It names a whole-body posture before God, somewhere between dread and worship, that Hebrew never bothered to separate.
Behind the English phrase sits the Hebrew yirah, from a root that also gives you the ordinary word for being afraid. The same root describes Israel shaking at Sinai and a wise person's settled reverence toward God. Hebrew doesn't split these into two words the way English wants to. Fearing the LORD can mean visceral alarm, or it can mean the steady orientation of a life, and often the text lets both meanings vibrate at once.
In wisdom literature especially, 'the fear of the LORD' becomes almost a technical term for true religion itself, the right relationship a creature has with its Maker, out of which knowledge and moral sense actually grow. It is not primarily an emotion you manufacture. It's a recognition of scale, God as God, and you as not. The New Testament carries this into Greek with phobos, used both for ordinary fright and for this same reverent stance toward God and Christ.
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.
States the fear of the LORD as the starting point of knowledge itself, not an emotional add-on.
And He said to man, ‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to turn away from evil is understanding.’”
Defines wisdom in terms of this fear after a long poem on how hidden true wisdom is.
Come, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD.
The psalmist offers to teach it, treating it as something learned rather than merely felt.
Then the church throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria experienced a time of peace. It grew in strength and numbers, living in the fear of the Lord and the encouragement of the Holy Spirit.
Uses the Greek phobos for a church living in reverent awe of the Lord in a season of peace.
English versions mostly keep 'fear' in the classic phrase because it's so fixed in the tradition, but elsewhere they scatter the same Hebrew and Greek roots across 'awe', 'reverence', 'respect', and even 'wonder'. Newer paraphrases sometimes swap 'fear of the LORD' for 'reverence for the LORD' to soften it for modern ears, which smooths out the older sense that this reverence has real trembling in it, not just polite deference.
A popular workaround says the fear of the Lord 'really just means respect,' the way you might respect a strict but kind teacher. That's an overcorrection. The Hebrew and Greek words are the same ones used for genuine fright elsewhere in the same books, and the biblical writers seem happy to let that discomfort stand rather than resolve it into something tamer.
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