A fast
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צוֹם (ṣôm) is the noun for a fast — the practice of abstaining from food as a deliberate religious act, typically accompanied by prayer, lamentation, and the physical expression of repentance or urgent need. The corresponding verb is ṣûm (H6684, to fast).
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Full entry for צוֹם (H6685) · Open the biblical lexicon
צוֹם (ṣôm) is the noun for a fast — the practice of abstaining from food as a deliberate religious act, typically accompanied by prayer, lamentation, and the physical expression of repentance or urgent need. The corresponding verb is ṣûm (H6684, to fast).
The BSB source-word alignment has 26 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include a fast (9), with fasting (3), - (2), of fasting (2), the fast (2).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at 2 Samuel 12:16. Its strongest book concentrations include Isaiah (4), Zechariah (4), Joel (3), Psalms (3).
צוֹם (ṣôm) is the noun for a fast — the practice of abstaining from food as a deliberate religious act, typically accompanied by prayer, lamentation, and the physical expression of repentance or urgent need. The corresponding verb is ṣûm (H6684, to fast). In the OT, fasting is regularly set within the context of the covenant relationship: it is an act of turning toward God with the whole body, not merely with the voice, when the ordinary rhythms of life cannot continue as usual.
The most dramatic ṣôm in the Hebrew Bible occurs in Jonah 3:5-7: when Jonah's proclamation reaches Nineveh, the people believed God, 'proclaimed a fast (ṣôm), and put on sackcloth.' Then the king decreed that both humans and animals should fast and cry out to God. The Ninevite ṣôm is striking in its scope (an entire pagan city, from the greatest to the least, including livestock) and in its theological seriousness — the king explicitly grounds the fast in the hope that God 'may turn and relent' (Jon 3:9).
The ṣôm is not mere ritual compliance but an expression of genuine corporate conviction about the divine character. In the broader OT, ṣôm is associated with grief (2 Sam 1:12, fasting at the death of Saul and Jonathan), military crisis (Judg 20:26, fasting before battle), and penitence (1 Sam 7:6, Israel fasting at Mizpah as an act of confession). The prophets complicate the picture significantly: Isaiah 58 challenges fasting that is externally performed without internal transformation, and Zechariah 7-8 asks whether the fasts of the exile were genuinely for God or for themselves.
These prophetic critiques do not abolish fasting but insist on its integrity.
צוֹם is currently counted by the local OT index at about 26 uses in the OT, with the corresponding verb ṣûm adding further uses. Key concentrations appear in narrative contexts (David, Nehemiah, Esther), in the prophetic literature (Isaiah 58, Zechariah 7-8, Joel 2), and in Jonah 3. The ṣôm is commonly accompanied by prayer and often by sackcloth and ashes — it belongs to the cluster of repentance-and-mourning practices.
The people of Nineveh believed God; and they proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from their greatest even to their least.
The most remarkable ṣôm in Scripture: a pagan Gentile city, not a covenant people, hearing a five-word proclamation and responding with genuine corporate penitence. The ṣôm here is a signal of total corporate response — 'from the greatest to the least' is the phrase used in Jer 31:34 for the scope of the new covenant; Nineveh's fast enacts a similar totality. The ṣôm and the sackcloth are the body expressing what the heart has been convicted of by a single prophetic word.
Isn’t this the fast that I have chosen: to break the chains of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and tear off every yoke?
Isaiah's great ṣôm-critique: not the external absence of food but the internal reorientation that produces justice. The prophet does not abolish fasting but relocates its content — the ṣôm God chooses is enacted in releasing the oppressed, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless. The Ninevite fast (Jon 3) partially fulfills this by the king's command to 'turn from their evil way and from the violence in their hands' (Jon 3:8) — the external ṣôm requires the moral transformation Isaiah demands.
“Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to Me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning.”
Joel's call to a sacred ṣôm as the appropriate response to the coming Day of the Lord. The ṣôm is one of three bodily expressions (fasting, weeping, mourning) that accompany the heart's turning — but Joel 2:13 immediately qualifies: 'tear your heart and not your garments.' The ṣôm is the body's participation in genuine repentance, not its substitute. Joel grounds the call in the ḥannûn-raḥûm character of God (2:13) — the same character Jonah cites in 4:2.
On the twenty-fourth day of the same month, the Israelites gathered together, fasting and wearing sackcloth, with dust on their heads.
The great post-exile assembly of repentance: the returned community gathered in ṣôm and sackcloth to confess the sins of themselves and their fathers. The ṣôm here is corporate and historical — the whole community engaging in the posture of penitence as they receive the covenant renewal under Ezra and Nehemiah. The connection to Jonah 3 is pointed: both the Ninevites and the returning Jewish community use the same cluster of practices (ṣôm + sackcloth) to express genuine corporate turning.
David pleaded with God for the boy. He fasted and went into his house and spent the night lying in sackcloth on the ground.
David's ṣôm for the dying child after the Bathsheba affair: seven days of fasting, lying on the earth, refusing to eat with his servants — a whole-body expression of grief and petition. When the child dies, David rises, washes, and eats. His servants are puzzled, but David explains: 'while the child was still alive, I fasted and wept... but now he is dead. Why should I fast?' The ṣôm was petitionary, not a formula; when its purpose was resolved (one way or the other), the fast ended.
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How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Hebrew word. Voluntary self-denial of food as covenant response; expresses repentance, mourning, or urgent petition before God
Voluntary self-denial of food as covenant response; expresses repentance, mourning, or urgent petition before God
a fast BDB: fasting Usage: fast(-ing).
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
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צוֹם is built from this root:
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The Ninevite fast in Jonah 3 is one of the most theologically potent events in the Hebrew Bible: an entire pagan city, with no covenant history and no Torah, responding to a five-word proclamation with genuine corporate repentance expressed through ṣôm and sackcloth. Jesus cites this in Matthew 12:41 as a standing rebuke to his generation: 'The men of Nineveh will stand up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.'
The ṣôm of Nineveh sets the bar — and then Jesus announces he is more than Jonah. The homiletical use of ṣôm is not primarily about advocating for the practice of fasting (though that is legitimate) but about what genuine corporate repentance looks like when it happens: it involves the body, not just the mind; it involves the community, not just individuals; and it is proportionate in seriousness to the divine word that generated it.
Isaiah 58's critique is the permanent hermeneutical companion to ṣôm: no practice of fasting is valid if it is uncoupled from justice and mercy. The fast that God chooses moves from empty stomach to open hand.
Jon.3.5
צוֹם is the noun; ṣûm (H6684) is the corresponding Qal verb (to fast). The word refers specifically to abstaining from food, though the full practice always includes prayer, and often sackcloth, ashes, weeping, and the cessation of ordinary activity. The Ninevite fast in Jon 3:7 is extended to animals ('let neither man nor animal, herd nor flock, taste anything') — an unusual expansion that may be a literary intensification of totality rather than a literal prescription for livestock fasting.
The phrase 'proclaim a fast' (qārāʾ ṣôm) is the standard formula for calling a communal fast. In Jonah 3:5 and Joel 1:14 / 2:15, the call goes out to the whole community; in Esther 4:16 it is Esther calling the Jewish community to three days of ṣôm before her approach to the king.
Jesus assumes fasting as a continuing practice for his disciples: Matthew 6:16-18 addresses 'when you fast' rather than 'if you fast,' redirecting the practice from public piety to private devotion before the Father who sees in secret. Matthew 9:14-15 (Mark 2:18-20; Luke 5:33-35) frames the absence of fasting during Jesus' ministry as appropriate to the wedding-feast nature of his presence: you do not fast at a wedding.
But when the bridegroom is taken away, the disciples will fast — placing fasting in the time between the ascension and the return, precisely where the church now lives. Acts 13:2-3 and 14:23 show the early church practicing ṣôm at key moments of discernment and commissioning. The Ninevite ṣôm's citation in Matthew 12:41 as a paradigm for repentance connects the OT practice to Jesus' proclamation: what the five-word 'yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown' produced in an ancient pagan city, Jesus' gospel should produce in those who hear him.
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