Long-Suffering

And the Lord passed by before him [Moses], and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth....

-- Exodus 34: 6 (KJV)

The compound "long-suffering" debuted in William Tyndale's 1526 translation of the Epistle to the Galatians (5: 22), where it is used as a noun. Much more common today is the adjective (as in "my long-suffering accountant"), also a biblical coinage, tracing to Miles Coverdale's 1535 translation of this passage.

If you had to define the term from its context, you might mistake its meaning, considering Yahweh's temper. Yet the Lord knows that He is a jealous God, so in renewing His covenant with Israel after the golden calf debacle He pledges to rely more often on His better qualities of graciousness and mercy (Exodus 33: 19).

This doesn't mean, however, that all the Israelites' sins will be forgiven. In the same breath as He declares himself "merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth," Yahweh also notes that His patience and mercy will "by no means clear the guilty," and that a father's sin will be paid back upon four generations of his offspring (Exodus 34: 7) -- a sentence later reversed after the Babylonian exile.

In short, "long-suffering" did not originally imply meek or all-forgiving, as it tends to do today. More faithful to the original phrase is an implied breaking point: one may suffer long, but not forever, and the longer the suffering, the more violent the backlash.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!