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To understand what the Bible says about anxiety—and to understand anxiety itself—it’s helpful to look at the words that are translated as anxiety through Scripture. In the Old Testament, what’s used for anxiety comes from the Hebrew verb דָּאַג, daag, or the noun דְּאָגָה , deagah, meaning care, fear, heaviness, or sorrow. The connotation is that the fear, dread, sorrow, and worry is a weight pulling the person down. In the New Testament, anxiety comes from the Greek word μεριμνάω, pronounced merimnao, a verb that means to take apart or divide, carrying the negative connotation of having a divided or distracted mind.
Anyone with anxiety can attest that both of these aspects are true; anxiety causes the brain to go in several different directions, and it feels like the heart and body are torn apart. Under such duress, the stress of this pulling can make someone feel immobilized and heavy—which is one reason why anxiety and depression often go hand in hand.
I’ll admit that I do not pretend to understand anxiety. I believe, perhaps, I have felt remnants of it at particularly stressful moments of my life. But I have been diagnosed with depression, and there is one caveat that my doctor has explained to me which I think is helpful to apply here when thinking about the biblical statements about anxiety: everyone, to an extent, has anxiousness, but what makes anxiety a mental illness is when it becomes debilitating to daily life.
“Anxiety causes the brain to go in several different directions, and it feels like the heart and body are torn apart.”
Some of the instances of anxiety in Scripture are merely descriptive of people’s fear or dread. This is especially true with the Hebrew usage in the Old Testament. Most of the instances of daag or deagah are used to describe how people feel in various circumstances, including worry (1 Samuel 9:5 and 10:2, Jeremiah 17:8), trouble (Psalm 38:18, Jeremiah 49:23), dread (Isaiah 57:11, Jeremiah 42:16), and fear (Jeremiah 38:19, Joshua 22:24). Many versions of Ezekiel 4:16 and 12:18-19 do translate deagah to anxiety when God says he is about to cut off the food supply in Jerusalem and “the people will eat rationed food in anxiety.”
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