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Japanese In the Bible, bracelets are gifts of love and marks of honour. Abraham’s servant puts gold bracelets on Rebekah’s wrists when she is chosen to marry Isaac (Genesis 24:47). God, telling Jerusalem how he loved her, says, “I put bracelets upon thy hands” (Ezekiel 16:11). Israel offered them to God, and prophets warned when they fed pride.
In both of those first scenes, someone else does the putting on. Rebekah came to the well with her pitcher on her shoulder, gave a stranger a drink and then drew water for all his camels, and the servant, who had asked God for exactly that sign, “wondering at her held his peace” (Genesis 24:21). Only then did the gold come out. In Ezekiel the scene is darker and tenderer still: God finds Jerusalem as a newborn girl “cast out in the open field” on the day she was born, “polluted in thine own blood,” and says to her, “Live” (Ezekiel 16:5–6). He washes her, clothes her, and puts bracelets on her hands. We do not dress ourselves for that kind of love. We hold out our hands and are adorned.
Where are bracelets mentioned in the Bible?
The King James Version says “bracelet” once and “bracelets” ten times, in eleven verses, all in the Old Testament. The New Testament never mentions them. Behind those eleven verses stand five different Hebrew words, and three of the verses describe something else. Judah’s “bracelets” in Genesis 38:18 and 38:25 translate pathil, which the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon defines as the cord from which a seal was hung, and newer translations such as the English Standard Version read “your signet and your cord and your staff.” In Exodus 35:22 the word is chach, a hook or ring, perhaps a brooch or nose-ring. That leaves eight verses about true bracelets: Rebekah’s in Genesis 24:22, 24:30 and 24:47, the war offering in Numbers 31:50, Saul’s in 2 Samuel 1:10, the jewellery of Isaiah 3:19, and Ezekiel’s two pictures of Jerusalem in Ezekiel 16:11 and 23:42.
Other translations give other totals, because translators choose between “bracelet”, “armlet”, “cord” and “brooch” for these words. The English Standard Version, for instance, calls Saul’s bracelet an “armlet”. The stories stay the same.
Why did Abraham’s servant give Rebekah bracelets?
Because his prayer had been answered before he finished praying it. Sent to Abraham’s own kindred to “take a wife unto my son Isaac” (Genesis 24:4), the servant stood at the well and asked for a sign: let the young woman who says, “Drink, and I will give thy camels drink also,” be the one God had chosen (Genesis 24:14). “Before he had done speaking,” Rebekah came out (24:15), and she did exactly that. “As the camels had done drinking,” he took “a golden earring of half a shekel weight, and two bracelets for her hands of ten shekels weight of gold” (24:22). Easton’s Bible Dictionary puts a shekel at a little more than half an ounce, so ten shekels came to about five ounces of gold, a gift any family would notice.
The servant’s first response was worship. “The man bowed down his head, and worshipped the LORD,” blessing the God “who hath not left destitute my master of his mercy and his truth” (24:26–27). Then Rebekah “ran, and told them of her mother’s house these things” (24:28), and her family noticed the gold. When her brother Laban “saw the earring and bracelets upon his sister’s hands,” he hurried out to the man at the well (24:29–30). The bracelets came first, and the proposal came after them. More gifts followed, “jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment” (24:53), and when her family asked Rebekah, “Wilt thou go with this man?” she answered in three words: “I will go” (24:58).
Genesis does not call the bracelets a bride price, and it gives them no hidden meaning. They answer a kindness at the well, and they tell a family that the visitor comes from a house of which he can say, “the LORD hath blessed my master greatly” (24:35).
What do the bracelets in Ezekiel 16 mean?
They are God’s own gift in a parable of his love for his people. Ezekiel tells Jerusalem’s story as the life of a foundling whom God rescued, raised and married: “I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord GOD, and thou becamest mine” (Ezekiel 16:8). Then the bridegroom dresses his bride. “I decked thee also with ornaments, and I put bracelets upon thy hands, and a chain on thy neck. And I put a jewel on thy forehead, and earrings in thine ears, and a beautiful crown upon thine head” (16:11–12). Her beauty, God says, “was perfect through my comeliness, which I had put upon thee” (16:14).
Then the parable turns. “Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men” (16:17). The gifts of love were melted down for idols. In Ezekiel 23 the image is darker still: two sisters, Aholah and Aholibah, who stand for Samaria and Jerusalem (23:4), take their bracelets now from foreign lovers, “Sabeans from the wilderness, which put bracelets upon their hands, and beautiful crowns upon their heads” (23:42). The same gold, put on by another hand, means unfaithfulness, and any of us can spend on something else the beauty God has put on us.
Why did the Israelites give their bracelets to God?
The clearest case follows the war against Midian. The captains came to Moses (Numbers 31:48), told him they had counted their soldiers and “there lacketh not one man of us,” and brought “jewels of gold, chains, and bracelets, rings, earrings, and tablets, to make an atonement for our souls before the LORD” (31:49–50). Moses and Eleazar the priest took the gold and “brought it into the tabernacle of the congregation, for a memorial for the children of Israel before the LORD” (31:54). Every man had come home, and the captains answered with the most precious things they had carried back, given for their souls and kept before God as a memorial.
The King James Version also lists “bracelets” among the gifts for building the tabernacle, brought by “as many as were willing hearted” (Exodus 35:22), though the Hebrew word there probably means brooches. Either way, the jewellery Israel wore went to God because hearts were willing.
Why did the Amalekite bring Saul’s bracelet to David?
To prove that Saul was dead, and to win favour with the man who would be king. After the battle on Mount Gilboa a young Amalekite came to David with a story. “I stood upon him, and slew him,” he said of Saul, “and I took the crown that was upon his head, and the bracelet that was on his arm, and have brought them hither unto my lord” (2 Samuel 1:10). The crown and the bracelet were a king’s insignia, and he carried them as proof.
His story does not match the one the Bible has already told. Saul asked his armourbearer to kill him, and when the man refused, “Saul took a sword, and fell upon it” (1 Samuel 31:4). Whatever the Amalekite really did on the mountain, his boast cost him his life. “How wast thou not afraid,” David asked him, “to stretch forth thine hand to destroy the LORD’s anointed?” (2 Samuel 1:14). David later said of him that he “thought that I would have given him a reward for his tidings” (2 Samuel 4:10). He had carried a king’s bracelet to buy favour, and it testified against him instead.
Does the Bible warn against wearing bracelets?
It warns against pride, and bracelets appear in the warning. Isaiah describes the daughters of Zion walking “with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet” (Isaiah 3:16), the tinkle of anklets. “In that day,” the prophet says, “the Lord will take away” their finery, and the list includes “the chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers” (3:18–19). In the next verse the King James “earrings” translate lechashim, which the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon defines as “charms, amulets, worn by women,” and the English Standard Version reads “amulets”. The judgment ends with the city’s beauty turned to grief: “instead of well set hair baldness … and burning instead of beauty” (3:24).
The New Testament says nothing about bracelets as such. Its two warnings about adornment speak of gold in general. Peter asks wives to let their beauty be “the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price” (1 Peter 3:3–4), and Paul asks women to adorn themselves “not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works” (1 Timothy 2:9–10). Both passages are about display and the heart behind it. Whether a Christian may wear jewellery at all is a question with its own page: is wearing jewelry a sin?
What do Christian bracelets mean today?
The Bible says nothing about the faith bracelets Christians wear now. Their meanings come from the people who made them, and most are reminders. The best known carry the letters WWJD, “What would Jesus do?” The question comes from In His Steps, the story Charles Sheldon first preached to his Kansas congregation in 1896, and according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, the bracelets began in 1989 with Janie Tinklenberg, a youth leader at Calvary Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan, who saw her students making friendship bracelets for one another and had two hundred made with the letters stitched in.
Some bracelets tell the gospel in coloured beads, a way of sharing it with children. If yours has gold, dark, red, white and green beads, it follows the Wordless Book, which the preacher Charles Spurgeon introduced in 1866 with three pages, black, red and white. Child Evangelism Fellowship, which has printed it since the 1920s, now uses five colours, gold, dark, red, clean and green, each standing for a part of the gospel; “clean” is the white page of Spurgeon’s book.
Catholics and Orthodox Christians also wear prayer on the wrist. A rosary bracelet is often a single decade of the rosary, and the liturgist Father Edward McNamara, answering a reader’s question in 2011, wrote that rosary bracelets “are never mere jewelry but are worn as a sign of faith.” Orthodox Christians pray with a prayer rope, which the Orthodox Church in America describes as “tied with a number of close knots for remembering the Jesus prayer.”
A bracelet worn for protection is another matter. Isaiah’s list of the finery God would strip from the proud daughters of Zion included their amulets, and the Catholic Catechism says plainly, “Wearing charms is also reprehensible” (paragraph 2117). A bracelet with a verse on it can do what Moses asked of God’s words, to “bind them for a sign upon thine hand” (Deuteronomy 6:8), so long as we remember that the words, and the God who spoke them, do the keeping.
Jerusalem’s story in Ezekiel does not end with the stolen gold. After the unfaithfulness and the judgment, God speaks again to the girl he found in the field: “Nevertheless I will remember my covenant with thee in the days of thy youth, and I will establish unto thee an everlasting covenant” (Ezekiel 16:60).
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