to put to the test: to set up a trial that brings out what a person, a thing, or even God will actually do
At its core this verb is about staging a trial to see what comes of it. You do not yet know how someone will respond, or whether something will hold up, so you arrange the circumstances that will show you. That is true whether the trial is small and practical, like trying on a borrowed sword to see if you can move in it, or enormous and life-defining, like the command to Abraham. The word does not name the result; it names the act of probing for one.
From that single idea the word fans out along two lines. The first is everyday and unloaded: to try something out by experience, or to venture an attempt at something difficult. The second is the heavily weighted line that carries most of the word's fame, where the testing happens inside a relationship between God and people. There the word develops a strong one-way rule: God may test people, to bring out and form what is in their hearts, but people are forbidden to test God, which the Bible treats as the signature sin of the wilderness generation.
The trial is meant to be genuine. When God tests Abraham, the outcome is not a foregone formality; the story turns on whether Abraham will actually obey. When Israel tests God at the place named for this very word, the complaint is real defiance, not a game. The word names the place where trust is put on the line and proved, one way or the other.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether God's testing implies that God genuinely learns something he did not already know, especially given the "now I know" of Genesis 22:12.
- majorityThe testing is revelatory and relational: it brings out and makes visible what was already in the person's heart and deepens the relationship, without implying God lacked knowledge.; R. W. L. Moberly, The Theology of the Book of Genesis (Cambridge UP, 2009); Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, rev. ed., OTL (Westminster, 1972)
- minorityThe test is genuine in a stronger sense: God really does come to know the outcome, because human freedom makes the response truly open.; Terence E. Fretheim, The Suffering of God (Fortress, 1984); Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy, JPS Torah Commentary (JPS, 1996)