The Hebrew word chesed stands 248 times in the Old Testament, and no single English word holds it. Here is where it stands, and what the translations call it.
The counts are Biblion’s own, over the Strong’s numbers its King James Version carries: each rendering is counted as the English word its number stands under, and the World English Bible’s by the verses its words appear in. The texts are the King James Version with Strong’s numbers, the World English Bible and Strong’s Hebrew lexicon, all in the public domain. Every verse chesed stands in is gathered on its Strong’s number. The picture is drawn by Biblion from those texts, none by hand and none generated by AI; the narration is a synthetic voice reading a written script, and the music was composed with ElevenLabs.
Some words in the Bible carry more than any translation can, and chesed H2617 is one of them. It is love that keeps faith: loyal, generous and undeserved, shown by God to his people and asked of them in return. The Old Testament uses it 248 times, in 241 verses across 28 books, and the film above follows it from its first place to its last.
Where chesed first appears
It first stands in Genesis. Lot has been led out of Sodom by the two men who came for him, and he answers them:
See now, your servant has found favor in your sight, and you have magnified your loving kindness, which you have shown to me in saving my life. I can’t escape to the mountain, lest evil overtake me, and I die.
It soon becomes a word between people too. Abraham's servant asks God to show it to his master (Genesis 24:12), and Joseph, in prison, asks it of the cupbearer (Genesis 40:14). The book of Ruth turns on it three times: in Naomi's blessing on her daughters-in-law (Ruth 1:8), in her words about Boaz (Ruth 2:20), and in Boaz's words to Ruth (Ruth 3:10).
Chesed in the Psalms
More than half of the 248, 128 of them, are in the Psalms. Psalms 136 gives it to every one of its 26 verses, as their refrain:
Give thanks to Yahweh, for he is good, for his loving kindness endures forever.
It is also the "mercy" that follows the psalmist all the days of his life in Psalms 23:6.
The English words for chesed
No single English word covers chesed, and the translations show it. The King James Version calls it "mercy" 149 times, "kindness" 40 and "lovingkindness" 30, and has nine other words for the remaining 29: goodness, kindly, merciful, favour, pity, good, goodliness, reproach and, once, "wicked thing". The World English Bible, the text Biblion opens with, prefers "loving kindness", which stands in 174 of the 241 verses.
The quotations on this page are shown in your own translation, so their words may differ from the ones counted here.
To see the Hebrew under the English, open a verse in the Study Bible with the Strong's numbers on. The number beside the word leads to every verse chesed stands in.
Chesed beside truth and covenant
Chesed keeps company. It stands beside emet, truth or faithfulness, in 33 verses, and beside the covenant in 13. When the LORD proclaims his name to Moses, the two words stand together:
6 Yahweh passed by before him, and proclaimed, “Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, 7 keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children’s children, on the third and on the fourth generation.”
The King James says "goodness" in the first of those verses and "mercy" in the second, for the same Hebrew word a line apart. The covenant verses use it the same way: God "keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him" (Deuteronomy 7:9, KJV).
What chesed asks
Chesed is also what God asks for. Hosea 6:6 says so, and Jesus quotes that verse twice, in Matthew 9:13 and Matthew 12:7. Micah gives it a place in his summary of all that the LORD requires:
He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does Yahweh require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?
The last place chesed stands
The last place chesed stands is in Zechariah, among the prophets after the return from exile:
“Thus has Yahweh of Armies spoken, saying, ‘Execute true judgment, and show kindness and compassion every man to his brother.