Fear and trembling (biblical phrase)

Fear and trembling (Ancient Greek: φόβος και τρόμος, romanised: phobos kai tromos)[1] is a phrase used throughout the Bible and the Tanakh, and in other Jewish literature.

The idea was also used by Edmund Spenser in his poem The Faerie Queene, and as the title of Søren Kierkegaard's 1843 treatise Fear and Trembling, both of which have been interpreted as referring to its use in the New Testament.

[2] References to fear and trembling are common throughout the Hebrew Bible: it is used as a stock phrase when a weaker military force encounters a stronger one, sometimes explicitly brought about by God.

[6] The theologian Klaus Berger has argued that the epiphanic connotations of "fear and trembling" continue in its use in the New Testament, but that it becomes imbued there with greater ethical force, becoming also a model for human relations with each other.

Clare Carlisle gives the source of this title as Philippians 2:12–13, writing that it creates a link between the two texts as works which address contemporary Christians in a particular historical situation, and which "explore a tension between responsibility and humble receptivity".

[15] In "The Movement of Fish", part of the 1962 collection Drowning with Others, the American poet James Dickey writes of "the instinct of fear and trembling" that unites human beings and other animals: the critic Robert Kirschten has identified this as both a biblical allusion and a reference to the work of Kierkegaard.