I’ve been thinking a lot lately about stiff necks. And not because I have a stiff neck. No, I recently spent time in a room, facing some stiff-necked people. It was not fun.

This is a post about stiff-neckedness.

The dictionary defines stiff-necked as “haughty or stubborn.” But the Bible gives the word a lot more nuance. In fact, the word comes from the Old Testament. It’s qāšê, pronounced “kawsheh,” and it can mean hard, cruel, severe, obstinate, difficult, severe, or rough. 

We readers of the Old Testament most associate it with the Israelites who, having been released from slavery, followed Moses into the wilderness to the promised land. They’d been delivered out of Egypt and carried through the waters to safety from Pharaoh’s armies. You’d think they have been grateful and happy, but instead they only got impatient waiting for Moses to receive the tablets. Off came the jewelry to be molded into an idol shaped like a calf, and God saw it all unfold. “The Lord said to Moses, ‘I have seen this people, how kawsheh they are’” (Exodus 32:9).

Haughty, yes, because they thought they’d found a better solution than God. Stubborn, yes, but a blind kind of stubborn. 

But there was more.

They were hard. They couldn’t allow the possibility that they might have been wrong. Cruel. There was cruelty in the ways they treated each other and Moses, disrespectfully, meanly. And severe. They had judged both Moses and God without understanding. Obstinant, yes, of course. Difficult and severe and rough. They were all these things because they had forgotten God, failed to trust God, and flung themselves at the mercy of false gods that were going to let them down.

It’s easy now to look back in judgment of the Israelites at this moment. The problem is that the same word kawsheh is used again to describe some far more sympathetic people.

Take the woman Hannah in 1 Samuel 1. She was desperate for a child. She took her despair to the Lord, weeping and pouring out her petitions before Him with such passion that she lost her voice. Only her lips moved. Eli the priest took her for drunk. “But Hannah answered, ‘No, my lord, I am a woman deeply kawsheh; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord’” (1 Samuel 1:15). 

Here, in this verse, kawshew meant sorrowful. It turns out that there’s sadness lurking behind stiff-neckedness too.

Ain’t that the truth? Behind all that hardness, cruelty, severity, and obstinacy lurks sadness–

Things didn’t work out the way I wanted. I did my best. Things still fell apart. Maybe if I deny it. Maybe if I refuse to look, it will all go away. Just make it go away. 

Kawsheh shows up again in another unlikely place. A king Jeroboam fears losing his son. He sends his wife to a prophet Ahijah. She tiptoes to his room, afraid of what he will tell her. 

“But when Ahijah heard the sound of her feet as she came in at the door, he said, “Come in, wife of Jeroboam; why do you pretend to be another? For I am charged with kawsheh tidings for you” (1 Kings 14:6).

The message Ahijah delivers is kawsheh indeed. The boy would die. Jeroboam would father no more sons, because he had turned away from the same God who had granted him that throne in the first place. 

It turns out that there’s some fear behind stiff-neckedness too.

Don’t tell me I helped make it happen? Did my own decisions lead me to this place? Do I have the strength to admit what I did wrong? No, so make the truth tellers leave. Just make it go away.

But the only way out of stiff-neckedness is truth telling and repentance. It’s facing our sadness and fear, our pride and wrong actions, with strength and courage, compassion and love.

And all those stiff-necked people–the Israelites, Hannah, Jeroboam and his wife–God didn’t give up on them. He stayed faithful. In the fullness of time, He even sent His son for the stiff-necked people who came after them.

Stiff necks don’t have to stay stiff.