Bible verses about rest

“Rest for your souls” is a quotation

Matthew 11:28-30, at the top of the list, makes two promises. I will give you rest is the first. The second, you will find rest for your souls, is the end of a line in Jeremiah 6:16, also in the list. Ellicott calls it “a direct quotation from Jeremiah”, and the Pulpit Commentary notes that the words come from the Hebrew of Jeremiah, “not the LXX”: Bengel points out that the Septuagint, the old Greek translation, has purification for your souls at that point, not rest (commentaries on Matthew 11:29).

Jeremiah's verse does not stop at the promise. In the King James it ends But they said, We will not walk therein. Isaiah has the same shape twice, both in the list: This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest; and this is the refreshing: yet they would not hear (28:12), and In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not (30:15). Both end on the same Hebrew verb, avah, to be willing, with a not in front of it (28:12 and 30:15), and Brown-Driver-Briggs lists that verb with a negative everywhere but two places. Jeremiah's word for rest, margoa, occurs only in that verse, and so does Isaiah's word for the refreshing; Strong's derives both from the same root (4771, 4774).

So when Jesus says it, he is making an old offer again, one that had been made and refused. None of these verses is a rebuke to someone who is simply worn out. What they show is the offer still standing after the refusal. Isaiah's offer is followed by the people's horses, and two verses after the horses comes this:

Therefore the LORD will wait, that he may be gracious to you; and therefore he will be exalted, that he may have mercy on you, for the LORD is a God of justice. Blessed are all those who wait for him.Isaiah 30:18 · World English Bible

The LORD waiting and the people who wait for him are one Hebrew verb, chakah, used twice in the same verse (interlinear).

Still waters are waters of rest

Psalm 23:2's still waters are, in the Hebrew, waters of rest: mê menuchot, with the noun in the plural (interlinear). It is the same noun, menuchah, as the rest in Psalm 116:7, in the list, Return unto thy rest, O my soul, and as the rest God says the wilderness generation will not enter at the end of Psalm 95:

Therefore I swore in my wrath, “They won’t enter into my rest.”Psalms 95:11 · World English Bible

Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses it “resting-place, rest” (4496): a place you arrive at as much as a state you are in. Our page on Psalm 23 goes through the whole psalm line by line.

The verb behind it, nuach, is in the list twice more. In Exodus 33:14 it is what God promises Moses, I will give thee rest, two verses after Moses has said thou hast not let me know whom thou wilt send with me. The answer to who is going is My presence, and the Hebrew for presence there is the ordinary word for face (interlinear). In Exodus 23:12 the same verb is what the ox and the donkey get on the seventh day.

God took breath

The first rest in the Bible is God's. Genesis 2:2-3, in the list, uses shabat, to stop, which is the verb the Sabbath is named from. When Exodus gives the reason for the Sabbath a second time, it adds another verb:

It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.Exodus 31:17 · King James Version

Was refreshed is naphash, and Barnes, the Cambridge Bible and the Pulpit Commentary all give its literal sense as “took breath” (commentaries on Exodus 31:17). Brown-Driver-Briggs lists exactly three uses (5314). This is one. The second is Exodus 23:12, in the list, where on the seventh day the son of thy handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed. The third is 2 Samuel 16:14, where David, fleeing from his son Absalom, arrives with everyone who was with him, weary, and they refreshed themselves there. Barnes: “The application of the word to the Creator, which occurs nowhere else, is remarkable.” The Cambridge Bible calls it “a strong anthropomorphism”, used elsewhere only of people.

So one verb covers God on the seventh day, a servant's son and a foreigner on their day off, and a king on the run. Brown-Driver-Briggs and the NAS concordance treat it as a verb formed from nephesh, the Hebrew for breath, life and soul; Strong's treats it as a root of its own meaning to breathe. Nephesh is the soul Psalm 116:7 tells to return to its rest, and the souls Jeremiah promised rest to. Our page on work prints both versions of the Sabbath commandment, which give two different reasons for it.

In Psalm 62, rest is the word for silence

Psalm 62:1-2 is where our two translations part most. The King James has Truly my soul waiteth upon God, the modern rendering My soul rests in God alone. The Hebrew has neither verb. It has a noun, dumiyah, silence. Ellicott renders the line “Literally, unto God (is) silence my soul”, and MacLaren has “My soul is silence unto God” (commentaries on Psalm 62:1). Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses it “silence, still waiting, repose” (1747), and it occurs four times. The King James makes it am not silent in Psalm 22:2, I was dumb with silence in 39:2, and in 65:1 Praise waiteth for thee, waiting again.

Then the refrain comes back at verse 5, changed:

My soul, wait in silence for God alone, for my expectation is from him.Psalms 62:5 · World English Bible

The noun has become an order he gives himself, dommi, be silent, from the verb damam (interlinear), and this time the modern rendering does say silence. My salvation has become my expectation, which is tiqvah, the word for hope that our post on Jeremiah 29:11 is about. The King James's Rest in the LORD at Psalm 37:7, on our page about patience, is the same verb again, dom: be still before the LORD (interlinear). In these psalms, resting is going quiet.

Hebrews changes the word

Hebrews 3 and 4 are a long reading of Psalm 95, and its word for rest, katapausis, comes eight times between 3:11 and 4:11 (2663). It is the word the Septuagint uses for menuchah in Psalm 95. Then at 4:9, in the list, the writer reaches for a different word, sabbatismos, and uses it once. The modern rendering marks the change with a Sabbath rest; the King James has only a rest, so the toggles show it. Ellicott: “the word is suddenly changed.” Meyer finds it nowhere else but once in Plutarch (commentaries on Hebrews 4:9).

What it means is where readers part. Thayer's lexicon gives the word two senses, the keeping of a sabbath and “the blessed rest from toils and troubles looked for in the age to come” (4520). Some Christians read the verse as a reason to keep a weekly Sabbath; others read it as a rest still ahead, or as both. Which day, and whether the commandment binds Christians at all, are questions churches answer differently, and we do not settle them here. The next verse is not in dispute: whoever enters that rest hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his. The argument ends where Genesis 2 began.

What this page is not

• It is not about sleep. If the trouble is lying awake, our verses for sleep are for that, including the night Jesus slept through a storm.
• It is not about having too much. If everything has piled up at once, our page on feeling overwhelmed starts there.
• It is not medical advice. Tiredness that rest does not lift can have a physical cause. MedlinePlus, from the US National Library of Medicine, lists the common causes of fatigue and when to contact a doctor.