The Difference Between Fear and Dread

For when the vibe is reverent, curious, and indulgent.

Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will not leave or forsake you. – Deuteronomy 31:6

This, at first, seems to be a wordy verse until you consider the nuanced difference between fear and dread. Dread is to be worried that something you do not want to happen will happen. Fear is to be worried that something bad will happen. So dread is worry for a specific circumstance and fear is worry about an unknown, but negative circumstance. These are two discrete emotional states, and God warns us against doing both.

Then, there is the parallel syntax of the verse. DO be strong and courageous. DO NOT fear or dread. God WILL NOT leave or forsake. Each pair of actions is similar, yet distinct. You already know about the fear and dread of the mid-verse statement. Turning toward the leading order: strength is the quality of being physically strong, which can be useful, but I suspect the meaning of strength here is the capacity to withstand great force or pressure. Courage is the capacity to do that which is frightening (or something unknown that we suspect will have negative implications based on the understood definition). So, these pairs of words come together to form a complex order – cultivate the capacity to do that which frightens you and also do not be frightened; be able to withstand unspecified pressures while eliminating your worries about specific ones.

That just leaves us with God’s promises – to neither leave nor forsake. Forsake is the more straightforward of the two words. It means to abandon (or cease support), to renounce (or declare cessation of support), to give up. Leave is somewhat more interesting a term. It means either to go away from or to allow to remain. It also refers to the lay of the balls on a pool table after a player makes a move. The connotation of the leaving depends entirely on the disposition of the thing being left. In this case, God leaving us would see us rather in a lurch considering all of the fear and dread that we are grappling with. Unlike the leave of a pool table, there are drastic physical and emotional circumstances at stake with this leaving.

Taken together, these pairs of six words form an equation; specific actions to take and not to take and, most importantly, what a person can expect from God.