Bible verses about patience

Two words, and the King James keeps them apart

Here is the fruit of the Spirit, in both translations we print:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.Galatians 5:22-23 · World English Bible

The King James has longsuffering where the modern rendering has patience. The Greek is makrothumia. Now the other one:

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you fall into various temptations, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. Let endurance have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.James 1:2-4 · World English Bible

The King James has patience; the modern rendering has endurance. The Greek here is hupomone, a different word entirely.

The classic statement of the difference is Lightfoot's, quoted in Thayer's lexicon and printed at BibleHub: “While ὑπομονή is the temper which does not easily succumb under suffering, μακροθυμία is the self-restraint which does not hastily retaliate a wrong. The one is opposed to cowardice or despondency, the other to wrath or revenge.”

So one is for circumstances and the other is for people. This is a translation matter, not a manuscript one — nobody disputes the Greek. It is also a plain case of English drift, because longsuffering has simply fallen out of use, taking the distinction with it.

Which is useful rather than merely interesting. If what you need is not to snap at somebody, the four longsuffering passages below are the ones written for it — Galatians 5:22-23, Colossians 3:12-13, Ephesians 4:2 and 2 Peter 3:9. If what you need is to keep going, the others are yours. A list that runs them together is answering a question you did not ask.

The patience of Job, which is not what the phrase suggests

The expression comes from one verse, and it is worth reading in both translations:

Behold, we call them blessed who endured. You have heard of the perseverance of Job and have seen the Lord in the outcome, and how the Lord is full of compassion and mercy.James 5:11 · World English Bible

The King James says the patience of Job; the modern rendering says the perseverance of Job. The Greek is hupomone again — the endurance word, not the composure word.

Which matters, because in English “the patience of Job” has come to mean placid, uncomplaining suffering, and the book of Job shows nothing of the kind. He says this in chapter seven:

“Therefore I will not keep silent. I will speak in the anguish of my spirit. I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.Job 7:11 · World English Bible

He argues for thirty-odd chapters. He demands an answer, accuses his friends of being miserable comforters and asks why he did not die at birth. And James, who had read it, still holds him up as the example.

If you are enduring something loudly, that is the relevant fact on this page. Nothing in the commendation of Job requires you to be quiet about it.

The farmer, and why this is not passivity

Be patient therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. Behold, the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it, until it receives the early and late rain. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.James 5:7-8 · World English Bible

The image is chosen carefully. A farmer waiting for the harvest is not doing nothing — he is farming, in the certain knowledge that nothing he does will make the rain come sooner. Patience here is what you do while the part you cannot control takes its time.

Note also that he waits for the precious fruit. It is a specific expected thing, not a general unhurriedness. The same is true of Romans 8:25, which ties patience to hope: you only wait for what you cannot yet see. Our page of verses about hope covers why the English word has drifted there too.

Waiting is its own question, and four of these are about it

A good deal of what sends people to a page about patience is not somebody to put up with. It is a thing that has not happened yet. Four passages above are about exactly that — Psalm 37:7, Psalm 40:1, Romans 8:25 and James 5:7-8 — and they are not interchangeable, because the words under them are not the same word.

Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him. Don’t fret because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who makes wicked plots happen.Psalms 37:7 · World English Bible

And the one written from the far side of a wait:

I waited patiently for the LORD. He turned to me, and heard my cry.Psalms 40:1 · World English Bible

Both of those say “wait patiently”. It is two unrelated verbs.

This is the place on this page where the two translations cannot help you. The King James and the modern rendering agree on both verses, word for word in the phrase that matters, so the toggles show you nothing and you would never guess from the English that the Hebrew differs. We would rather say that than let a lexicon claim look like something you just checked.

At Psalm 37:7 the verb is chul, Strong’s 2342, in the hitpael. The root has nothing to do with composure: Strong’s gives it as “properly, to twist or whirl … to dance, to writhe in pain (especially of parturition) or fear”, with “to wait” listed as the figurative sense. The word for waiting quietly is also the word for labour pains. We are not going to tell you what to do with that; we are telling you the lexicon prints both under one entry, and the interlinear has the parsing.

At Psalm 40:1 it is a different verb, qavah, Strong’s 6960 — and it is said twice. The interlinear has qawwoh qiwwiti, an infinitive absolute followed by the finite verb, which is how Hebrew leans on a word. Waiting, I waited. That doubling is the “patiently”: there is no separate adverb in the line for it to translate.

One caution, because this root gets overstated everywhere else. Strong’s derives qavah from a primitive root meaning “to bind together (perhaps by twisting), i.e. collect”, and Brown-Driver-Briggs lists two verbs spelled alike, I. wait for and II. collect. The lexicon keeps them apart and we cannot tell you what a Hebrew reader heard. The noun from this root is tiqvah, the hope word that ends Jeremiah 29:11, which our post on that verse in context sets out at length.

The Greek half, where both of this page’s own words turn up

Romans 8:25 puts the endurance word beside a waiting verb: the patience is hupomone (5281) and the waiting is apekdechomai (553). James 5:7 does it the other way round — the farmer’s patience is makrothumeo (3114), the longsuffering word, and the waiting itself is ekdechomai (1551). So both halves of the split this page is built on show up in the waiting passages, each with its own separate verb for the waiting. Four words, one English idea, and none of them means sitting still.

Which of the four is yours

• Psalm 37:7 — when the waiting is physically hard and somebody has told you to be calm about it. This is the verse whose verb means writhing.
• Psalm 40:1 — when you want to hear from someone on the far side of it. The doubled verb is the weight of how long it took.
• Romans 8:25 — when you cannot see the thing yet, and waiting is what hoping looks like from the inside.
• James 5:7-8 — when there is a specific expected thing arriving on a timetable that is not yours.

What these verses do not ask of you

• Not a temperament. Galatians calls it fruit. Fruit is grown, and slowly; it is not a personality you either arrived with or did not.
• Not calm. Romans 12:12 pairs it with tribulation and prayer — it describes what you keep doing, not how you feel while doing it.
• Not silence. Psalm 40:1 is written afterwards, by someone reporting what the waiting turned into. Job complains throughout and is commended anyway.
• Not a reason to let a wrong stand. Longsuffering is about not retaliating, which is a different thing from not naming it. On our page about forgiveness, Luke 17:3 puts the rebuke first.
• Not a payment. None of these passages says the waiting earns the outcome. 2 Peter 3:9 turns it round entirely: there, the one being patient is God, and the delay people complain about is the mercy.

“Patience is a virtue” is not in the Bible

Worth saying plainly, because people go looking for it. The phrase is not scripture: it is an English proverb, traced to William Langland's Piers Plowman in the fourteenth century and, behind that, to the Latin Distichs of Cato.

No complaint about the sentiment — Galatians has patience in a list of things the Spirit grows. But it is a proverb rather than a quotation, and this site would rather you knew which is which.