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Bible Dictionaries
Pleasure
Vine's Expository Dictionary of OT Words
or A. Noun.
Chêphets (חֵפֶץ, Strong's #2656), “pleasure; delight; desire; request; affair; thing.” None of the 39 occurrences of this word appear before First Samuel. All its occurrences are scattered through the rest of biblical literature.
This word often means “pleasure” or “delight”: “Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord?” (1 Sam. 15:22—the first occurrence). Thus “the preacher [writer of Ecclesiastes] sought to find out acceptable [chêphets] words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth” (Eccl. 12:10), words that were both true and aesthetically pleasing. A good wife works with “hands of delight,” or hands which delight in her work because of her love for her family; “she seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly [in delight] with her hands” (Prov. 31:13).
Chepes can mean not simply what one takes pleasure in or what gives someone delight but one’s wish or desire: “Although my house be not so with God; yet he hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure: for this is all my salvation, and all my desire, although he make it not to grow” (2 Sam. 23:5). “To do one’s desire” is to grant a request (1 Kings 5:8). “Stones of desire” are precious stones (Isa. 54:12).
Third, chepes sometimes represents one’s affairs as that in which one takes delight: “… There is … a time to every purpose [literally, delight] under the heaven” (Eccl. 3:1). In Isa. 58:13 the first occurrence of this word means “pleasure” or “delight,” while the last occurrence indicates an affair or matter in which one delights: “If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable; and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words.” Finally, in one passage this word means “affair” in the sense of a “thing” or “situation”: “If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter [NASB “sight”] …” (Eccl. 5:8).
B. Verb.
Châphêts (חָפֵץ, Strong's #2654), “to take pleasure in, take care of, desire, delight in, have delight in.” This verb, which occurs 72 times in biblical Hebrew has cognates in Arabic, Phoenician, Syriac, and Arabic. Châphêts means “to delight in” in 2 Sam. 15:26: “But if he thus say, I have no delight in thee; behold, here am I, let him do to me as seemeth good unto him.”
C. Adjective.
Châphêts (חָפֵץ, Strong's #2655), “delighting in, having pleasure in.” This adjective appears 12 times in biblical Hebrew. The word is found in Ps. 35:27: “Let the Lord be magnified, which hath pleasure in the prosperity of his servant.”
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Vines, W. E., M. A. Entry for 'Pleasure'. Vine's Expository Dictionary of OT Words. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/vot/p/pleasure.html. 1940.
