Bible verses about enemies carry some of Scripture’s most challenging teaching, especially Jesus’ command to love those who oppose us. They show how God treated us when we were His enemies, how His people are to respond to hostility, and how we can trust Him for protection and justice instead of seeking revenge.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
Matthew 5:43-45 (KJV)
Jesus overturns the idea of hating enemies, calling us to love them and pray for them as children of our Father.
But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.
Luke 6:35 (KJV)
Loving enemies, doing good and lending without expecting return reflects God’s kindness to the unthankful.
If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the Lord shall reward thee.
Proverbs 25:21-22 (KJV)
Giving food and water to a hungry enemy is commended, and the Lord promises to reward it.
Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
Romans 12:19 (KJV)
Believers are not to avenge themselves but to leave room for God’s justice.
Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth: Lest the Lord see it, and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.
Proverbs 24:17-18 (KJV)
We are warned not to rejoice when an enemy falls or stumbles.
If thou meet thine enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again. If thou see the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his burden, and wouldest forbear to help him, thou shalt surely help with him.
Exodus 23:4-5 (KJV)
Even the law required returning an enemy’s straying animal and helping with his fallen donkey.
But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.
Romans 5:8-10 (KJV)
God showed His love by reconciling us through Christ while we were still His enemies.
When a man’s ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.
Proverbs 16:7 (KJV)
When our ways please the Lord, He can bring even our enemies to peace with us.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Psalms 23:5 (KJV)
God prepares a table for His people in the presence of their enemies, a picture of His care amid opposition.
I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies.
Psalms 18:3 (KJV)
David called on the Lord, who is worthy of praise, and trusted Him for rescue from his enemies.
Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots.
Luke 23:34 (KJV)
On the cross Jesus prayed for forgiveness for those who crucified Him.
And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.
Acts 7:60 (KJV)
Stephen followed Jesus’ example, asking God not to hold the sin against those who opposed him.
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Ephesians 6:12 (KJV)
Our deepest struggle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual powers of darkness.
Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto me.
Micah 7:8 (KJV)
The prophet tells his enemy not to gloat, because though he falls he will rise and the Lord will be his light.
And he said to David, Thou art more righteous than I: for thou hast rewarded me good, whereas I have rewarded thee evil.
1 Samuel 24:17 (KJV)
Saul admitted that David was more righteous for repaying his evil with good.
And he prepared great provision for them: and when they had eaten and drunk, he sent them away, and they went to their master. So the bands of Syria came no more into the land of Israel.
2 Kings 6:23 (KJV)
Elisha had captured enemy soldiers fed and sent home, and their raids stopped.
Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive me: thou shalt stretch forth thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and thy right hand shall save me.
Psalms 138:7 (KJV)
God preserves His people in trouble and stretches out His hand against the wrath of their enemies.
The heart of the Bible’s teaching on enemies begins with God Himself. Romans 5:8-10 says that while we were enemies, God reconciled us through the death of His Son. Because we have received that mercy, Jesus calls us in Matthew 5:43-45 and Luke 6:35 to love our enemies, do good to them and pray for them, reflecting the Father who sends rain on the just and the unjust.
This command is not new in the New Testament. Exodus 23:4-5 required Israelites to help an enemy’s lost or struggling animal, and Proverbs 25:21-22 commends feeding a hungry enemy. The Bible also forbids gloating over an enemy’s misfortune (Proverbs 24:17-18) and tells us to leave vengeance to God (Romans 12:19). Loving enemies does not mean ignoring wrongdoing; it means trusting God to judge rightly.
Scripture gives vivid examples. David refused to harm Saul, and Saul confessed that David had repaid evil with good (1 Samuel 24:17). Elisha fed captured soldiers and sent them home, and the raids ended (2 Kings 6:23). Supremely, Jesus prayed for those who crucified Him (Luke 23:34), showing that grace toward enemies is the way of the cross.
Matthew 5:44s love your enemies is among the more difficult instructions in Scripture, given without qualification or exception.
These Bible Verses About Enemies are rarely about easy feelings, and this story is a good place to start. First Samuel 17 is often remembered as a story about courage, but it is also a story about how David framed his enemy. Goliath taunted Israel’s army for forty days, and the soldiers, including David’s own brothers, saw only a giant too large to fight. David saw the same giant and called him uncircumcised, someone defying the living God, not merely a personal threat to be feared. His confidence did not come from underestimating Goliath’s size; it came from refusing to let the enemy define the terms of the conflict. David ran toward Goliath rather than waiting to be attacked, and the fight that Israel’s whole army had been too afraid to start was over in moments.
Among these Bible Verses About Enemies, this parable redraws the line of who counts as one. Jesus told the parable in Luke 10 to answer a question meant to limit who counted as a neighbor. He chose a Samaritan as the hero on purpose, since Jews and Samaritans of that era carried generations of mutual contempt, closer to enemies than strangers. A priest and a Levite, people the original audience would have expected to help, passed by a wounded man on the road. The Samaritan, from the group least likely to be praised in the story, stopped, paid for the man’s care himself, and followed up to make sure he recovered. Jesus did not ask who the man’s neighbor was in theory; He asked who had actually acted like one, and let the answer come from the one group His listeners would have called an enemy.
Few of these Bible Verses About Enemies are tested as directly as in this scene. First Samuel 26 is a second chance for David to kill Saul, and in some ways it is more striking than the first. David and Abishai slipped into Saul’s sleeping camp at night, past guards who were supernaturally deep asleep, close enough to take Saul’s own spear and water jug as proof. Abishai urged David to end the pursuit permanently with one thrust. David refused again, saying he would not stretch out his hand against the Lord’s anointed, and instead called out from a distance the next morning, holding up the spear as evidence of restraint rather than a trophy of violence. Twice given the chance to remove his enemy by force, David chose to wait on God’s timing instead.
These Bible Verses About Enemies also have to reckon with a changed enemy. Acts 9 describes an uncomfortable truth the early church had to live with: the man asking to join them, Saul, was the same man who had been imprisoning and consenting to the killing of believers just before his conversion on the road to Damascus. When he tried to join the disciples in Jerusalem, they were afraid of him and did not believe he was really a disciple. It took Barnabas personally vouching for him, describing what had actually happened, before the church accepted him. Their fear was not unreasonable; a genuine former enemy does not automatically feel safe simply because he says he has changed. Trust had to be extended carefully, through someone willing to stand between the fear and the man asking to be believed.
Not every threat these Bible Verses About Enemies describe is fully visible. Second Kings 6 opens with the king of Syria so frustrated by Elisha’s ability to anticipate his battle plans that he sends a great army to surround the city of Dothan just to capture one prophet. Elisha’s servant woke up to see the city encircled by horses and chariots and panicked, asking what they would do. Elisha’s answer was that those with them were more than those with the enemy, and then he prayed that the servant’s eyes would be opened. The servant saw the hillside full of horses and chariots of fire surrounding Elisha for protection, an army the enemy army never saw at all. The threat was real and visible; what mattered more was the protection that was real but invisible until God opened the servant’s eyes to it.
These Bible Verses About Enemies sometimes call for strategy rather than confrontation. When Absalom’s rebellion drove David out of Jerusalem, David asked his friend Hushai to do something dangerous: stay behind, pretend loyalty to Absalom, and work from inside the enemy’s camp to undo the counsel of Ahithophel, whose advice was shrewd enough to end the war quickly in Absalom’s favor. Second Samuel 15 through 17 shows Hushai playing that difficult role convincingly enough that Absalom trusted his advice over Ahithophel’s, advice that bought David’s forces the time they needed to prepare. Hushai was not fighting his enemy with a sword; he was countering him with patience and timing, embedded in a dangerous place for the sake of someone he actually served.
Looking back across these Bible Verses About Enemies, David met Goliath head-on, the Samaritan crossed an old line of hatred to help a stranger, David then refused twice to kill a sleeping enemy when he had every opportunity, the early church had to slowly extend trust to its former persecutor, Elisha’s servant needed his eyes opened to see protection that was already there, and Hushai served his king by enduring the discomfort of pretending loyalty to the wrong side. Scripture never pretends enemies are not real or that the fear they cause is irrational. It keeps insisting, through very different situations, that how we respond to an enemy matters as much as the outcome of the conflict itself.
Lord, when an enemy looks larger than I can handle, give me David’s confidence that was never really about my own size compared to theirs. Give me the Samaritan’s willingness to cross old lines of resentment when someone in front of me actually needs help. Where I have the power to strike back and justice would seem to allow it, give me David’s restraint in Saul’s camp instead. And when I am afraid, like the early church was of Saul, help me stay open to the possibility that someone has actually changed. Amen.
Refuse to let an enemy’s size or reputation set the terms of how you respond, the way David refused to let Goliath’s height define the fight. Look for the person in front of you who actually needs help, even across old lines of mutual distrust, as the Samaritan did. When you have the power and the justification to retaliate, ask whether restraint, like David’s twice-given mercy to Saul, is the wiser path. Give a genuinely changed person time to earn trust rather than demanding instant acceptance, as Barnabas helped the church do for Paul. And remember that the protection you cannot see may still be real, the way Elisha’s servant needed his eyes opened before he could see it.
Is there an enemy or opponent in your life whose size or reputation has been setting the terms of how you respond, the way Goliath’s height intimidated Israel’s whole army? Have you let an old line of distrust keep you from helping someone who actually needed it, the way the priest and Levite passed by in the parable? Is there a situation where you have the power to retaliate but restraint, like David showed Saul twice, would actually be the stronger choice? And is there someone whose change you have been slow to believe, the way the early church was slow to trust Paul?
The soldiers came into Gethsemane with torches and clubs, and Peter did what many of us would want to do. He swung. A servant of the high priest named Malchus lost his right ear (John 18:10). Luke adds a detail the other Gospels skip. In Luke 22:51 Jesus said, “Suffer ye thus far,” and then “he touched his ear, and healed him.”
Think about the order of events. The man belonged to the arresting party. Jesus was about to be bound, taken to a night trial and beaten. Even so, His last act before they led Him away was to repair an enemy’s wound. Nobody asked Him to. Nobody was watching for a reward.
That scene is worth reading slowly when you want to know what loving an enemy looks like in practice. It was not a speech. It was one quiet touch, in the dark, at personal cost. You may never get a moment as dramatic as this one, but small repairs are available: returning a borrowed tool the neighbor was rude about, or sending the invoice on time to the client who never says thank you. Several of the Bible Verses About Enemies on this page describe exactly that sort of unglamorous kindness.
After Saul met the risen Lord on the Damascus road, he sat blind in a house on Straight Street, praying. God spoke to a believer named Ananias and told him to go lay hands on Saul. Ananias objected, and honestly. In Acts 9:13 he says, “Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem.” He knew the man’s record, and it was bloody.
God did not scold him for being afraid. He simply said, go. So Ananias walked into the house and spoke the words of Acts 9:17, beginning with “Brother Saul.” Brother. The man who had come to drag believers to prison was welcomed before he had proved anything.
There is room in this story for your own hesitation. You can bring God your honest list of what the person did and still be sent. Obedience here did not erase memory. It simply turned an enemy into a family member, and without Ananias’s short walk down that street, Paul’s ministry might never have begun.
In 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37, the Assyrian army sits outside Jerusalem, and their commander has sent a letter mocking the king’s God. Hezekiah reads it. Then he does something very physical. He goes up to the temple and spreads the letter open before the Lord, as if showing a document to a judge.
There is no polished prayer in that moment. He simply says, in Isaiah 37:17, “Incline thine ear, O LORD, and hear; open thine eyes, O LORD, and see: and hear all the words of Sennacherib.” Then he asks for deliverance so that all kingdoms of the earth may know the Lord alone is God.
Try that with your own paper. Print the angry email, or open the threatening text, and talk to God about it out loud, line by line. It will not change the words on the page, but it may change where you carry the weight. Hezekiah’s enemy was larger than he could handle, and he did not pretend otherwise. He placed it where he could not control it and asked for help from someone who could.
Daniel’s rivals could find nothing to accuse him of in his work, so they went after his prayer life and persuaded the king to sign a law that made praying to anyone but the king a crime (Daniel 6). Daniel knew about the law, and he knelt at his open window three times a day, as he had always done.
He was thrown to the lions. At dawn, the king rushed to the pit, and Daniel answered in Daniel 6:22, “My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, that they have not hurt me: forasmuch as before him innocency was found in me.” The men who plotted were dealt with afterward, but notice that Daniel never asked for that. His word to the king was about God’s rescue, not his enemies’ punishment.
If your enemy is spreading lies at work or in your community, this account offers a pattern. Keep doing the honest thing you were already doing. Do not change your habits out of spite or fear. And leave the outcome to the One who closes lions’ mouths.
The word most often used for enemy in the Gospels, echthros, simply means someone hostile, a person who stands against you. It is wider than a battlefield foe. It can mean a rival, a slanderer, a neighbor who drags you into court or a relative who has turned cold. Jesus uses it in Matthew 5:44 with no list of exceptions.
This helps when you read Bible Verses About Enemies and wonder whether the command applies to you. Most of us have not been persecuted in a dramatic way, yet nearly all of us have been undermined, lied about or left out on purpose. Those people count.
It is also worth noticing what the Bible does not ask. It does not ask you to feel warm affection on cue. Love in these passages is shown by actions: greeting, praying, feeding, refusing to take revenge. Feelings often follow slowly, and sometimes they never fully arrive, and that is not failure. If the hurt is deep, trauma or fear may need a counselor’s careful help alongside prayer.
Twenty years earlier Jacob had cheated his brother out of the blessing and run for his life. Now Esau was coming with four hundred men, and Jacob split his family into groups, sent gifts ahead, and spent a sleepless night wrestling with God at the Jabbok (Genesis 32). He walked toward his brother with a limp, bowing seven times as he drew near.
What happened surprised everyone. Genesis 33:4 says, “And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept.” The brother he feared had spent two decades getting past the anger. Jacob had prepared for a fight, and found a welcome.
Sometimes an enemy has changed more than we assumed. Other times, of course, they have not, and caution is still wise. Jacob did not move in with Esau afterward, and the chapter shows them parting in peace. A reconciliation does not have to mean living under one roof. It can mean two people finally able to meet without a weapon hidden behind the back.
Readers interested in enemies often continue with Bible Verses About the Holy Spirit, Bible Verses About Love and Relationships, Bible Verses About Love, Bible Verses For Difficult Times, Bible Verses For Praise, Bible Verses For Kindness, Bible Verses For Work, Bible Verses About God's Mercy, Bible Verses About Patience, Bible Verses About Walking by Faith and Bible Verses About Faith Over Fear.
Helpful free resources for further study include Blue Letter Bible, Bible Gateway, Bible Hub and Bible Study Tools.
The heart of the Bible's teaching on enemies begins with God Himself. Romans 5:8-10 says that while we were enemies, God reconciled us through the death of His Son.
This page brings together 11 King James Version references about enemies, drawn from 7 different books of the Bible.
Yes. The verses about enemies gathered here include passages from both the Old Testament and the New Testament, such as Exodus 23:4 and Romans 5:8.
Romans 5:8 is one of the verses about enemies referenced in this collection, alongside Matthew 5:43.
Yes, the verses referenced on this page, including Romans 5:8, are quoted according to the King James Version (KJV), and are suitable for daily reading, memorization, or devotional use.
