To have affection for (sexually or otherwise)
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אָהַב is the Old Testament's primary verb for love across its full human range: the love of a parent for a child, a man for a woman, a friend for a friend, a people for their God, and supremely God for His people. BDB describes it as affection, whether relational or physical, but the pastoral weight of this word is far larger than any single relationship or feeling.
Reader summary
Full entry for אָהַב (H157) · Open the biblical lexicon
אָהַב is the Old Testament's primary verb for love across its full human range: the love of a parent for a child, a man for a woman, a friend for a friend, a people for their God, and supremely God for His people. BDB describes it as affection, whether relational or physical, but the pastoral weight of this word is far larger than any single relationship or.
The BSB source-word alignment has 211 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include love (15), I love (13), loved (13), loves (11), he loved (7).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Genesis 22:2. Its strongest book concentrations include Psalms (39), Proverbs (27), Deuteronomy (22), Hosea (16).
This entry includes 4 verse guides that explain exact original-language forms in context.
אָהַב is the Old Testament's primary verb for love across its full human range: the love of a parent for a child, a man for a woman, a friend for a friend, a people for their God, and supremely God for His people. BDB describes it as affection, whether relational or physical, but the pastoral weight of this word is far larger than any single relationship or feeling. אָהַב names the orienting movement of the whole person toward someone or something — the attachment of will, the pull of the heart, the commitment of life.
What arrests the reader across the Old Testament is that God is the subject of this verb as often as He is its object. The God of Israel is not a distant sovereign who receives devotion from below. He is an אָהַב — a lover who initiates, pursues, names, claims, and remains. When Hosea hears the command to love an unfaithful wife as the Lord loves an unfaithful Israel (Hos 3:1), the verb carries God's own character into that brutal obedience. When Jeremiah hears "I have loved you with an everlasting love" (Jer 31:3), the word arrives not as comfort alone but as anchor — a love that will outlast Israel's exile and God's apparent silence.
For Israel, the command to love God with the whole heart, soul, and strength (Deut 6:5) does not sit beside אָהַב as its explanation — it sits inside the word as its demand. To love God in the Shema is not a feeling managed but a life reoriented. The verb expects a whole-person response: treasuring, following, obeying, trusting, delighting. The Old Testament does not separate love from loyalty, or devotion from obedience. They belong to the same word.
Pastorally, אָהַב rescues the congregation from two opposite errors. The first is sentimentalism — the idea that love is a feeling that rises and falls with emotional weather. The second is cold duty — the idea that obedience to God has no heart in it. This Hebrew verb will not let either error stand. Love in the Old Testament is emotional and volitional, felt and willed, tender and covenantal. It moves through history, endures exile, survives betrayal, and arrives finally in the Word made flesh — who is the love of God embodied.
Gen 22:2 — God addresses Abraham with "your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love (אָהַבְתָּ)." The first named use of אָהַב for a human relationship is also the moment when that love is placed before God in the most severe test the text contains.
The verb אָהַב does not arrive in Scripture as a concept to be defined — it arrives in a relationship to be witnessed. When God first uses it with Abraham in Genesis 22, the effect is not to catalogue emotions but to name what is at stake: this is your son, your only son, the one you love. Love and sacrifice stand in the same sentence. Whatever אָהַב will come to mean across the Old Testament, it opens here in a moment that will not let anyone be comfortable about the cost of loving or about the God who asks the question.
As the Torah unfolds, the word takes on commanding force. Deuteronomy 6:5 does not describe love as something Israel naturally feels for God — it commands it. The Shema's love is wholehearted: all the heart, all the soul, all the strength. The Old Testament does not apologize for commanding emotion because it does not understand love as a mood that cannot be cultivated. Love for God is a way of life, a reorientation of the self, the response of a people who have been redeemed and must now live as if the Redeemer matters more than anything else. This love is also extended outward: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev 19:18) — the same verb, the same demand of the whole person directed toward the one who stands beside you.
In the Prophets, אָהַב does its most arresting work from the divine side. Hosea's marriage becomes the primary enacted parable of God's love — a love that is grieved, tested, and still pursuing. Jeremiah's everlasting love is declared to a people who are about to go into exile, as if God wants the word to go with them into the darkness. Isaiah's "you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you" (Isa 43:4) arrives to people who feel abandoned. The prophets do not use אָהַב to describe a smooth and untroubled divine emotion. They use it to name the love that holds when everything else has come undone.
The canonical trajectory runs directly into the New Testament through the LXX's consistent rendering with ἀγαπάω. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 as the greatest commandment (Matt 22:37). John writes that God loved (ἠγάπησεν) the world in the sending of His Son (John 3:16). Paul announces that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ (Rom 8:39). The connection is not forced — it is the same love, the same God, now fully disclosed. The אָהַב of the Old Testament is not merely background for the New Testament's proclamation of love. It is the theological substance that gives that proclamation its weight: a love that is everlasting, covenantally faithful, costly, and moving directed toward the people it names as its own.
אָהַב moves through the Old Testament as both command and declaration — Israel commanded to love God and neighbor, God declaring His own love for Israel as prior, initiating, and covenantally grounded. The LXX renders אָהַב primarily with ἀγαπάω (G25), the same verb that the New Testament uses for God's sending of His Son (John 3:16), for Christ's love for His disciples (John 15:9), and for the love that defines the new community (John 13:34-35).
The trajectory is direct: the love commanded in Deuteronomy, embodied in Hosea, proclaimed in Jeremiah, and declared in Malachi finds its fullest expression in the love of God revealed and enacted in Jesus Christ. The Hebrew verb does not predict the incarnation as a cipher to decode — it establishes the character of a God whose love is active, initiating, costly, and enduring, so that when the New Testament announces that God is love (1 John 4:8), it is not introducing a new idea but unveiling the fullness of what אָהַב regularly named.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Verse-level guides showing how this original-language form works in its specific context, including grammar, verse function, and guarded interpretation.
Hebrew word. Encompasses both covenant loyalty and emotional attachment; God's love combines protective choice with relational intimacy
Encompasses both covenant loyalty and emotional attachment; God's love combines protective choice with relational intimacy
to have affection for (sexually or otherwise) BDB: love Usage: (be-) love(-d, -ly, -r), like, friend.
How the stem changes the meaning of this verb across the biblical text.
This verb appears through different tense, voice, mood, or stem patterns. Those forms help readers see how the action is presented in context.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 2 selected witnesses from 211 lexical occurrence verses.
אָהַב is a primitive root - no further derivation.
Expresses Yahweh’s covenant affection.Hosea 11:1-7
Defines divine covenant commitment despite infidelity.Hosea 3:1-5
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
This word opens a direct pastoral pathway into the character of God as a God who loves first and commands love as the whole-life response of the redeemed. It allows a preacher to speak of love without sentimentality, to hold together divine initiative and human obligation, and to show a congregation that the love God commands is the same love He has already given.
It also opens the command to love neighbor as genuinely connected to the love of God — not a secondary ethical afterthought but the outward movement of the same whole-person orientation.
It corrects the sentimentalist reading of biblical love — the idea that love is only or primarily a feeling, that it rises and falls with emotion, and that when the feeling is absent the love is absent. אָהַב is a verb of orientation, commitment, and will. It also corrects cold dutiful religion that keeps God at arm's length and obeys without delight. The Shema does not ask for compliance — it asks for the whole person.
And it corrects the popular assumption that God's love must be earned or maintained by the quality of the believer's performance. The Old Testament's love declarations arrive to unworthy, failing, and exiled people.
Start with the congregation's actual experience: they have been told that God loves them, but they are not sure what that means or whether it endures when they fail. Then open the Old Testament and let the word work in its own landscape — show God saying "I have loved you" to people in exile (Jer 31:3), to people who look abandoned (Isa 43:4), to people who challenged the claim (Mal 1:2).
The Hebrew verb does not need to be announced by name. What it needs is to be heard in its own sentences. Then bring the Shema: the love God commands is the love He has already extended. We love because He first loved. Do not introduce this as a Greek or Hebrew lesson. Introduce it as a question: what kind of love has God shown, and what kind of love does He ask for?