Father in the Bible: How Many Times the Word Appears (1,675 in the KJV) and What a Father Is

The word “father” appears 1,675 times in the KJV, counting its plural. “Father,” with “father’s,” makes up 1,126 of them and “fathers” 549, mostly in the Old Testament. In Scripture a father is the one a family comes from, who provides for it, teaches it and corrects it. God takes the name for himself, above all in the New Testament.

Jesus gave us the clearest picture of what the word means in a story about a son who wasted everything. The boy comes home rehearsing an apology, and “when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). A father who was watching the road. That is the Father Jesus taught us to pray to, and the father the Bible hopes every father will be.

In the King James Version, 1,675 times in its singular and plural forms, and the Old Testament holds about three quarters of them.

Word in the KJV	Old Testament	New Testament	Whole Bible
“father” and “father’s”	757	369	1,126
“fathers”	490	59	549
All forms	1,247	428	1,675
“Father” with a capital, nearly always God	1	272	273

Genesis alone says “father” 201 times, more than any other book, because it is a book of families: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their sons. The plural “fathers” usually means ancestors, as when God tells Moses to say that “the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:15). “Fatherless” is left out of the count; it adds 43 more.

The capitals show where God is meant. Of the 273, 268 name God the Father. Four belong to human fathers, and three of those are the prodigal son speaking to his own father (Luke 15:12, 18 and 21). The fourth is the rich man calling out “Father Abraham” (Luke 16:24). The last capital is the only one in the Old Testament, a title of the promised Messiah: “his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6).

These totals cover every verse of the King James Version, Genesis to Revelation, and a second edition of the same text gives the same count. Other Bibles come out a little differently, because translators do not always choose “father” for the same words. The Reina-Valera 1960, a Spanish Bible, has its word for father 1,092 times and the plural 512 times, 1,604 in all, and its plural also serves for “parents.”

The Hebrew word is ‘ab (often written av), and the Greek is pater. The King James Old Testament translates ‘ab 1,215 times, almost always as “father” or “fathers,” and the New Testament translates pater 419 times: 268 times as “Father” for God, 150 times as “father,” and once as “parents,” for Moses’ parents in Hebrews 11:23. Those figures come from Blue Letter Bible’s concordance.

Both words reach well beyond the man who begets a child. A father is first a parent: “Honour thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12). He can be an ancestor, however distant, as when God renamed Abram “Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee” (Genesis 17:5). He can be the founder of a way of life. Jabal “was the father of such as dwell in tents,” and his brother Jubal “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ” (Genesis 4:20–21). He can be a protector of the weak. Job, remembering his former life, says, “I was a father to the poor” (Job 29:16). And he can be a teacher in the faith. When Elijah was taken up, Elisha cried, “My father, my father” (2 Kings 2:12), and Paul told the Corinthians that they had many instructors “yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel” (1 Corinthians 4:15).

Underneath them all is one idea. A father is where a life or a people comes from, and he is responsible for it. Paul traces even that back to God, praying to “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Ephesians 3:14–15). Every father on earth borrows the name.

Yes, though rarely: in about fourteen verses, against about 238 in the New Testament. God is Father to Israel because he made it and redeemed it. “Is not he thy father that hath bought thee? hath he not made thee, and established thee?” Moses asks the people (Deuteronomy 32:6). Isaiah prays, “But now, O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter” (Isaiah 64:8), and a chapter earlier, “thou, O Lord, art our father, our redeemer” (Isaiah 63:16). Through Jeremiah God says, “I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn” (Jeremiah 31:9), and he waits, like the father on the road, for Israel to say “My father” in return (Jeremiah 3:4, 19). Malachi asks, “Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us?” (Malachi 2:10).

God is also Father to the son who would follow David as king. “I will be his father, and he shall be my son,” he promises (2 Samuel 7:14, repeated three times in 1 Chronicles), and the king is to “cry unto me, Thou art my father, my God, and the rock of my salvation” (Psalm 89:26). And he is father to those who have none: “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation” (Psalm 68:5).

Other verses use fatherhood as a picture without giving God the title. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him” (Psalm 103:13). “Whom the Lord loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth” (Proverbs 3:12). The Catechism of the Catholic Church gathers these threads: in Israel God is called Father “inasmuch as he is Creator of the world,” because of “the covenant and the gift of the law,” as Father of the king, and above all as Father of the poor, “the orphaned and the widowed, who are under his loving protection.”

Constantly. Jesus spoke of God as his own Father and taught his followers to pray to him the same way. What is rare in the Old Testament fills the Gospels: John alone has the capitalised “Father” 122 times, Matthew 44 times. Jesus gave his disciples the prayer that begins “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name” (Matthew 6:9). On the morning of the resurrection he told Mary Magdalene, “go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17).

That one sentence holds a distinction the New Testament keeps. God is Jesus’ Father in a way that belongs to him alone, and he becomes our Father through Jesus, who calls us his brothers. The question of whether Jesus is our Father or our brother follows that thread further. “Father” also stands among the other names of God in the Bible, beside Yahweh, Elohim and Adonai.

Does “Abba” mean “Daddy”?

No. Abba is the Aramaic word for father, and the New Testament has it three times, each time followed at once by the Greek word for father, which the KJV renders “Abba, Father.” Jesus prays it in Gethsemane: “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt” (Mark 14:36). Paul writes that we have “received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15), and that “God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Galatians 4:6).

The idea that abba was a baby’s word like “Daddy” usually goes back to the German scholar Joachim Jeremias, who called it a “children’s word used in everyday talk.” The scholar James Barr answered him in 1988 in an article titled “‘Abba Isn’t ‘Daddy’.” The word was familiar, Barr concluded, but “it was not a childish expression comparable with ‘Daddy’: it was a more solemn, responsible, adult address to a father.” Grown men used it to their fathers. Jesus used it in Gethsemane, the night before he died, asking for the cup to pass and accepting it in the same breath. It is close and trusting without being childish.

Scripture gives fathers few rules, and each is plain. A father is to teach his children the faith as the day goes along: “thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up” (Deuteronomy 6:7). God chose Abraham, Genesis says, “that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord” (Genesis 18:19).

A father is to provide for his household. Scripture assumes this more than it commands it. The sharpest words come from Paul, writing about families who must care for their widowed relatives: “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8).

A father is to correct his children without crushing them. “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). “Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged” (Colossians 3:21). Preaching on the Ephesians verse, John Chrysostom noticed what Paul left out: “He does not say, love them, because to this nature draws them even against their own will, and it were superfluous to lay down a law on such subjects.” Paul took the love for granted and warned against what Chrysostom saw many fathers do instead, treating their children “overbearingly, not as free, but as slaves.”

And a father is to have mercy. Psalm 103 measures God’s pity by a father’s, and the prodigal’s father shows it running. He does not wait for the speech. He calls for “the best robe,” a ring and shoes, “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:22, 24).

Christians of different traditions describe God’s care in words that echo these verses. The Westminster Confession, the Reformed statement of faith, says believers are “pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by him, as by a father.” The Catholic Catechism says that calling God Father shows that he is “the first origin of everything and transcendent authority” and “at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children.”

The Bible shows its fathers as they were, the good with the bad. Abraham was chosen to teach his household the way of the Lord. Other fathers failed in plain sight. Jacob, renamed Israel, “loved Joseph more than all his children,” and gave him a coat of many colours; his other sons saw it and “hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him” (Genesis 37:3–4). Years of grief followed from that favouritism.

Eli the priest raised the boy Samuel, yet God judged his house “because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not” (1 Samuel 3:13). David failed the same way. Of his son Adonijah, who later tried to seize the throne, Scripture says “his father had not displeased him at any time in saying, Why hast thou done so?” (1 Kings 1:6). And when his son Absalom died in rebellion against him, David’s grief is set down in full: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Samuel 18:33).

Joseph, who raised Jesus, is remembered for obedience. When the angel spoke to him in a dream, he “did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife” (Matthew 1:24), and from then on he protected the child.

If your father died, he did not fail you. Scripture’s word for you is the promise to the fatherless: “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation” (Psalm 68:5).

Some fathers do fail their children, and the Bible says plainly that God does not: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up” (Psalm 27:10).

God’s fatherhood does not excuse a bad father. It is the standard a father is judged by. Hebrews sets the two side by side: earthly fathers “for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness” (Hebrews 12:10). “After their own pleasure” means as seemed best to them. Human fathers correct by their own judgment, which can be wrong; God corrects only for the child’s good. The Catechism says it gently. Human parents are “fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood,” while God, who is “their origin and standard,” stands above them both: “no one is father as God is Father.” If your father was harsh, you do not have to picture God with his face. The command in Ephesians 6:4, not to provoke your children, is Scripture’s own judgment on that harshness.

Scripture speaks to fathers who know they have failed, too. Eli’s silence and David’s tears are not its last word. More verses on all of this are gathered in Bible verses about fatherhood. The Old Testament closes with a promise of a prophet who will “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6). A heart that has turned away can be turned back, and somewhere down the road a father can still run.

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• 24 Best Bible Verses About God Being Our Father
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• Who is Jesus’ earthly father? Joseph in the Gospels
• Eli, the priest who raised Samuel
• Why the Catholic and Protestant Lord’s Prayer end differently