Properly, a mesh (as allowing a liquid to run through), i.e. coarse loose cloth or sacking (used in mourning and for bagging); hence, a bag (for grain, etc.)
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שַׂק (śaq) is the coarse cloth, typically woven from dark goat or camel hair, that was worn as a garment of mourning, grief, or penitence in the ancient Semitic world. The physical quality of the material is theologically significant: rough against the skin, uncomfortable, visually distinctive — sackcloth was chosen precisely because it was not normal clothing.
Reader summary
Full entry for שַׂק (H8242) · Open the biblical lexicon
שַׂק (śaq) is the coarse cloth, typically woven from dark goat or camel hair, that was worn as a garment of mourning, grief, or penitence in the ancient Semitic world. The physical quality of the material is theologically significant: rough against the skin, uncomfortable, visually distinctive — sackcloth was chosen precisely because it was not normal.
The BSB source-word alignment has 48 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include sackcloth (25), in sackcloth (6), his sack (2), the sackcloth (2), with sackcloth (2).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Genesis 37:34. Its strongest book concentrations include Isaiah (8), Genesis (5), 1 Kings (4), Esther (4).
שַׂק (śaq) is the coarse cloth, typically woven from dark goat or camel hair, that was worn as a garment of mourning, grief, or penitence in the ancient Semitic world. The physical quality of the material is theologically significant: rough against the skin, uncomfortable, visually distinctive — sackcloth was chosen precisely because it was not normal clothing.
Wearing it was a public statement that the wearer's inner condition was not normal. In Jonah 3:5-8, śaq appears repeatedly in rapid succession: the people of Nineveh put on sackcloth, from greatest to least; the king rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes; he then decreed that both humans and animals should be covered with sackcloth and cry out to God.
The intensity and totality of the śaq response — even the animals — is the narrative's way of signaling that Nineveh's repentance was complete in expression, not superficial. The OT is consistent in pairing śaq with prayer, fasting, lamentation, and ash. Together these form a cluster of embodied practices that express the total orientation of a person or community toward God in a moment of crisis, grief, or urgent repentance.
The key theological point is that repentance in the OT is never only an interior event — the body participates. Śaq is the body saying 'I am not well; something has broken or needs to break; I am not going about my ordinary life while this stands.' The prophets repeatedly challenge śaq that is merely external (Isa 58:5; Joel 2:13 — 'rend your heart and not your garments'), but they do so within a tradition that takes the external expression seriously, not one that dismisses it.
שַׂק appears in the local Hebrew index about 48 times in the OT. It appears in contexts of individual grief (Jacob mourning Joseph, Gen 37:34), community mourning (Nineveh's fast, Jon 3), penitence (Ahab's repentance, 1 Kgs 21:27), prophetic lament (Isaiah's sackcloth, Isa 20:2; Joel 1:8, 13), and eschatological mourning (the mourning of cosmic darkness, Isa 50:3). The garment is closely associated with ashes, dust, fasting, and prostration.
The people of Nineveh believed God; and they proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from their greatest even to their least.
The breadth-statement: from the greatest (haggĕdôlîm) to the least (haqqĕṭannîm), all of Nineveh put on śaq. The social comprehensiveness is the text's point — this is not the religious elite performing a ritual; it is the whole city, across every class boundary, wearing the garment of penitence. The same spectrum is extended in vv.7-8 to include livestock, which is the narrative's way of saying that not one corner of Nineveh continued in its ordinary state.
The news reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and took off his royal robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
The most symbolically loaded action of the passage: the king rises from his throne (power posture), removes his royal robe (identity marker), puts on sackcloth (humiliation posture), and sits in ashes (mortality posture). The sequence is a complete demotion of the human claim to autonomous power before God. The king of the greatest empire of his day performs exactly the posture of the penitent — the sackcloth makes him indistinguishable from the least of his subjects.
When Ahab heard these words, he tore his clothes, put on sackcloth, and fasted. He lay down in sackcloth and walked around meekly.
Ahab's sackcloth response after Elijah's indictment of his theft of Naboth's vineyard — one of the most morally complicated repentance moments in the OT. Ahab was a persistently wicked king, but when he humbled himself in śaq, God said to Elijah, 'Have you seen how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he has humbled himself before me, I will not bring the disaster in his days.'
The divine response to the sackcloth is taken seriously even in deeply compromised circumstances — the external gesture of humility is not dismissed as performance.
Is this the fast I have chosen: a day for a man to deny himself, to bow his head like a reed, and to spread out sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast and a day acceptable to the Lord?
Isaiah's prophetic challenge to external śaq: sackcloth spread on the ground while oppression continues is not the fast God has chosen. The challenge is not against śaq as a practice but against śaq-without-justice — the external posture of humility performed while the social conditions that require real humility (release of the oppressed, feeding the hungry) remain untouched. This critique is the canonical companion to Nineveh's śaq, which does lead to the moral reorientation Jon 3:8 demands.
Then Jacob tore his clothes, put sackcloth around his waist, and mourned for his son many days.
The first individual sackcloth use in Scripture: Jacob's grief at the reported death of Joseph. The śaq is worn 'many days' — it is not a single ritual gesture but a sustained embodied state of mourning. Jacob refuses to be comforted (v.35), which shows that śaq is not merely a social form but the genuine expression of an inner condition. The same śaq that Nineveh wears in penitence, Jacob wears in grief — the garment covers the full range of situations where the body needs to speak what ordinary life cannot contain.
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.
Hebrew word. Coarse fabric embodying mourning ritual; shifts from garment to container, grief to practicality.
Coarse fabric embodying mourning ritual; shifts from garment to container, grief to practicality.
properly, a mesh (as allowing a liquid to run through), i.e. coarse loose cloth or sacking (used in mourning and for bagging); hence, a bag (for grain, etc.) BDB: sack Usage: sack(-cloth, -clothes).
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 1 selected witness from 48 lexical occurrence verses.
שַׂק is built from this root:
Greek words that correspond to or develop the meaning of this Hebrew word in the New Testament.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
The Ninevite king's sequence in Jonah 3:6 — throne to ashes, robe to sackcloth — is one of the most compact images of what genuine repentance requires of power. The śaq did not ask Nineveh to change its theology first and then act; it asked the body to enact the reorientation while the heart caught up. This is the OT wisdom about embodied spiritual practice: the body is not merely the passive recipient of inner decisions; it participates in forming them.
When the king of Nineveh put on śaq, he was not performing a ritual — he was making a statement with his body that his words of proclamation ('who knows, God may relent') had not yet fully resolved. Isaiah 58's challenge keeps the śaq practice honest: wearing rough cloth while continuing to oppress workers is not repentance in any form God recognizes. But Joel's call (2:13 — 'rend your heart and not your garments') does not abolish the garment; it insists on the heart behind it.
The pastoral use of this is to recover embodied practices of repentance and mourning in communities that have reduced spiritual life to interior states, and to insist that genuine turning involves the whole person — including the body that puts on the rough garment.
Jon.3.5
שַׂק is cognate with Akkadian saqqu and Greek sakkos (from which English sack derives — the same rough material used for grain bags). The material was dark, coarse, and uncomfortable — visually and physically the opposite of the fine linen that represented prosperity and festivity. The OT uses śaq for garments worn directly on the skin (1 Kgs 21:27, 'sackcloth on his flesh') and for coverings spread on the ground (Isa 58:5).
The pairing śaq wāʾēper (sackcloth and ashes) appears as a fixed formula for the fullest expression of corporate penitence (Esth 4:1, 3; Dan 9:3; Matt 11:21). The animals wearing śaq in Jon 3:8 is sometimes compared with other ancient Near Eastern mourning conventions, though the precise practice remains uncertain.
The NT uses sakkos (from the Hebrew śaq) in Revelation 6:12 and Matthew 11:21. Jesus' citation of Tyre and Sidon's hypothetical repentance in 'sackcloth and ashes' (Matt 11:21) shows that the śaq-practice remained a recognized image of genuine repentance into the first century. The Nineveh reference in Matthew 12:41 connects the śaq of Jonah 3 directly to the repentance Jesus demands: 'the men of Nineveh will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah.'
The embodied repentance practices of the OT — śaq, ashes, fasting, weeping — are not replaced in the NT but re-internalized in the direction of Matthew 5:3-4 ('poor in spirit,' 'those who mourn') and 6:16-18 (fasting privately before the Father). The śaq's public visibility moves toward hidden interior reality — the rough garment becomes the broken and contrite heart (Ps 51:17) — while the NT does not abolish the embodied practices but expects them to flow from that prior interior truth.
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