Bible verses about sadness

“Why is your face sad?”

The first two passages in the list above ask the same question, and in Hebrew they ask it in the same three words: maddua, why, then faces, then ra‘im (7451), the ordinary word for bad (Genesis 40:7, Nehemiah 2:2). Why are your faces bad. The Cambridge Bible, on Nehemiah, says the adjective “means literally ‘bad’” and is used this way constantly, “just as we speak of ‘bad news’ when we mean ‘sad news’”, and it points back to Genesis 40:7 for the same usage (commentaries on Nehemiah 2:2).

Joseph asks it in prison, where he was a prisoner himself. He came in, the text says, and saw them, and saw that they were sad, and asked. Matthew Henry’s comment on the scene is a plain one: “It is often a relief to those that are in trouble to be noticed” (commentaries on Genesis 40:7).

The king’s version is the one this page is built around, because he draws the line most people are trying to draw: since you are not sick. Nothing is wrong with the body, and something is plainly wrong. This is nothing else but sorrow of heart. The Cambridge Bible adds that sorrow there comes from the same root as sad, and “had better have been rendered ‘sadness,’ to bring out the antithesis between ‘countenance’ and ‘heart’”: a sad face, and a sad heart behind it. Both our translations say sorrow of heart, so the toggles cannot show you the echo. Then Nehemiah says Then I was very much afraid, and Ellicott explains why: “A sad countenance was never tolerated in the royal presence.” Verse 1 has already told you he had never been sad in front of the king before, and Ellicott reads it the obvious way: he had carried it for months without letting it show, and “on this day his sorrow could not be repressed.”

A sad face, and a heart made good

Two proverbs in the list use the same Hebrew words and run them in opposite directions. Proverbs 15:13 says A glad heart makes a cheerful face: in Hebrew a glad heart makes the face good, with the verb yatab (3190). Ecclesiastes 7:3 turns it round: for by the sadness of the face the heart is made good. Same verb, and this time it is the heart that is made good, by a face that is sad (interlinears for Proverbs 15:13 and Ecclesiastes 7:3). The word for sadness there is roa (7455), from the same root as the bad faces above, which Strong’s glosses “badness (as marring)”. The King James has the heart is made better; the modern rendering keeps the Hebrew’s plainer made good.

What Ecclesiastes means by it is argued over. Barnes reads sorrow as “Rather, Seriousness”, and takes made better to mean “made bright and joyful”, pointing to 2 Corinthians 6:10, which is in the list, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing (commentaries on Ecclesiastes 7:3). It is not telling you to be sad on purpose. It is saying that a sad face is not proof of a ruined heart, and Proverbs 14:13 says the same from the other side: Even in laughter the heart may be sorrowful. The face and the heart can disagree in both directions.

One more word in that list is worth knowing. The aching of Proverbs 15:13, an aching heart breaks the spirit, is atstsebeth (6094), a word that occurs five times in the Old Testament. One of the other four is the wounds of Psalm 147:3, the verse about the brokenhearted, which our page on heartbreak is built on.

“Am I not better to you than ten sons?”

Hannah has no children, and every year, when the family goes up to the LORD’s house, her husband’s other wife provokes her about it until she cries and will not eat. Elkanah asks the questions people ask: Hannah, why do you weep? Why don’t you eat? Why is your heart grieved? The Hebrew opens all three with the same word, lameh, why (interlinear). Then, without waiting, he answers them himself: Am I not better to you than ten sons? Ellicott says ten is “merely a round number to express many”, and Benson calls Elkanah “a most excellent husband” (commentaries on 1 Samuel 1:8). Both can be true. He loves her, and he has offered himself as the answer to a sadness that is not about him. The text gives no reply from her. The next thing she does is get up and go to pray, and what she says there, in bitterness of soul, is on our page about bitterness.

The second Hannah passage in the list ends with her eating and her facial expression wasn’t sad any more. Nothing has changed yet: Eli has given her a blessing and no child has been born. Barnes notes that “The word ‘sad’ is not in the Hebrew text, but it fairly supplies the meaning intended” (commentaries on 1 Samuel 1:18). The Hebrew has no adjective there at all: word for word, her face “was not to her any more” (interlinear). Both our translations supply sad, which is fair, and is also one of the places where the toggles cannot show you what the original leaves out. Poole read face there as her vexation, which is another way of saying the same thing. Ellicott calls it “A beautiful example of the composing influence of prayer.”

Tears in a bottle

In Psalm 56:8 the tears are kept. The King James has put thou my tears into thy bottle, and the modern rendering has container. The Hebrew word is no’d (4997), which Strong’s glosses “a (skin or leather) bag (for fluids)”: the skin you would carry water or wine in. The verse is built on two plays on words. Ellicott: “There is a play of words in the original of ‘bottle,’ and ‘wandering’”, nodi and nodekha, my wandering and your bottle. Keil and Delitzsch hear a second one, joining count at the start of the verse to book at the end (commentaries on Psalm 56:8, interlinear). The movement of the verse is counted, kept, written down.

If you have come across small glass “tear bottles” with a story that mourners in Roman times wept into them, the story is older than the evidence. Ellicott, writing in the nineteenth century, already said not to think of the glass ones, and the archaeology has since settled it: the little vessels found in Roman and Greek tombs, once supposed to have caught mourners’ tears, held perfumes and ointments, and there is no evidence from the ancient world that they were used as tear-catchers (Wikipedia, citing Anderson-Stojanovic in the American Journal of Archaeology, 1987). The verse does not need the souvenir. Its point is that your tears are counted, not that they are collected.

“Stay here and watch with me”

In Gethsemane Jesus says My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. The Greek word is perilypos (4036), which Thayer’s lexicon explains as “encompassed with grief”, and Thayer lists, among its uses in the Greek Old Testament, the refrain of Psalm 42 (numbered 41:6 and 41:12 in that translation): Why are you in despair, my soul? So the word Matthew uses for Jesus’ sorrow is the word the Greek translation of that psalm uses in its refrain. That is as far as the lexicon goes, and as far as we will. The refrain itself, which comes three times across Psalms 42 and 43, is on our pages about disappointment and hope.

Then look at what he asks for. Not an explanation and not a cure: Stay here and watch with me. Company, awake, nearby. If you are trying to help someone who is sad, that is most of the job, and what not to do instead (Proverbs 25:20’s songs to a heavy heart) is in our post on what to say to someone grieving.

Sorrow that turns, and sowing while you cry

The last three passages in the list do not tell you to stop being sad. Paul’s as sorrowful yet always rejoicing puts both in the same breath, not one after the other. John 16 says your sorrow will be turned into joy, with childbirth as the picture: the same sorrow is turned, not skipped or swapped for something else.

Psalm 126:6 is the one to read twice. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed for sowing, will certainly come again with joy. The Hebrew doubles both verbs, going he goes and coming he comes (interlinear). Poole explains the doubling on the second as “Heb. coming shall come; which manner of expression may note either the certainty of the thing, or the frequency and customariness of it” (commentaries on Psalm 126:6). Our translations mark only the coming back, certainly in one and doubtless in the other, though the going out is built the same way. And the person going out weeping is carrying seed. The work is still being done by someone who is crying while doing it.

What this page is not

• It is not the page for a death. Grief after someone has died is grief, and the end of a relationship is heartbreak.
• It is not the page for an outcome. If you are sad because something you hoped for did not happen, disappointment starts there, and it has the two on the Emmaus road, whose faces were sad too. If it is about something you did, that is regret, and if it is mostly about being alone, loneliness.
• It is not a diagnosis. The US National Institute of Mental Health puts the line plainly: “Everyone feels sad or low sometimes, but these feelings usually pass with time. Depression … is different” (NIMH on depression). If the sadness has not lifted for weeks, or is getting in the way of sleeping, eating or working, talk to a doctor.
• It is not help in a crisis. If sadness 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.