What does it mean to “fear God” in the Bible?
In the Bible, to fear God means to hold him as the highest authority — a practical posture that shapes decisions, especially when human power demands something different. It is not primarily terror, though awe is part of it. It is the conviction that God’s claim on your life outweighs any other claim.
The Hebrew is יָרֵא (yare, H3372) — a word that covers everything from terror to reverence to a settled recognition that God is God and you are not. It appears more than 400 times in the Old Testament. Its most important uses are not about trembling before lightning. They are about making choices.
The pairing יָרֵא + אֱלֹהִים (yare + Elohim, "fear God") runs through 92 verses in the canon. Each time it appears, the context is decision-making under pressure — usually the pressure of human authority, self-interest, or fear of someone else.
The first civil disobedience
The clearest illustration is Exodus 1:17. Pharaoh has ordered the midwives Shiphrah and Puah to kill every Hebrew boy at birth. The narrator explains why they refused in a single sentence:
"But the midwives feared God (yare + Elohim) and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live."
— Exodus 1:17
The grammar is contrastive. Pharaoh commanded. The midwives feared God. Those two things produced a third: they let the boys live. The fear of God is the causal hinge between the command and the refusal.
And the same verse shows us what fearing God is not: it is not the absence of all fear. These women stood before a king who had the power to execute them. They did feel fear of some kind. What they feared more was God — and that settled the decision.
Where the phrase came from
The first person in the Bible to use this phrase is Joseph. His brothers stood before him in Egypt, not knowing who he was, terrified. He said: "I fear God" (Genesis 42:18 — the same yare + Elohim) — and then, "Do this and live." His fear of God is the explicit reason he chose preservation over retaliation when he had the power to destroy.
The midwives re-enact Joseph's posture in the very next generation, facing the same geography and the same question: who has the power here, and what will you do with it? Joseph said: I fear God — and preserved life. The midwives said the same — with their hands, before they ever said it with words.
What the law codifies
The Torah later formalized the same logic. Leviticus 25:36 commands: "Fear your God" (H3372 + H0430) — as the ground for letting an impoverished neighbor live with you rather than exploiting him. The two things the midwives did — feared God and preserved life — become the explicit structure of the Sinai law. Fear as the root. Life-preservation as the fruit.
The same pairing appears in the perek legislation: the prohibition of crushing servitude (H6531, the word for exactly what Egypt did to Israel in Exodus 1:13–14) is also grounded in "you shall fear your God" (Leviticus 25:43). The Torah is written as the negative image of Pharaoh's Egypt: do not do to the sojourner, the debtor, the slave what was done to you — because you know what it is, and because you fear God.
Not just terror, but orientation
Proverbs 1:7 calls the fear of the LORD "the beginning of wisdom." Proverbs 31:30 says the excellent woman's final commendation is that "she fears the LORD." Psalm 112:1 opens: "Blessed is the man who fears the LORD." These are not describing a state of paralytic dread. They are describing an orientation — a person whose inner compass is calibrated to God rather than to power, reputation, or survival.
Habakkuk captures it in a prayer: "LORD, I have heard the report of you, and your work I fear" (Habakkuk 3:2). He is not saying the news made him want to run. He is saying that hearing what God does reorients him — it changes what he is afraid of.
The practical test
The test of whether someone truly fears God always comes when another fear challenges it: fear of a king (Exodus 1:17), fear of consequence (Genesis 42:18), fear of public shame, fear of poverty. The midwives passed the test. What they decided in those moments — not some general religious sentiment, but specific choices when Pharaoh's decree was on the table — is what the narrator calls the fear of God.
And God, the narrator says, rewarded it: "Because the midwives feared God, he made them houses" (Exodus 1:21). The reward is posterity — the very thing they had given to others.
For the full portrait of what the fear of God looks like against a kill-decree — from Joseph to the midwives to Daniel to the apostles — see The Midwives Feared God.
Who were Shiphrah and Puah, and were they right to defy Pharaoh?
Shiphrah and Puah were the midwives Pharaoh ordered to kill Hebrew newborn boys. They refused, and God blessed them for it. The text commends their fear of God and their preserving of life; what it does not clearly commend is the precise wording of their answer to Pharaoh — and that distinction matters.
Why did Pharaoh try to kill the Hebrew baby boys?
Because Israel had grown so numerous that Pharaoh feared they would side with Egypt's enemies in a war. But the text shows something deeper: the oppression was a direct assault on God's creational purpose for Israel, and the pattern of a ruler moving to destroy the promised seed runs from Exodus through Matthew and into Revelation.
Why does Exodus 1 say Israel “was fruitful and multiplied”?
Because Exodus 1:7 is deliberately echoing the creation mandate. The narrator stacks five verbs in one sentence to show that what God commanded at the beginning of the world — “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28) — was being fulfilled, in Egypt, in Israel.