Grunt and running Javascript

I'm building a client library for a database and need to write it in javascript. I have never worked with js. I was directed to node and grunt as tools for js but from what I've gathered grunt will not actually compile and execute my js files. I need something fairly automated and I was hoping for some direction in this task.

It looks like grunt is a tool to automate some commonly performed tasks like minimizing files or Uglifying them, but I have yet to see anything that compiles and executes. What tool do I need to execute my code, or how can it be done in grunt?

Basically I'm just looking for an equivalent of 'make' for js. Ideally I would be able to run js from a grunt script.