Bible verses about bullying reveal how seriously God takes cruelty, mockery, and the misuse of power over others. Scripture calls every person to love their neighbor, guard their tongue, and defend the vulnerable. It also shows that God sees those who are mistreated, as He saw Hannah when her rival provoked her year after year.
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
Matthew 7:12 (KJV)
Jesus’ golden rule asks us to treat others the way we want to be treated, which rules out bullying.
Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord.
Leviticus 19:18 (KJV)
Long before the New Testament, God commanded His people not to bear grudges but to love their neighbor as themselves.
For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.
Galatians 5:14-15 (KJV)
Paul warns that if people bite and devour one another, they will end up consumed by one another.
Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.
Philippians 2:3-4 (KJV)
In lowliness of mind, believers are to value others and look out for their interests, not only their own.
Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.
Ephesians 4:29 (KJV)
No corrupt talk should come from our mouths, only words that build others up and give grace.
Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.
James 3:9-10 (KJV)
It is wrong to bless God and then curse people who are made in His image with the same tongue.
There is that speaketh like the piercings of a sword: but the tongue of the wise is health.
Proverbs 12:18 (KJV)
Careless words can pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.
But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.
Matthew 5:22 (KJV)
Jesus teaches that contempt and name-calling toward a brother are serious in God’s sight.
If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?
1 John 4:20 (KJV)
Anyone who claims to love God while hating a brother is not telling the truth, John says.
He that oppresseth the poor reproacheth his Maker: but he that honoureth him hath mercy on the poor.
Proverbs 14:31 (KJV)
Oppressing the poor or powerless insults their Maker, while showing mercy honors Him.
Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.
Proverbs 3:31 (KJV)
This proverb warns against envying the oppressor or choosing any of his ways.
Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother: And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor; and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart.
Zechariah 7:9-10 (KJV)
God told His people to show mercy and compassion, oppress no vulnerable person, and plot no harm against one another.
Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.
Proverbs 31:8-9 (KJV)
Scripture calls us to speak up for those who cannot defend themselves and to plead their cause.
Lord, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear: To judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress.
Psalms 10:17-18 (KJV)
God hears the humble and defends the oppressed so that people may no longer terrorize them.
And her adversary also provoked her sore, for to make her fret, because the Lord had shut up her womb. And as he did so year by year, when she went up to the house of the Lord, so she provoked her; therefore she wept, and did not eat.
1 Samuel 1:6-7 (KJV)
Hannah’s rival provoked her year after year until she wept and could not eat, a biblical picture of ongoing torment.
Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering;
Colossians 3:12 (KJV)
Believers are to clothe themselves with kindness, humbleness, meekness, and longsuffering toward others.
The Bible’s teaching on bullying begins with the value of every person. People are made in God’s image, which is why James 3:9-10 says it is wrong to bless God while cursing people with the same mouth. Jesus warned that contempt and name-calling are serious (Matthew 5:22), and His golden rule in Matthew 7:12 leaves no room for treating others in ways we would never want to be treated.
Scripture also speaks strongly against oppression, the misuse of strength over someone weaker. Proverbs 14:31 says oppressing the poor insults their Maker, and Zechariah 7:9-10 calls God’s people to show mercy rather than plot harm. The story of Hannah in 1 Samuel 1 shows the pain of repeated taunting; her rival provoked her until she wept and could not eat. Yet Hannah poured out her heart to God, and He heard her.
Believers are called not only to avoid bullying but to stand up for those being hurt. Proverbs 31:8-9 urges us to open our mouths for those who cannot speak for themselves. Kindness, humility, and patience (Colossians 3:12) are the marks of a Christian community where everyone is safe.
Scripture speaks directly to Gods concern for the oppressed, treating harm caused by bullying with real seriousness, not dismissal.
Bible Verses About Bullying often get reduced to softer, more comfortable language. Modern language softens this behavior into words like “drama,” “teasing,” or “conflict,” but Scripture is more direct. Matthew 5:22 treats contemptuous speech – calling someone a fool, dismissing them with scorn – as something serious enough to answer for, not as harmless banter. James 3:9-10 makes the same point about a wounding tongue: it takes the same mouth that blesses God and uses it to curse a person made in God’s image, and James calls that contradiction something that “ought not so to be.” Bullying, stripped of its modern packaging, is an old problem Scripture already has a category for: using speech or power to diminish someone God made and values.
The Old Testament backs this up. Leviticus 19:18 – “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” – sits at the center of the entire law, and 1 Samuel 1:6-7 shows what its absence looks like in practice: Hannah’s rival “provoked her sore, for to make her fret,” repeatedly, over years, specifically because Hannah was already vulnerable. The text does not soften what Peninnah did by calling it rivalry; it names it as deliberate provocation aimed at someone in pain. That pattern – targeting a person precisely because they are already struggling – is bullying in every sense a modern reader would recognize, and Scripture recorded it as wrong three thousand years before the word existed.
Proverbs adds a warning about character. Proverbs 3:31 tells the reader plainly not to envy “the oppressor” or choose any of his ways, treating cruelty toward others as something to actively refuse rather than something to shrug off as just how some people are. Proverbs 12:18 contrasts speech “like the piercings of a sword” with words that bring healing, putting the choice of which kind of speech to use squarely on the speaker. None of these verses treat bullying as a private matter between children, or between adults, that has nothing to do with faith; they treat the way people speak to and about each other as a direct measure of whether love of neighbor is real or only claimed.
Several Bible Verses About Bullying speak directly to the person on the receiving end. Psalms 10:17-18 was written for exactly this situation: for someone who has been “oppressed” and needs to know that God “will cause thine ear to hear” the cry of the fatherless and the crushed, so that “man of the earth may no more oppress.” It does not promise that the bullying will stop the moment someone prays about it, but it insists that God is not indifferent to it – that the cruelty a person is enduring is seen and matters to him, even when it is invisible to everyone else. Zechariah 7:9-10 pairs that comfort with a command to the wider community: execute true judgment, and oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, or the poor. In other words, being on God’s side of this issue is not passive; it means actively refusing to let cruelty toward someone vulnerable go unaddressed.
Proverbs 31:8-9 pushes this even further, telling the reader to “open thy mouth for the dumb” and “plead the cause of the poor and needy” – language written for a king, but applicable to anyone in a position to speak up for someone who cannot easily defend themselves. That is a direct answer to the bystander problem that makes so much bullying possible: Scripture does not leave room for silent neutrality when someone nearby is being mistreated.
Bible Verses About Bullying also point toward a better alternative, not only a warning. Ephesians 4:29 gives the practical alternative: “let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying.” Colossians 3:12 asks believers to “put on” bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, and longsuffering – language that treats kindness not as a personality trait some people happen to have, but as something deliberately chosen, put on like clothing, day after day. Philippians 2:3-4 sharpens the target even more: “let nothing be done through strife or vainglory,” and look not only on your own things but on the things of others. Matthew 7:12, the Golden Rule, sums up the whole shift in one sentence – treat others the way you would want to be treated – and 1 John 4:20 closes any loophole for claiming to love God while mistreating someone in front of you: “if a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.” Bullying, in light of these verses, is not a minor social problem to be managed; it is a direct contradiction of what these passages call believers to become.
Bible Verses About Bullying leave little room for staying silent on the sidelines. 1 John 4:20 closes off one more excuse worth naming: it is possible to think of oneself as a caring, faith-filled person while still saying nothing when someone nearby is being mocked or excluded. “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar” applies just as directly to silence in the face of cruelty as it does to open hatred, because both leave the person being hurt equally unprotected. Zechariah 7:9-10, read alongside this, gives a positive instruction rather than only a warning: “execute true judgment, and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother,” language aimed at the whole community responsible for how a vulnerable person is treated, not only at the person doing the bullying.
That combination — a warning against passive silence and a positive command to act — answers one of the most common excuses people give for not intervening when they witness bullying: that it is not their business, or not their place to say anything. Scripture consistently treats the character of a community, not just the behavior of one offender, as the measure of whether love of neighbor is being taken seriously in a given place.
Bible Verses About Bullying are not limited to New Testament teaching; the Old Testament tells the story plainly. Joseph’s brothers didn’t just dislike him — Genesis 37:4 says plainly “they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him,” before escalating to throwing him into a pit and selling him into slavery. It is one of Scripture’s clearest pictures of sustained, deliberate cruelty from people who were supposed to be family, not strangers.
What makes the account useful for anyone currently being targeted is what came later, not the cruelty itself: Joseph’s eventual response, “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good” (Genesis 50:20), wasn’t naive forgiveness offered the day after. It came years later, after real suffering, once Joseph had actually processed what had been done to him.
One of the most personal Bible Verses About Bullying describes betrayal from someone familiar. Psalm 55:12-14 captures something specific worth noticing: the writer’s pain isn’t from an anonymous enemy, but from someone he knew — “it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance.” Bullying from someone in your own circle, your own school, your own family, cuts differently than hostility from a stranger, and this psalm names that specific pain rather than generalizing it.
Romans 12:19, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord,” doesn’t ask a person to pretend the harm didn’t happen or wasn’t serious. It asks them to hand the response over rather than carrying both the injury and the burden of settling it themselves.
Bullying is not a modern invention, and the Bible never pretends it is. One of the earliest scenes sits in Genesis 21:9, where Sarah watches Hagar’s son and sees him mocking Isaac, the child whose weaning feast had just been held. The older boy was bigger, had standing in the household, and carried a grievance. Paul later reads that moment as persecution (Galatians 4:29). Notice how ordinary it looks at first: a taller kid, a younger one, a party, a few words. Nobody in the camp would have called it a crisis until Sarah did.
The psalms give the same pattern from the receiving end. Psalm 123:4 says, “Our soul is exceedingly filled with the scorning of those that are at ease, and with the contempt of the proud.” The people praying that line are worn out, and the word that matters is contempt. Contempt is not an argument. It is a verdict that someone does not count. That is why so many Bible Verses About Bullying keep coming back to dignity: the real injury is often less the bruise than the message behind it, that you are small and nobody will stop this.
Reading these old scenes helps a person who is being targeted now. You are not strange for hurting this much. Scripture records people who ached in just this way, and it says plainly that the proud who scorn them are the ones in the wrong.
Nothing in the Bible mentions a group chat, and yet James 3:5 reads like a description of one. “Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!” A screenshot, a mocking nickname, a photo passed around at midnight: each one is a spark, and sparks do not stay where they land. The old problem of the tongue gets worse when words can be copied, saved and sent to two hundred people before breakfast. A cruel remark spoken in a hallway ends when the bell rings. One typed into a feed can still be sitting there next Tuesday.
Proverbs 18:21 says, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue”, and the writer would not have shrunk that line for a keyboard. If anything, typing adds a false sense of distance. People write things at a screen that they would never say to a face, and then act surprised when someone is crushed. Scripture closes that excuse. Words are words, whether they travel by breath or by wifi.
For the person on the receiving end, one practical thought. Keep the evidence, show it to a parent, teacher or another adult you trust, and do not answer in kind at one in the morning. Reporting is not tattling. It is asking someone with authority to do what Proverbs 31:8 describes, to open the mouth for those who cannot speak for themselves.
Jesus told a story about a man beaten and left half dead beside the Jericho road, and the first two people to see him were respectable. Luke 10:31 says of the priest, “when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.” The Levite does the same in the next verse. Neither of them hit anyone. Neither said a word. That is what makes the parable so uncomfortable for anyone who has watched a classmate get shoved in a corridor, or a coworker get ridiculed in a meeting, and quietly studied their phone.
Look at what Jesus does with the ending. He does not praise the bystanders for staying out of trouble. The hero is the Samaritan, a man with every social reason to keep walking, who stops, bandages the wounds and pays for a room. He has not fixed the robbers. He has fixed the next hour for one person. Among the Bible Verses About Bullying and bystanders, this story shows that most of us cannot dismantle a school’s whole culture, but nearly anyone can sit with the kid eating alone, or say “Leave him be” in an even voice, or tell a teacher afterward.
Proverbs 24:11 pushes the same direction: “If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain”, and the next verse asks whether the One who weighs hearts does not see it. Nobody gets to say they did not know. Courage here is rarely loud. It is usually a small, plain decision made in front of people who are watching to see what you will do.
Matthew 5:39 is probably the most misused line in this whole subject. “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Some people have heard it as an order to stand still and absorb whatever comes. Others hear it as permission for adults to tell a hurt child to just take it. Neither reading fits the rest of the Bible.
A slap on the right cheek, in that culture, was usually a backhand, a gesture of insult rather than an attempt to injure. Jesus is talking about answering humiliation without answering with more of it, refusing to be dragged into the other person’s game. He is not describing a beating, and he is not telling anyone to stay in a house or a classroom where they are being hurt. Jesus himself slipped away when a crowd picked up stones in John 8:59, and Paul used his Roman citizenship to demand a proper hearing from officials in Acts 16:37. Leaving, reporting and insisting on fair treatment were all on the table for them.
So walk away from a fight, yes. Refuse to hit back, yes. But if the mistreatment is physical, repeated or frightening, tell a parent, a teacher, a pastor, or the police if it comes to that, and talk to a counselor if it has left you anxious or sleepless. Bible Verses About Bullying never ask a hurting person to stay in danger quietly. Forgiveness can come later, and from a safe distance.
It is uncomfortable to face, but some people reading this are not the target. They are the one with the sharp tongue, or part of the group that laughs, or someone with a habit of picking on the same person. The Bible has real hope for that reader too, and it starts with a man who did far worse. Paul says in 1 Timothy 1:13 that he was “a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy.” Injurious is a good word. It describes someone who does harm almost for sport. He did not excuse it. He named it, and said mercy found him anyway.
Zacchaeus gives the practical pattern. In Luke 19:8 the tax collector says, “if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.” He did not stop at feeling bad. He went to the people he had wronged and did something visible about it. For someone who has bullied, that might be a plain apology with no excuses attached, an end to the nickname, a refusal to join in the next time it starts, and some honest thought about why the cruelty felt good.
Proverbs 3:31 says, “Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.” Pushing others down looks like strength from the outside, but it is often fear dressed up. You can choose another way tomorrow morning, and the Bible says mercy is waiting there.
Sometimes the most honest thing is to say it out loud to God before saying it to anyone else. Psalm 55:22 invites exactly that: “Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee.” Here is one way to put it into words.
God, you know what happened today, including the part I have not told anyone. You know the name that was called, the table where nobody saved me a seat, the message I read three times. I am tired of acting like it did not land. Be near me the way you were near Hagar in the wilderness, who called you the God who sees. Give me one safe person to tell, and the nerve to actually tell them. If I have been the unkind one, show me plainly, without crushing me, and give me the humility to fix it. Teach me to stand beside someone else this week, even if it costs me a little standing myself. Keep my heart from hardening while I wait for things to change, and let me sleep tonight knowing you are not looking away. Amen.
Keep exploring with these related pages: Bible Verses For God's Love, Bible Verses About Work, Bible Verses For Provision, Bible Verses For Courage and Faith, Bible Verses For Calling, Bible Verses About Peace of Mind, Bible Verses About Peace and Anxiety, Bible Verses For Courage and Strength, Bible Verses About Finances, Bible Verses About Blessings and Bible Verses About Provision.
Free tools for studying these passages further: Blue Letter Bible, Bible Gateway and Bible Hub.
The Bible's teaching on bullying begins with the value of every person. People are made in God's image, which is why James 3:9-10 says it is wrong to bless God while cursing people with the same mouth.
This page brings together 7 King James Version references about bullying, drawn from 5 different books of the Bible.
Beyond the references highlighted on this page, bullying appears throughout Scripture in books such as James, Matthew, Proverbs, Zechariah, Colossians; this collection focuses on some of the clearest examples.
These bullying verses are drawn from books including James, Matthew, Proverbs, Zechariah, Colossians.
Yes. The verses about bullying gathered here include passages from both the Old Testament and the New Testament, such as Proverbs 14:31 and James 3:9.
