to worry: to carry an anxious, unsettled concern about what may happen, whether to someone you love or from a danger you can already see
This is the Old Testament's word for worry. It shows up only seven times, and in every case someone is carrying a weight about something that has not happened yet: a father wondering what became of his son, a king wondering what his own people will do to him, a tree facing a year without rain. It names an unsettled mind rather than a jolt of fright.
The seven uses fan out across the whole range of ordinary anxiety:
- a father worrying about a son who has not come home (1 Samuel 9:5, 1 Samuel 10:2)
- a king dreading what defectors from his own city might do to him (Jeremiah 38:19)
- refugees dreading a famine they think they can outrun (Jeremiah 42:16)
- a nation that has spent its worry on foreign powers instead of God (Isaiah 57:11)
- a man in anguish over his own sin (Psalm 38:18)
- a well watered tree that does not worry when the rain fails (Jeremiah 17:8)
What holds them together is the forward tilt: the trouble is still ahead, and the mind keeps turning it over. Hebrew has sharper words than this for fear. יָרֵא covers everything from plain fright to reverent awe, and פָּחַד names the sudden shudder of terror. This word is quieter and more drawn out, closer to what English calls being worried sick. The matching noun (דְּאָגָה) names the anxiety itself.
Jeremiah uses the word twice in ways that answer each other. The person who trusts the LORD is like a tree planted by water, which "is not anxious" in a year of drought (Jeremiah 17:8), while the people who run down to Egypt end up overtaken by the very famine they were anxious about (Jeremiah 42:16). Worry, in Jeremiah, is what a rootless life cannot escape.