1 Peter 5:7

The letter opens by naming its readers. The American Standard Version renders the address as "to the elect who are sojourners of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia." Those are five Roman provinces covering most of what is now Turkey. The introduction to 1 Peter published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops describes these "chosen sojourners" as people who feel an alienation from their previous religious roots and from the society around them.

That is the situation the letter keeps returning to. Chapter 4 speaks of a fiery trial and of readers being reproached for the name of Christ. Chapter 2 tells them they are spoken against as evildoers. The same USCCB introduction notes that in 4:12 through 4:19 the persecution is described as already occurring.

That introduction also lays out the disagreement about who wrote the letter and when. From Irenaeus in the late second century until modern times, Christian tradition regarded Peter the apostle as the author, writing from Rome shortly before he was martyred under Nero between AD 64 and 67, with "Babylon" in 5:13 read as a code name for Rome.

Some modern scholars, the same page says, point to the cultivated Greek, the use of the Greek Septuagint when the Old Testament is quoted, and the scale of the persecution described, and place the letter decades later. Other scholars answer that a secretary, the Silvanus named in 5:12, gave the letter its literary style.

For reading verse 7 the dating question changes very little. On every account the readers were a religious minority under social pressure in a place that was not home.

Here is the passage around it in the World English Bible, from verse 6 through verse 9. Read it as one block before you read verse 7 by itself.

"Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your worries on him, because he cares for you. Be sober and self-controlled. Be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, walks around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Withstand him steadfast in your faith, knowing that your brothers who are in the world are undergoing the same sufferings."

Two things happen on either side of the verse that almost never travel with it. Before it, a command to get low under a hand that is described as mighty. After it, an instruction to stay sober and awake because something is hunting. The verse sits between submission and vigilance.

The paragraph closes at verse 10, and the World English Bible ends it this way: "But may the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you." The phrase "after you have suffered a little while" is doing work. Peter puts a limit on the suffering while treating it as still underway.

The Greek text analysis at Biblehub parses every word of the verse. The word translated "casting" is epiripsantes, tagged there as an aorist active participle in the nominative masculine plural. A participle carries no command of its own. It attaches to the nearest imperative, and the nearest imperative is "humble yourselves" in verse 6. So the casting is the shape the humbling takes. Handing the weight over is what getting low under God's hand looks like in practice.

The object is stranger than English shows. Peter writes pasan ten merimnan hymon, and Biblehub tags merimnan as accusative feminine singular. The noun is singular. English readers picture a stack of separate cares to be sorted through, and the Greek has all of your care as one mass, thrown in one motion. Thayer's lexicon glosses merimna as care or anxiety and traces it to a verb meaning to be drawn in different directions, comparing the English word distraction.

The last clause is the part worth slowing down on. The King James has "for he careth for you." The Greek is hoti auto melei peri hymon. Strong's entry for melo calls it a primary verb used only in the third person singular present indicative, impersonally, meaning it matters. A wooden rendering would be: because to him it matters concerning you. The claim is about God's attention. Whether you can feel that attention is outside what the sentence says.

It does not promise that the trouble goes away. The next sentence in the same paragraph tells the readers to stay sober because a predator is circling, and the sentence after that says other believers in the world are going through the same thing. Verse 10 speaks of glory after they have suffered a little while. Nothing in the paragraph suggests that casting the care removes the cause.

It does not promise a feeling. There is no verb here about calm or relief. Philippians 4:6-7 does promise a guarded heart, in different words and a different letter. Verse 7 promises attention: it matters to him concerning you. Those are separate claims, and merging them sets people up to conclude that their faith failed when the dread stayed.

It is not a private message. Biblehub tags every pronoun in the verse as second person plural, and the paragraph it belongs to is addressed to congregations, then followed by a reminder that other believers are carrying the same load. The verse assumes you are inside a group of people who know what you are going through.

It does not say anxiety is disobedience. Peter names the care as something his readers have and tells them where to put it. Psalm 55, the passage his wording comes from, is spoken by someone whose heart is sore pained within him, who says fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and who wishes for wings like a dove so he could fly away and be at rest.

People stretch the verse in these directions for a plain reason. They are frightened and they want the shortest true sentence they can hold. That is a decent instinct working with a cropped text.

Matthew 6:25-34 and Philippians 4:6 both use the verb merimnao, which Strong's derives directly from merimna, the noun Peter uses. The word family is shared, so the three passages sound alike in English. They are answering different questions.

In Matthew, Jesus is talking about provision. The World English Bible has him say, "Therefore I tell you, don't be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear." The argument runs through birds that do not farm and a question about whether worry adds any time to a life. The subject is what you will eat and whether tomorrow is covered.

In Philippians the move is procedural. Thayer glosses the command there as be anxious about nothing, and the next clause hands the reader prayer as the practice, with a guarded heart following. Peter's sentence does neither of those. His readers are not worried about lunch and he offers them no technique. He tells a pressured minority to get under God's hand, throw the whole weight there, and then stay awake.

Reading the three as one message flattens all of them. If what you are carrying is money or food, Matthew is the passage that speaks to it. If what you are carrying came from other people deciding against you, Peter wrote to that.

The King James Version of 1611 reads: "Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you." Verse 6 ends with a colon and verse 7 opens with a capital C. On the page it looks like a fresh sentence with its own subject, which is a large part of why this verse travels alone on posters and phone screens.

The American Standard Version of 1901 reads: "casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you." Lowercase c, with a comma before it and no break from verse 6. The World English Bible reads: "casting all your worries on him, because he cares for you." Same punctuation choice, plainer vocabulary.

The disagreement here is a matter of English punctuation. All three are translating one participial clause of Greek. The later editors punctuated to show the grammar. The King James punctuated the verse as a break, and four centuries later the eye reads that colon and capital as a full stop.

The vocabulary gap is real too. The King James translators used care for merimna in all six places the noun appears, and rendered the related verb mostly as take thought. In their English the word carried an anxious weight. Today care mostly means tenderness, so the King James line now sounds like it is about affection in both halves. Anxiety and worries recover what the older word has lost.

There is also a spelling variant in the Greek manuscripts. The Byzantine Majority and Textus Receptus editions print epirripsantes with a doubled rho, while Westcott and Hort and the Nestle text print epiripsantes with one. Thayer notes the difference. It changes nothing about meaning. If you want to compare modern copyrighted wordings such as the New International Version or the English Standard Version, open them side by side at BibleGateway.

Thayer's lexicon says the wording of 1 Peter 5:7 comes from Psalm 54:23 in the Greek Septuagint numbering, which is Psalm 55:22 in English Bibles. The King James renders that psalm line: "Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved." Peter is handing his readers a line they would already have known by heart. There is no citation formula in verse 7, so what you have is his own sentence built out of the psalm's vocabulary.

The Hebrew noun there is yehab, and Blue Letter Bible counts it exactly one time in the entire Hebrew text. When a word occurs once, translators have almost nothing to work from. The King James, American Standard, and World English all print "burden," which reads naturally.

Brown, Driver and Briggs go a different way. Their entry glosses yehab as "lot (as that which is given)," and paraphrases the psalm line as casting on the LORD your lot, meaning the care and anxiety that are your portion. On that reading the psalm is about the hand you were dealt and not a weight you picked up.

Both readings are in print from serious reference works. Strong's own definition splits the difference, giving "what is given (by Providence), i.e. a lot" and then listing burden as the King James rendering. If the BDB reading is right, the psalm line behind Peter has a sharper edge: bring God the situation you did not choose, along with the dread it produced.

The psalm is worth reading whole. Its complaint is that the betrayal came from a friend. The King James has the speaker say it was "a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance," someone he had walked to the house of God with. That is the setting of the line Peter draws on.

The verb, Strong's G1977, shows up twice in the New Testament. Once here, and once in Luke 19:35, where the disciples throw their cloaks over the colt before Jesus rides into Jerusalem. The King James translates both with the word cast.

The plainest thing this tells you is that the verb is physical. It describes moving an object off yourself and onto something else, and Thayer glosses it simply as to throw upon or place upon. Two occurrences is a thin base for a doctrine, and a sermon that makes the cloaks carry a lot of freight is reading more into the pair than the count supports.

What it does settle is the direction of motion. The word means throw onto. That is a decision, and it is one you may have to make again tomorrow with the same care.

You already know when. A biopsy result that came back on a Friday afternoon. A layoff email with a calendar invite attached. A child who has stopped answering the phone. A marriage where nobody has said the real thing out loud in six months. Three in the morning, awake, doing arithmetic on a life.

Here is a way to use the passage in that state. Open a Bible to 1 Peter 5 and read verses 6 through 11 as one paragraph, out loud if you can. Then write down the single care you are carrying, in one sentence, in whatever words you would actually use with a friend.

Then do the thing the verse assumes you already have. Peter's readers were in a congregation and knew that others were carrying the same weight. Pick one human being with a name and a phone number, and send them the sentence you wrote. A pastor, a doctor, a sponsor, a sister. This page is software and holds no teaching authority. It cannot sit with you.

If the honest sentence you wrote involves hurting yourself or someone else, stop reading and call or text 988 in the United States. That is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, staffed by people, running all night.