The Bible's word for repent is two words: shuv in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, a turning back, and metanoia in the Greek of the New, a change of mind. Here is what each means, where each stands, and what they say repentance is.
Meanings from the Brown-Driver-Briggs and Abbott-Smith lexicons; counts in the Hebrew and Greek texts, from STEPBible’s TAHOT and TAGNT (CC BY); quotations from the King James Version. Every verse is on shuv, metanoia and its verb. Drawn by Biblion, nothing generated by AI; synthetic narration; music composed with ElevenLabs.
Repent is one English word for two older ones. The Old Testament's is shuv H7725, a verb of movement; the New Testament's is metanoia G3341, a word about the mind. The film above follows both from their first places to their last.
Shuv: to turn back
Brown-Driver-Briggs, the Hebrew lexicon behind every Hebrew number on Biblion, gives shuv first as "turn back, return". It is a verb of the road, and the Hebrew text says it 1,057 times, in every book of the Old Testament but Haggai. Its first place is the sentence on Adam, where turning back is going back to the dust:
You will eat bread by the sweat of your face until you return to the ground, for you were taken out of it. For you are dust, and you shall return to dust.”
It is also how Naomi goes home from Moab. The first chapter of Ruth says it twelve times, from the day she sets out to go back (Ruth 1:6) to the day she arrives in Bethlehem (Ruth 1:22).
Turning away, and turning back
The same verb turns a heart, in either direction, and the lexicon lists both: "turn back from God", and "turn back to God", to repent. Jeremiah, who says it most, 111 times, turns the word on itself:
Return, you backsliding children, and I will heal your backsliding. “Behold, we have come to you; for you are Yahweh our God.
All three of that verse's key words grow from one root: shuv itself, and the two words for backsliding built from it, shovav H7726 and meshuvah H4878.
The prophets' call to turn is plainest in Ezekiel, and there the King James gives the one Hebrew word both ways at once, "Repent, and turn yourselves", for two forms of shuv:
“Therefore I will judge you, house of Israel, everyone according to his ways,” says the Lord Yahweh. “Return, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions, so iniquity will not be your ruin.
Elsewhere the King James makes shuv "return", "again", "turn", "back" and dozens of other words, and "repent" only three times. The quotations on this page are shown in your own translation, so their words may differ from the ones counted here.
Its last place is the last verse of the Old Testament, the promise of the prophet who will come before the day of the LORD:
He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.”
Metanoia: a change of mind
In the next book, the preaching opens with the Greek word. John the Baptist's first recorded word is "Repent" (Matthew 3:2), and Jesus begins the same way (Matthew 4:17).
Metanoia connects the Greek word for after, meta, with the word for mind, nous. Abbott-Smith, the Greek lexicon behind every Greek number on Biblion, gives it as "after-thought, change of mind, repentance", and its verb, metanoeō G3340, as "to change one's mind or purpose". Noun and verb stand 58 times in the Greek text, 25 of them in Luke and Acts, and never in John's Gospel. In Luke, heaven rejoices over one sinner who repents (Luke 15:7).
Not an act that earns forgiveness
Repentance, then, is a change in how a person thinks, not an act that earns forgiveness. The New Testament speaks of repentance itself as given:
God exalted him with his right hand to be a Prince and a Savior, to give repentance to Israel, and remission of sins.
It says the same of the Gentiles (Acts 11:18) and of opponents who may yet come to the truth (2 Timothy 2:25), and Paul writes that "the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance" (Romans 2:4, KJV). What a person does comes after, as its fruit. When John speaks again, to the Pharisees and Sadducees who come to his baptism, he says so:
Therefore produce fruit worthy of repentance!
Repent and turn
Acts sets the two pictures side by side, the change of mind and the turning back, in one sentence:
but declared first to them of Damascus, at Jerusalem, and throughout all the country of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, doing works worthy of repentance.
The word for turn there, epistrephō G1994, is one the Greek Old Testament uses again and again for shuv, as Abbott-Smith notes.
The last place metanoia stands
Metanoia itself last appears in the second letter of Peter:
The Lord is not slow concerning his promise, as some count slowness; but he is patient with us, not wishing that anyone should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
To see the Hebrew and Greek under the English, open a verse in the Study Bible with the Strong's numbers on. Each number leads to every verse its word stands in, with its lexicon: shuv, metanoia and its verb.