A Witness to the Consistency of God’s Faithful Love
A Review of
Hesed, the Seed of the Biblical Story: New Life for Old Testament Theology
Jennifer Matheny
Paperback: Baker Academic, 2026
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Reviewed by Emily Cash
In a culture often wary of the so-called “Old Testament God,” Jennifer Matheny’s new book—Hesed, the Seed of the Biblical Story: New Life for Old Testament Theology—is a bright and fruitful reminder that the love of God grows out of every corner of the canon, originating in the being of YHWH and blooming in the places and people where we might least expect it.
As the title suggests, the book is attentive to one lexical formulation of that love, the Hebrew word hesed, which is variously rendered in English translations as “love,” “loving-kindness,” “steadfast love,” or “mercy.” But, as both Matheny’s book and previous studies of the word attest, hesed is too multivalent and theologically significant to be pressed into any simple translation.
It should be noted that the book is published by Baker Academic and not necessarily intended for a lay audience. However, the scholarly rigor of Matheny’s argument is presented in readable, even warm, prose, and because much of the technical discussion and language is contained in the footnotes, the body of the argument is refreshingly approachable. Matheny not only integrates introductions to more scholarly concepts and designations, but she also employs and models different approaches to the text (synchronic v. diachronic, comparative, intertextual, etc.) that enrich readers’ interpretive skills. That multidimensionality makes the book both an exploration of hesed specifically and a companion for anyone looking to study the OT with more attention and intention.
However, that’s not to say that Matheny offers readers hesed as a kind of “key” that unlocks or organizes the whole Old Testament. In some sense, Matheny complicates the text, proposing a rather unwieldy definition of hesed as, “the loyal loving-kindness that originates in God’s nature, embodying both answerability and possibility through anticipated and creative relational endeavors and expressions among God, humanity and creation.”
But her resistance to simplifying hesed to a sound-bite is, in large part, the point of the book: instead of making hesed an idea to be understood, she explores hesed as a relational reality that requires contextual engagement, and therein it comes to be known, tasted and seen in the text rather than just intellectually grasped.
Hence, the governing metaphor of the book is hesed as a seed, which Matheny proposes as a generative alternative to biblical theology’s frequent attempts to locate a “center” of the Old Testament. So, with all the potentiality and dynamism implied by a seed, Matheny turns to dozens of specific texts, insightfully exploring different uses of the word to give it open-ended shape. After reviewing the scholarship on the term, which she finds to be both enriching and insufficient, she develops her own “definition” by proceeding programmatically through sections of the OT — the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, and the Psalms. Devoting a chapter to each section, she describes how hesed is used generally, while also doing a detailed analysis of specific texts. And, while the temptation of biblical theology is to avoid or flatten difficult texts that seem to contradict who we think God is (or should be), Matheny chooses to address many of the gnarliest bits of the OT (including herem, lament, and imprecatory prayer).
I’m tempted to summarize these core chapters here, but doing so would undercut the book’s explicit goal: readers are meant to get their hands dirty in the soil of scripture, to root around with Matheny’s expert guidance and to patiently allow hesed to unfold before their own eyes. I will say that Matheny’s exposition of the creation narratives generates her conviction that “the Torah presents an ideal vision of humanity imaging YHWH by demonstrating hesed to other human beings (as people-keepers) and to creation (as earth-keepers),” a conviction that not only shapes much of the book, but is also a vital corrective to those who’ve understood hesed to be uniquely divine. Beyond that, it only seems right to leave readers to open the treasure-trove of this book for themselves, explore the depths of God’s hesed, and find themselves more robustly called to the work of image-bearing.
There were a few points at which Matheny’s commitment to the seed metaphor seemed to conceal rather than reveal — for example, using the language of “dormancy” to describe human neglect of hesed implies a kind of adaptation, rather than an often malicious neglect to care for a vulnerable Other. But my only other critiques of the book are a function of my own interests and convictions. For example, I found her commitment to the “storied” quality of scripture, even in non-narrative genres, to be at points more constrictive than illuminating. And, especially given the book’s attention to silence, I would have loved for Matheny to address the potential meaning of hesed’s absence from several books of the OT (which is, arguably, a kind of lexical silence).
But the book is definitely worth reading, for it is itself a life-giving expression of hesed — it is faithfully attentive to texts and characters that readers of the OT would either be apt to miss, because of their smallness or discordance with our expectations, or to dismiss, because we don’t know what to make of them. Matheny beautifully bears the image of the Old Testament God into the world through this book, which is wise, disciplined, and abounding in steadfast love.
Emily Cash
Emily Cash is a doctoral student in Old Testament at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. A former bookseller and then small-town pastor, her work grows out of a longstanding vocation of reading, drawing together literature, Scripture, and the life of the Church. She cohosts the podcast Holy Writ, a conversation at the intersection of novels and Scripture, and authors the Substack newsletter Driftwood Prayers.
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