 at any hour (the 988 Lifeline).
• It is not a failure of faith. Psalms 61, 77, 142 and 143 all say overwhelmed in the first person, and they were kept in the songbook. Psalm 62:8 says Pour out your heart before him, and Psalm 142 does exactly that before it uses the word.
• It is not a reason to do more. Moses was given help, Elijah was given food and sleep, and the disciples were told to rest. Our pages on work, where the Sabbath is given twice for two different reasons, and on sleep go further.