God's Righteousness and Justice in the Old Testament

By Jože Krašovec and Craig G. Bartholomew

A semantic study of God’s righteousness and justice in the Hebrew Bible that draws exegetical, theological, and philosophical conclusions about the character of God and God’s relationship with humanity. 

God’s work of creation and salvation for the good of Israel, humanity, and the world manifests the nature of God’s being. Thus, if we can understand God’s characteristics of righteousness and justice, we can better understand God. 

In the Hebrew Bible, these aspects of God are not expressed by abstract concepts but by semantic elements within literary structures. From this premise, Jože Krašovec undertakes the present study to put semantics into dialogue with exegesis and theology to illuminate exactly how God’s righteousness and justice in the Old Testament should be understood. 

In the first part of the book, Krašovec analyzes occurrences of the Hebrew root ṣdq (meaning righteous) and other synonyms, working systematically through the entire Old Testament canon. In the second part, he builds off this lexical study with a more broadly exegetical, theological, and philosophical exploration of guilt, punishment, mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Krašovec concludes, among other things, that the biblical writers use “righteousness” as an expression of God’s affection for faithful people, especially those in distress because of persecution. God’s righteousness therefore exists in the Hebrew Bible in relation to the righteousness of human individuals and communities. Justice—whether in the form of forgiveness for the penitent or punishment for those who have hardened their hearts against God—is always carried out with the goal of building better community among God’s people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Sep 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781467464840

Jože Krašovec

Jože Krašovec is professor of biblical studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a full member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. A former president of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, Krašovec is the author of numerous monographic studies and articles published in Slovene, English, German, French, and other languages.

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Introduction

The notion of justice is one of the most important concepts of the Bible. The theocentric foundation of the Bible indicates that the significance of the notion of justice is not measured by the relationship of a person to God but by the relationship of God to Israel and the world. God’s righteousness has different theological criteria than human righteousness; therefore, it is more difficult to answer the specific question of what God’s righteousness is than the general question of what righteousness is.¹ Ultimately, this question is about God’s essence, his authority, and the scope of his activities. A mere dictionary approach would ideally lead to a virtual answer. All available conceptual abilities, all levels of semantic fields, and all dimensions of intertextual relationships must be taken into account in order to give full effect to the whole of the mental and religious world of the Hebrew Scriptures. If the basic meaning of the root of ṣdq and its derivations in the relationship of God to a person is reminiscent of the general meaning of the concept of the grace of salvation, then we can understand why the reasons for retribution and punishment keep open the possibilities for God’s mercy and forgiveness. The purpose of this study is to show how, in the Bible, the dimensions of God’s righteousness are not expressed by abstract concepts but by semantic fields within the literary structures of literary types and genres. It is a question of how interdependent living conditions and literary conventions work in original literary creations. Therefore, the theme of God’s justice in all dimensions requires literary analysis of existing texts and their intertextual relationships.

It appears that the concepts of righteousness and justice are among the most important concepts in the Bible. Gerhard von Rad states in his Old Testament Theology: There is absolutely no concept in the Old Testament with so central a significance for all the relationships of human life as that of צדקה. It is the standard not only for a person’s relationship to God but also for his relationships to his fellows, reaching right down to the most petty wranglings—indeed, it is even the standard for man’s relationship to the animals and to his natural environment.² The importance of the concept is, however, not measured by the ways of humans to God but by the ways of God to Israel and the world. The importance of the dimensions of God’s righteousness and justice is proved by the exceptional interest of the exegetes in this aspect of its basic meaning. Scarcely any other theme has been accorded as much attention as this one.

The fact that, throughout history, biblical scholars have quite often interpreted the root ṣdq in the sense of the retributive principle likewise suggests that we should research accurately all the texts connected with a belief in divine retribution—which sooner or later also opens the question of the possibility of mercy and forgiveness. If the basic meaning of the root ṣdq and its derivative forms in relation to God is reminiscent of the general meaning of the concept of grace, natural operation and verdicts of retribution or punishment call for God’s mercy and forgiveness. The topic of retribution in the Hebrew Bible requires literary analysis of extant texts in a broader context and in intertextual relations. This will be examined in the second half of the study. Only analysis of the places and the versatile meaning of the retributive principle, which in the same manner falls amidst the main tenets of Hebrew faith, will assist in ultimately recognizing juncture points and the differences between the Hebrew and European concepts of justice. An exhaustive and methodically suitable expert study on biblical belief in divine retribution is needed on account of the question itself in all its fundamental aspects.

The Semantic Field of God’s Righteousness in the Hebrew Bible

In order to do justice to the whole range of dimensions of God’s righteousness and justice in the Hebrew Bible, to combine semantic and literary approaches seems appropriate. A comparative semantic study makes it possible to exhaust all the significant aspects that are covered by the concepts of righteousness and justice. This procedure opens dimensions of righteousness and justice that are beyond the reach of mere vocabulary. Existing studies about the root ṣdq, biblical commentaries, and theological and philosophical writings do not permit us to remain solely with the researching of divine righteousness and justice within the framework of the basic meaning of this root and its derivative forms. The root ṣdq evidently does not include the retributive aspect of divine justice that is an especially visible component of the usual notion of justice. Some biblical commentaries evince this defining of ṣdq erroneously in the retributive sense—namely, while under the influence of the European retributory meaning of justice. Thus, the history of the interpretation of the root ṣdq is witness to the history of conflict between two different civilizations, the civilizations of Semitic and Indo-European languages.

The majority of European languages have only one expression for the whole range of meaning of the notion of justice: iustitia, giustizia, justice, Justicia (Spanish), Gerechtigkeit, gerechtigheid (Dutch), rätvisa (Swedish), pravičnost (Slovenian), pravednost (Croatian), etc. An interesting exception is English, which successfully differentiates between righteousness and justice. In the translations of the Bible into European languages, the appropriate terms in most places serve as a translation of the Hebrew root ṣdq. Hence the translation inevitably misguides the reader who is unacquainted with the specific Hebrew theological background and is not sufficiently attentive to context into an incorrect understanding of the text.

For these reasons it seems urgently necessary that, according to the contextual principle, we consider and analyze all the relevant places in the Hebrew Bible where ṣdq appears in relation to the divine subject, in order to ascertain the actual meaning of this root in every individual text. Only in this manner will it be possible to arrive at a synthetic conclusion regarding the entire range of meanings of God’s ṣdq. By using this method, we can ascertain which other notions from our languages express in individual texts the actual meaning of the present concept more appropriately. If the results of research had already been taken into consideration in the translations of the Bible, semantic conflict in the reading of the Bible (as in its explaining) would be greatly reduced.

My interest in the semantics of God’s righteousness led me, decades ago, to undertake extensive and comparative studies of its semantic field in the Bible. In order to establish the meaning of God’s righteousness as expressed in the Hebrew words derived from the root, I first examined all their contexts and the larger semantic field, including their synonyms and antonyms. In my monographic study La justice (ṣdq) de Dieu dans la Bible hébraïque et l’interprétation juive et chrétienne,³ I undertook semantic analysis of all passages containing various grammatical forms of the root ṣdq to articulate dimensions of God’s righteousness. In order to come to sure conclusions, I also prepared a survey of the history of interpretation of these words in ancient translations—the Septuagint, the targumim, and the Vulgate—as well as in ancient Jewish, patristic, and Renaissance commentaries. Having carried out additional studies focusing on selected biblical texts expressing dimensions of righteousness and justice, I had good reasons for completing my previous studies by using the principle of total interpretation of the structure of biblical texts in their proper literary context and in their intertextual relations. In this study, I focus on literary analyses of passages of the Hebrew Bible that contain the ṣdq vocabulary in various grammatical forms. The history of interpretation is limited to ancient Bible translations that were of special importance for the development of European civilization: the Septuagint, the targumim, and the Vulgate.⁴ In order to get a more complete survey of the concept of God’s righteousness in the Bible, this study is complemented with the examination of deuterocanonical literature (i.e., Apocrypha) and with a more detailed study on the dimensions of God’s righteousness in the New Testament.

God’s Justice between Punishment and Forgiveness in the Hebrew Bible

Humans have been preoccupied with ethical questions in all times. The issues of innocence or guilt and sin, obedience as opposed to disobedience, obstinacy (stubbornness), and reward or punishment (retribution), as well as repentance, atonement, leniency, mercy, pardon, forgiveness, reconciliation, and renewal (restoration), have been widely studied in all cultures. As mentioned earlier, these themes should be examined in their natural interrelationship—especially when it comes to the link between reward, punishment, and forgiveness. Because these themes are interwoven with what underlies cultural and religious tradition, a complex approach is required, one that accounts for historical but also literary documents.

The question of retribution within the Hebrew Bible is so complex that it cannot be considered in isolation. To discuss any one theme without considering its intertextual connections would destroy the organic texture of the texts and distort the results. Three reasons seem to justify a comparative approach, drawing on texts from other major cultures. Certain questions often intuitively arise when we read biblical texts, for example, concerning punishment: Does an offense necessarily entail punishment? What are God’s reasons for showing leniency to those who offend him? What is the relation between divine mercy and forgiveness and the apparently contradictory demands of justice and equality? Which modern theory of punishment can make sense of mercy and forgiveness?

In contrast to the question of punishment, little attention has been paid to the themes of mercy and forgiveness in recent times.⁵ But the past three decades have seen a revival of interest in these particular issues as well as in human attitudes and feelings in general. Scholars have considered aspects of these questions in fields as diverse as literature, philosophy, law, and theology. Philosophers, theologians, and others have provided terminology, a series of definitions and theories, which reflect a particular culture or tradition, as well as specific views held by individual scholars. They have often resorted to the use of analogy with human feelings and attitudes to describe the transcendental nature and actions of God.

The relationship between innocence or virtue, guilt or sin, reward or punishment, and mercy or forgiveness has been discussed in different contexts that reflect the particular views and the corresponding understandings of the concept of justice. Authors who limit the question of justice to reason and to social institutions come to the conclusion that social institutions, bound to the principle of equality, are obliged to punish offenders. Consequently, there is no room for leniency, mercy, pardon, or forgiveness. Where justice is understood in a broader and profounder sense as natural law (ius naturale) or divine law (ius divinum), which transcends and limits the scope of civil law (ius civile), concepts such as social justice are seen as existing alongside concepts such as cosmic justice (otherwise known as divine justice), the operation of intrinsic justice and personal justice. Cosmic and divine justice imposes indispensable obligations and limitations to any human action and to any institution. A wide reading of historical, literary, philosophical, and theological documents from various cultures and periods reveals that cosmic justice was always considered to be a fundamental criterion of human perception and behavior. The conception of cosmic justice is especially characteristic of nonbiblical ancient cultures and modern naturalistic ideologies. Within this framework the awareness of the tenet arose: what is done cannot be undone. This way of perceiving events in the world leaves little room for forgiveness.

The history of humankind recognizes three basic arbiters of reward, punishment, and pardon: human authority (individual or institutional), natural law, and the authority of the gods or a god. Forgiveness, however, is a function solely of interpersonal relations. The Hebrew Bible recognizes two criteria for human conduct: natural law and the divine law based on revelation. This involves external regulations as well as an intimate personal relationship to God. Wisdom literature, certain historical narratives, and prophetic statements throughout the Bible testify to the belief that human beings must adjust their conduct to the natural order of the world and to historical facts. According to this view, rewards and punishments automatically follow obedience or disobedience when the intrinsic law of right as perceived by conscience, reason, and experience is trespassed.⁶ Because the world was created, it is not autonomous but subject to its Creator’s providence. This implies that everything happens only with the explicit or implicit will of God.

For all the subtle Hebrew perception of universal cosmic and historical determinants, the focus of the Hebrew Bible is on the covenant between God and his people as based on the revelation of divine law. The foremost requirement here is that the covenant people should stand in the right relationship to God and other members of the community. Marital union and the father-son relationship are the most popular symbols of the personal dimensions of this covenant. Consequently, Israel’s conduct is measured not only against the background of a higher (and the highest) authority but also against a greater (and the greatest) justice, fidelity, and love. Obedience implies profound knowledge of the covenantal God and total fidelity to him. This explains why the Hebrew Bible presents disobedience and infidelity as the greatest misfortune to befall a people, as well as why repentance, as a precondition of forgiveness and reconciliation, is so urgent.

The characteristic biblical belief in creation and the historical revelation of a personal God implies that cosmic justice and personal justice form a harmonious and complementary relationship. The concept of justice within the Jewish-Christian tradition is not based on the principle of equality but on the polarity of the organic relationship between the Creator and his creation, on the one hand, and between the Redeemer and his covenant people, on the other. The divine foundation of the world itself forms the basis for the imperative of total obedience of all created beings to the lawgiver. Ancient Israel did not recognize from the beginning a pure form of monotheism, and the God of Israel’s charismatic writers was not fixed in form and content. History was open to surprises. The limits in human knowledge may mean that God condemns where humans condone, and vice versa.

This point provides a vital key to the interpretation of biblical texts. The underlying concepts of cosmic justice and personal justice complicate the discussion because they call into question every kind of human absolutism or empty rationalism and open perspectives into the infinite depths and heights of the kingdom of God. Biblical texts are concerned not only with moral principles and actions but also with what kind of person a member of the covenant people should be. In contrast to our modern society, in which justice is frequently discussed only as a virtue of social institutions, biblical writers perceived justice as a virtue of human beings and of the people of Israel in the covenantal relationship with God. The idea that God created man in his own image (Gen 1:27) found its true fulfillment in individual personalities and in Israel as a whole. For this reason, it was believed that, however much his people offended him, God would not abandon them. It was also believed that they had enough natural decency or intrinsic value to justify a renewal of the relationship with God, despite their constant infidelity. As Jean Hampton argues, divine punishment is conceived primarily as a means of educating the people, and it implies one important goal: the experience of submission—that is, the defeat of the wrongdoer and of his false claim to domination or superiority.⁷

From the personalist background of the Hebrew conception of God and human beings, it follows that the notion of justice is associated not only with the idea of deserved punishment and equality but also with benevolence. In the light of cosmic justice and personal justice, there is no absolute obligation to punish offenders. The right to punish, and especially the positive aim of punishment, also includes the right, even the obligation, to be lenient with offenders. While social justice involves an absolute obligation to punish, the concept of personal justice encompasses the sentiment of benevolence, mercy, and forgiveness. Mercy and forgiveness, however, have a clear precondition. Writers of the Jewish-Christian tradition generally agree that genuine repentance is an important reason for being lenient with an offender and for forgiving. To forgive someone in the absence of repentance would mean to betray a lack of self-respect and/or to condone wrongdoing. There are, however, other reasons for forgiveness, for instance, the universality of sin, solidarity in suffering, and the remedial effect of forgiveness.

The complexity of the concept of justice in all its ramifications implies a correspondingly complex method of analysis. Within the Hebrew Bible, reward, punishment, and forgiveness are expressed in various genres and in a great variety of literary modes. To acquire an adequate understanding of these themes, all the relevant major texts must be investigated. Of primary importance is the examination of authority, justification, and the purposes of punishment and forgiveness in individual books or passages. Hebrew theological universalism and life’s dynamism present a challenge to all other views on these themes. It seems, therefore, appropriate to compare the findings which come from an analysis of the Hebrew Bible with the highly influential culture and religion of ancient Greece, on the one hand, and with contemporary philosophical and theological interpretations of the issue, on the other. Because of the predominantly cosmological background of the ancient Greeks’ beliefs and values, there was little room for the operation of divine forgiveness in its true sense in the ancient Greek world. Forgiveness was simply a matter of common sense in elementary human relations. In recent times, however, philosophers have increasingly taken the issue of forgiveness into account, although punishment remains the main object of rational inquiry. Reward, on the other hand, is normally considered within the framework of the general concept of justice or in discussions on punishment.

No individual words in Hebrew correspond entirely to the modern concepts of justice, reward, retribution, punishment, and forgiveness as they are generally used. The words derived from the root ṣdq, for instance, only partially cover the range of meaning involved in the modern concept of righteousness, justice. A predominantly lexicographical or conceptual approach is, therefore, problematic. A discussion based on conceptual schemes that are shared by speakers of different languages would be more helpful, provided that these conceptual schemes include stylistic, rhetorical, and literary schemes within an unlimited horizon. The basic principle of semantics is that the meaning of words is determined not only by concepts (etymology) but more importantly also by the structure of sentences. Semantics cannot, however, cope with all dimensions of a literary work, which is composed of symbols, metaphors, rhetoric, and stylistic features, as well as larger structural components such as literary genres. Biblical and cognate religious texts are particularly complex, offering as they do profound psychological insight into characters and into the transcendental acts, and the promises and demands of God. Analogy or mimesis, therefore, plays an essential role in these texts. But a metaphorical interpretation of these analogies is needed to unlock the deeper and truer meanings.

The variety of literary and rhetorical forms of individual biblical texts, the background perspectives of their message, and the frequent gaps necessitate a holistic approach. A source-oriented inquiry, however, remains important. This study includes philological analysis, semantics, literary criticism, form criticism, structural analysis, rhetorical criticism, and other methods currently in use: source criticism, redaction criticism, and the historical-critical method. It is clear that any poetic valuation of the text must take into account external evidence, such as the common ancient Near Eastern literary tradition, textual prehistory, the genesis of the text, the development of Israel’s monotheistic theology, the dating of the canon, and so on.

Literary Ways of Expressing God’s Righteousness and Justice

In order to investigate the principal themes in the Bible, we must first of all confront second-order problems concerning methods, concepts, and form. This is especially true if we want to undertake a systematic examination of the themes of reward, punishment, and forgiveness, precisely because these themes are so deeply embedded in the fundamental meaning of the Bible and so closely linked with related themes. They can be understood in many different ways, all of which are justifiable in relation to their several contexts. Consequently, a semantic examination of the words used to denote the concepts is therefore of limited value for discerning their essential character. Nonconceptual—that is, literary and rhetorical—modes of expressing ideas and feelings also must be taken into account. It is clear that all great works of literature contain several layers. Hidden behind the explicit framework of statements can be other, more enigmatic levels of meaning. The aim of any analysis of individual texts is to allow the subject matter to speak for itself. A thematic investigation should for this reason be complemented by an analysis of the intertextual background.

Erich Auerbach and Meir Sternberg have made two of the most important contributions to the discussion on the relationship between form and ideology in the Hebrew Bible. Auerbach’s Mimesis, in particular, has had an extraordinary impact on contemporary methods of biblical literary criticism. Auerbach compared the way the Homeric poems and the narratives of the Hebrew Bible represent reality. He concluded that the speeches of Homer and the whole presentation of the material tends to express everything, leaving no gaps and no hinterland. The Homeric style was only of the foreground, that is, of a uniformly illuminated present without perspective: The Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer can be analyzed, as we have essayed to do here, but he cannot be interpreted.⁸

To illustrate the characteristics of the Old Testament on the other hand, Auerbach highlighted the contrasting elements to be found in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen 22:1–19). In the chapter of Mimesis entitled Odysseus’ Scar, he asserts that the content of biblical narratives can only be interpreted in the light of absolute divine authority. Auerbach identifies the main characteristics of biblical narratives as being, first of all, an extension into the depths—that is, an orientation to the background as opposed to the foreground perspective. A second feature is concealed meaning, which requires interpretation on many different levels. Frequent gaps can also be found. Characteristic too of biblical narrators is that they suggest the psychological processes of characters rather than describing them explicitly. They also claim to possess absolute authority and are orientated first and foremost to the truth. The complex nature of their accounts, incorporating doctrine, promises, and demands, requires a subtle investigation and interpretation.⁹

Auerbach’s views on the special characteristics of biblical narratives influenced Meir Sternberg, who expanded and elaborated them in his close reading of several familiar narratives. In the preface to his book The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, he remarks, Contrary to what some recent attempts at ‘literary’ analysis seem to assume, form has no value or meaning apart from communicative (historical, ideological, aesthetic) function.¹⁰ Sternberg outlines the basic principles of his form of literary criticism in his first chapter.

Meir Sternberg questions the approach of literary critics who consider the author’s intention to be the most important but who also take an anti-historical line. In his view, an interpretation must be concerned with embodied or objectified intention. An examination of the interrelation between text and context must therefore take extrinsic historical-linguistic data and textual prehistory into account. Sternberg also criticizes proponents of the Bible’s fictionality: As so often, the historical approach is not nearly historical enough and the literary not literary enough, for one sees fiction only when one loses sight of history and convention.¹¹ History and fiction as modes of discourse can only be distinguished from one another by their overall purposes. Historians are committed to factuality while writers of fiction are not. It is exactly this commitment that made Hebrew historiography what it is: religious historical memory. Sternberg explains that biblical narrative "claims not just the status of history but, as Erich Auerbach rightly maintains, of the history—the one and only truth that, like God himself, brooks no rival."¹²

Sternberg comes to this conclusion: The product is neither fiction nor historicized fiction nor fictionalized history, but historiography pure and uncompromising.¹³ This view is reminiscent of the terminology of Robert Alter used especially in the second chapter of his book The Art of Biblical Narrative, entitled Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction.¹⁴ Alter contends that prose fiction is the best general rubric for describing biblical narrative.¹⁵

Meir Sternberg also examines the three principles which he sees as regulating the multifunctional composition of biblical narratives: ideological, historiographic, and aesthetic. Surely there would be no point to exegesis at all unless the human mind and heart were responsive to the words, metaphors, symbols, and textual structures of narratives and poems. Is it not the case after all that Scripture itself states that God made humankind in his own image (Gen 1:27)? Does this not imply that human beings have the capacity to grasp transcendental truths and values which lie, in their essence, outside historical, sociological, and literary categories?

John M. Rist observes the following: The claim of any sacred tradition must be that it is pointing not merely in a better direction, but in the direction of the best: another example of Aristotle’s dictum that one must stop somewhere. Yet that somewhere, for Aristotle as well as for ourselves, is not with us. If there is a somewhere, if there is after all the possibility of a single conceptual scheme, it can only exist in the mind of God.¹⁶ The biblical and the sacred traditions of Judaism and Christianity are based on the belief that the principal purpose of God’s mind and activity in the history of the world and of Israel is to preserve the harmonious divine order and to establish a perfect covenant community. By intervening in the activities of nations and in Israel, God aims to heal the effects of sin and so create the conditions for a reconciliation. The goal of humankind, and especially Israel, is to imitate the divine mind so perfectly that union with God himself is possible.

But how does this apply to the essential question, whether the biblical view of justice is correct or not? The biblical texts challenge the reader to decide, although it is true that this decision in turn depends on the reader’s fundamental horizon of understanding, on his theistic or atheistic attitudes. This study pays particular attention to the perception of the operation of intrinsic justice as reflected in proverbial and other wisdom statements—statements which, however, rarely touch on the theme of forgiveness. An attempt is made to explore the psychological depths of those prophetic speeches and narratives that treat a central aspect of justice. Characteristic of these texts is the dramatic tension between the reasons for punishing the unfaithful individuals or covenant people and the even profounder reason for mercy and forgiveness. The biblical writers’ orientation to the highest spiritual dimension results in gaps appearing in their narratives or speeches, which need to be interpreted from a wider perspective.

The Hebrew Bible is a composition and compilation drawing on traditions with very different roots. These range from the ancient Israel of the time of the patriarchs to the Greco-Roman period. As the teachers tried to articulate, make explicit, and defend the revelation of the divine will in the history of world, they adapted the fragmentary oral and written traditions, both native and foreign, which they had inherited. By integrating smaller fragments into larger units, they aimed to create unified wholes that shed light on the particular problems of their own day and the specific theological concerns of their own communities. The Hebrew Bible provides evidence of a sustained effort to reinterpret the nature and will of God, the essence of human life, and the essence of interpersonal relationships. This process of adaptation and actualization, or of transmutational interpretation, took place within living communities of believers who each brought their own intellectual faculties and experiences to bear on an examination of the received traditions.

Many examples of the kind of synthetic transmutation of tradition can be found in the Hebrew Bible. The Pentateuch is perhaps the most striking example of innerbiblical exegesis, since it is composed of a whole range of diverse, sometimes even contradictory, elements. The book of Deuteronomy too contains modifications of Exodus through Numbers. The prophetic literature was reworked following a similar pattern. The book of Isaiah contains a series of smaller oracles and larger sequences such as the Great Apocalypse (Isa 24–27) and the Little Apocalypse (Isa 34–35). An examination of the oracles of Deutero-Isaiah (Isa 40–55) and of Trito-Isaiah (Isa 56–66) show linguistic and ideological similarities to Isaiah. First and Second Chronicles reveal a homiletical reworking of Samuel through Kings.¹⁷ The attitudes of major translators to the original biblical text also show the dynamism of innerbiblical exegesis. The Septuagint, targumim, and Samaritan recensions are not translations in the normal sense; all of them reveal changes designed to make the Bible’s content more comprehensible to their contemporaries.¹⁸

It is striking that the basic theological maxims did not change with the transmutation of traditions. As a variety of material ranging from ancient myths, folktales, legends, history, and prophetic oracles to hymns and laments—to mention just a few genres—was incorporated into biblical documents, the theological maxims became even more unified. It is true, however, that textual formulations often remained ambiguous, problematic, or incomplete. As a result of being incorporated into biblical texts, ancient material became depolytheized and monotheized and underwent a radical change of meaning. Despite the varied exegetical traditions, the themes and forms of the Hebrew Bible therefore show a clear tendency to universalism. The central axis of the Hebrew Bible is the personal relationship with God. It is this relationship which allows the Bible’s universalism to transcend all other cosmological kinds of universalism. The central focus of the Bible became personalist experience, and the general domain of human ethical relationship to God was extended to include all the basic theological questions concerning guilt, punishment, and forgiveness—extended, in fact, to cover all the concerns of life itself.

The way the Bible reached its final shape, the way it was formed much like a puzzle out of various pieces, confronts us with the question of its authority. How is this apparently haphazard accumulation of biblical documents to be reconciled with the Bible’s claim to reveal the final truth? To answer this problem, we must consider the role of charismatic prophets and other authorities whose statements were considered intrinsically compelling and wise. Evidence suggests that these central figures altered and adapted the received traditions in the light of their own knowledge and experience. The writers and editors chose to remain anonymous, or else they attributed their exegesis to authoritative names such as Moses, David, Solomon, and Isaiah. It may seem strange to us today that these writers preferred to remain unknown, but in fact such writers considered anonymity to be a value in itself: the important thing was the message.

The guarantee of moral reliability throughout the whole process of transmission is obedience. Obedience, generated by an understanding of the nature of God, is the key to understanding how the products of exegesis could be incorporated into the Bible in the sense of transformative revelations. The incentive for studying the implicit and explicit meanings of the received traditions was the belief that all that exists depends on God, who created every single thing. This belief ensured that all the ambiguities, conflicts, and apparent contradictions in the biblical documents were not overlooked. On the contrary, sensitivity to these contradictions, and to the great variety of literary forms and styles in which the divine message was expressed, increased as people attempted to recognize and realize the will of God as perfectly as they could. Human exegetical activity was thus subordinated to the word of God, and the Bible could therefore become a symbol of life par excellence.

The prophets’ attitude to obedience resulted from God’s direct intervention in their lives. But the inner conditions, which needed to be receptive to such intervention, can be assumed to have been promoted by private prayer. Their knowledge of God was clearly derived not so much from an analysis of the phenomena in the external world or of history but from an existential experience of personal communication. The personalist theology and the religion of the Hebrew Bible, therefore, culminates in the call to worship God and in the prayer book of Psalms. Prayer is the powerful force which unifies human beings inwardly with God. This unity also constitutes the compelling reason for monotheism. While the observation of events in the world and in history may have confronted the Israelites with insoluble antinomies and pressured them to abandon their beliefs, the experience of prayer propelled them to convergence with God, to an experience of oneness with him and other people. History was consequently not perceived primarily as a unity in an external sense but in an internal, prophetic, hymnic, and mystical sense. The activity of actualization took place in the liturgy. Jon D. Levenson remarks, Israel did not assert the oneness of her God with the dispassion of a philosopher. She praised God for being unique, incomparable, a source of embarrassment to his rivals, their master. Something precious is lost when we convert this language of hymnody into a matter of doctrine. That there comes a moment in the history of religion when philosophical reflection is necessary cannot be gainsaid. But we generate grave misunderstandings when we read that moment back into an era when it had not yet occurred.¹⁹

Canonical Approach

With the greater focus on literary criticism in the late 1970s appeared the canonical approach, which also shifted focus from an examination of the historical (diachronic) context of biblical texts to the structure of the texts themselves. The canonical program is explicitly connected with the name of Brevard S. Childs.²⁰ The overall aim of the program is to shed light on the crucial dilemma whether major biblical sections should be analyzed into underlying sources or should be interpreted in their final, canonical form. Questions of historical referentiality, which are characteristic of the historical-critical approach, continue to play an important role. But they are subordinated to the search for the final, canonical meaning of the text. As Childs explains at one point, Canonical analysis focuses its attention on the final form of the text itself…. It treats the literature with its own integrity.²¹ Childs’s intention is to resolve various tensions that critical studies have discovered in the biblical writings and to demonstrate that canonical texts are not primarily products of political and sociological forces but of theological reflection.

By investigating the canonical form, it can be shown how the various stages in the prehistory and history of Israel’s religion contributed to the meaning of the text in its canonical form. The final form and the purpose of sacred Scripture is theologically normative, and this determines the task of its interpreters. The proponents of the canonical approach consider the original context as the starting point for exegesis but approach historical-critical and literary questions with a heightened awareness that the original meaning might have been very different from that in the final form. As Childs explains, The reason for insisting on the final form of scripture lies in the peculiar relationship between the text and people of God which is constitutive of the canon. The shape of the biblical text reflects a history of encounter between God and Israel. The canon serves to describe this peculiar relationship and to define the scope of this history by establishing a beginning and an end to the process…. The significance of the final form of the biblical text is that it alone bears witness to the full history of revelation.²²

Insistence on a definite purpose for the final form of individual texts implies an assumption of canonical unity within the whole of the Scriptures. Interpreters understand that biblical texts are interrelated to form a coherent and cogent whole. This manifests an overall innerbiblical congruence. Many wisdom and prophetic statements clearly express timeless propositional truths. Likewise, accounts of specific historical occurrences look beyond their own time and temporally conditioned circumstances. Interpretation brings about a fusion of partial truths within the whole of canonical and religious traditions. In the light of this fact, the canonical program can be defined as follows:

The formal model … is that the biblical canon be construed as analogous to the collected works of a single author. This (divine) author wrote them (over a considerable period of time) by assuming a variety of authorial personae, each with its own distinctive character, historical situation, etc. As one moves, therefore, from one book to another one encounters a diversity of implied authors, each of whom must be understood on their own terms; yet behind them all is a single, controlling intelligence, working to an overall plan. Because of this, these diverse works therefore can—and for a full understanding, must—be read together as a unified canon.²³

Childs and his followers believed that biblical texts derived their value from the sacred nature of their underlying authority. They were interested primarily in the religious message which those texts communicated.²⁴ A variety of methods—form and redaction criticism, as well as literary and rhetorical criticism—were used to illuminate the structure of the texts in their final form. The importance of historical and sociological data receded with the new emphasis on the normative status of biblical texts as well their role in the community of believers in ancient Israel. Important to canonical analysis is a critical consideration of the process by which a particular text became part of the biblical canon. No canonical authority is, however, attributed to the earlier versions because of the unreliability of historical reconstructions. The adherents of the canonical approach also questioned whether the element of revelation resides in the text itself, in the forms, metaphors, and images, independently of their source.²⁵

Law and Literature

In the 1970s, the law and literature movement, which focused on the interdisciplinary connection between law and literature in order to broaden and to deepen understanding of human experience, began to attract attention. In its early stages, the law and literature movement focused strictly on the law-in-literature perspective as a way of critiquing social institutions and legal norms. The proponents of this perspective, such as Weisberg, focus on enduring issues of great literary texts and see an intrinsic value in the use of literature as a means of discussing legal topics.²⁶ They believe that literary texts, especially narratives, offer insight into the nature of law in dealing with the human condition and with political and social contexts. Greater attention to the possible relevance of literary texts dealing with legal issues for the study of law attracted attention to the law-as-literature perspective. Proponents of this perspective see value in the methods employed by literary scholars in literary analysis, interpretation, and critique of literary works and believe that comparing legal interpretation with interpretation in other fields of knowledge, particularly literature, helps us to come to a better understanding and interpretation of the law.

Ian Ward, a professor of law at Newcastle University Law School, explains both perspectives of the law and literature movement in more detail.²⁷ In dealing with the law in literary terms, he states, "The essence of ‘law as literature’ is the suggestion that the techniques and methods of literary theory and analysis are appropriate to legal scholarship…. It is a ‘theory of meaning’ which demands not only the external perspective of the historicist nature of understanding, but also the internal awareness of its own limitation.²⁸ In his assessment of the relationship between law and literature, James Seaton goes to the most universal basis for recognizing the role of literature in the field of law.²⁹ Following a critical account of the position of authors such as Richard Weisberg,³⁰ Martha Nussbaum,³¹ and Richard Posner,³² he expresses a much more positive appreciation of the role of literature for in-depth legal reflections. The importance of legal studies literature follows from its importance to human beings in general.³³ Literature is a vehicle for moral reflection and discrimination."³⁴

Michael J. Meyer edited the monographic study Literature and Law (2004) containing papers by fourteen authors with summarizing explications of the contents:

Collectively the essays in this book are designed to deal with themes of guilt and innocence, right and wrong, morality and legality. The essays also suggest that the world as it is delineated by lawyers is indeed a text that like its literary counterparts sometimes blurs the distinction between fact and fiction as it attempts to define truth and to establish criteria for impartial justice. By exploring interdisciplinary contexts, readers will surely be made more aware, more sensitive, to the role that stories play in the legal profession and to the dilemmas faced by legal systems that often succeed in maintaining the rights and privileges of a dominant societal group at the expense of a less powerful one. When law acts arbitrarily and capriciously, it is difficult for it to be blind; sadly, it is then unable to balance its scales so that the word law is synonymous with justice.³⁵

More recently, Kieran Dolin published an important monograph about the relationship between law and literature.³⁶ International experts present in over twenty chapters an overview of the many ways in which law, justice, and literature interact. For our purpose, a book by Chaya T. Halberstam is of greater relevance.³⁷ The author deals with the question of how humans can implement divine law, as revealed in the Bible, and render perfect justice in this world. She argues that the biblical legacy is a rhetorical celebration of the availability of knowledge and truth through ‘reverence for Yhwh,’ and of the attainability of true justice through obedience of God’s commandments.³⁸ At the same time, the rabbis faced a persistent question: Do humans, even the most well-intentioned, competent, and morally righteous among them, ever have the capacity to administer divine commandments?³⁹ Literary ways of expressing God’s promises and threats about divine retribution do not permit that God’s standards of justice could follow the dictates of human jurisprudence. It follows that rabbis relegated God’s involvement with humans and the world—divine reward and punishment—to a sphere beyond the law in which God could be encountered personally and individually.⁴⁰

The personal and individual bases of relationship between God and humans go so far beyond the law, guided by the faith that God takes responsibility and directing the course of human events to a gracious goal, that the martyrs of the martyrdom stories could affirm God’s providence and the truth of divine love even in the most dramatic of trials. The belief that allows God to operate emotionally and personally in his dealings with Israel and with humans as a whole is based, in the final analysis, on God’s vision of a higher truth that transcends legal criteria and human limitations in general. Great biblical narratives of the Hebrew Bible, such as the Joseph story (Gen 37–50), the stories in the book of Samuel, and so on, go much farther than most interpreters generally do in utterly undermining human evidence for drawing conclusions about guilt and responsibility. Halberstam states: God’s role in the biblical narrative is ultimately to absolve all the characters of culpability, as he appears as the invisible hand behind the humans’ missteps, guiding them toward a hidden goal.⁴¹ This perspective of God’s righteousness and justice opens the door to the prevalence of grace, forgiveness, and justification in God’s dealing with humans in the Bible.

1. See arguments by Kelsen, What Is Justice?, 1–24.

2. Von Rad, The Righteousness of Jahweh and of Israel, 370.

3. Krašovec, La justice (ṣdq) de Dieu.

4. Jobes and Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint; Schenker, The Earliest Text of the Hebrew Bible.

5. See the comprehensive study by Krašovec, Reward, Punishment, and Forgiveness.

6. See arguments by Koch, Gibt es ein Vergeltungsdogma im Alten Testament?; Koch, Um das Prinzip der Vergeltung in Religion und Recht des Alten Testaments, 30–181; Koch, Is There a Doctrine of Retribution in the Old Testament?; Barton, Natural Law and Poetic Justice; Barton, Ethics in Isaiah of Jerusalem. For a broader discussion on natural law, see especially Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights.

7. Hampton, Retributive Idea.

8. Auerbach, Mimesis, 13.

9. Auerbach, Mimesis, 3–23.

10. Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative, xii.

11. Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 24.

12. Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 32.

13. Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 34–35.

14. Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, 23–46.

15. Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, 24.

16. Rist, On the Very Idea of Translating Sacred Scripture, 1499–511.

17. See major commentaries to individual books.

18. See the comprehensive study by Krašovec, Prevajanje med teorijo in prakso, 58–102.

19. Levenson, Sinai and Zion, 63.

20. Childs, Exegetical Significance of Canon; Childs, Canonical Shape of the Prophetic Literature; Childs, Old Testament as Scripture; Childs, Old Testament Theology.

21. Childs, Old Testament as Scripture, 73.

22. Childs, Old Testament as Scripture, 75–76.

23. Noble, Canonical Approach, 341.

24. Jasper, Readings in the Canon of Scripture.

25. See the criticism of the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricœur and his followers by Childs, Old Testament as Scripture, 77.

26. Weisberg, Poethics.

27. Ward, Law and Literature.

28. Ward, Law and Literature, 16.

29. Seaton, Law and Literature.

30. Weisberg, Poethics.

31. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice.

32. Posner, Law and Literature.

33. Seaton, Law and Literature, 505.

34. Seaton, Law and Literature, 507.

35. Meyer, Literature and Law, viii.

36. Dolin, A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature.

37. Halberstam, Law and Truth.

38. Halberstam, Law and Truth, 4.

39. Halberstam, Law and Truth, 4.

40. Halberstam, Law and Truth, 145.

41. Halberstam, Law and Truth, 175.

PART ONE

Dimensions of God’s Righteousness in Acts of Creation and Redemption

Introduction to Part One

The first part of the book is semantic in nature. It deals with the role of keywords designating the semantic field of righteousness and justice in the Hebrew Bible in order to do justice to the whole range of meanings for interrelated words, word pairs, and established patterns. This implies special attention to repetition of keywords, to formulaic phrases, and to basic stylistic devices of biblical texts in view of the way they are used in the original and in standard ancient translations of the Bible. The nature of biblical languages and of the semantic, stylistic, and literary devices of biblical literature implies that interpreters and translators of the Bible must handle with great care vocabulary, imagery, similes, metaphors, and repetitions of keywords and phrases, for these components are found almost universally and very often have a crucial function within the structure of a text, whether in whole or in part.

Any profusion of stylistic and literary devices requires care in evaluation of their particular function at various levels within the context of short sentences, parallelism, a strophe, or a whole poem. Poetic devices do not occur in isolation but within the context of a poem, discourse, or narrative. The function of particular linguistic and literary devices is best shown by the full analysis of a complete portion of a text or of an entire short poem. As Irena Avsenik Nabergoj pointed out in her study about the semantics of reality and truth in the Bible, Every work of literature belongs to at least one literary type or genre. Though the classification of literary types and genres evokes conventionality of forms, literary works reflect life, which enables communication insofar as literary types function as a system of communication.¹ Generally speaking, repetition of various components is the most conspicuous feature both of prose and poetry: repetition of a sound, syllable, word, phrase, or metrical pattern. Repetition is a basic unifying device of a word’s basic meaning in poetry, but many kinds of repetition appear also in prose.

The poetic form of parallelism (parallelismus membrorum) most clearly shows the semantic relationships between synonymous and antithetical words that characterize the notion of righteousness and justice in the Hebrew Bible. Hebrew poetry uses grammatical parallelism as its basic method in linking successive verses. The term parallelism signifies that the second or third line of a distich or tristich consistently provides the same or similar thought, figure, or metaphor contained in the preceding verse or verses. Robert Lowth was the first to recognize the parallelistic principle in Hebrew poetry in his work De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (1815), and he made systematic efforts to fathom the structure of Hebrew grammatical parallelism—that is, interconnections between the paralleled lines. He realized that parallelism is a fundamental form in ancient Hebrew poetry. He also defined three types of parallelism: synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic. It follows that the distich is the basic structural unit. Single lines (monostichs) are rarely found in the Bible, tristichs being much more frequent. Most parallel units are distichs. Synonymous parallelism means repetition or duplication of thought by means of synonymous terms, whereas antithetical parallelism involves opposition of thought and corresponding terms. Lowth used the term synthetic parallelism to describe incomplete parallels. Among more recent scholars relevant for their research into parallelism are George Buchanan Gray’s The Forms of Hebrew Poetry (1972) and Michael Patrick O’Connor’s Hebrew Verse Structure (1997), among others.

Parallelism is such a fundamental form of expressing thought that it can be reproduced in translation. It follows that the translator must identify both the division between the stichs that form a parallelism and the relationship between the lines paralleled. Especially striking are the correlated synonyms, standard formulas, and repetitive patterns. Since parallelism is the basic form of the poetry in Northwest Semitic literature, two synonymous or antithetical words usually occur in the two parallel parts of a verse. The standardized division of statements in this way gave rise to a great number of correlated synonyms and antonyms. Synonymous parallelism and therefore correlated synonyms are far more frequent in the Hebrew Bible than are antithetical parallelism and correlated antonyms. In Canaanite literature, antithetical parallelism hardly exists, whereas synonymous parallelism is even more standardized than in the Bible. Thus, hundreds of correlated fixed synonyms are common to both literatures: dew-rain, enemy-adversary, kingruler, tent-dwelling, widow-orphan, earth-heaven, fire-sword, silver-gold, left hand-right hand, to know-to understand, etc.²

Consistency in and the frequency of using correlated synonymous words resulted in a number of synonymous formulas, or repeated phrases. Such formulas recur in the same form whenever the poet speaks of the same or a similar theme, situation, or action. Repeated phrases are subject to two ways of interpretation. Some scholars suggest that borrowing has taken place, and others tend to speak of traditional or conventional language. The basic literary structure of parallelism may point back to a common heritage of established phraseology.³ These general features of the Hebrew literature explain why in the Hebrew Bible so many couplets use synonymous and, to some extent, antithetical terms from the semantic field of righteousness and justice.

The basic metaphorical expressions and literary forms of the Northwest Semitic world make it clear that they were established over a very long period of oral and written transmission. The occurrence of particular words, word pairs, and literary motifs or structures in different bodies of literature also shows that these elements were not always used in the same manner in the Canaanite and Hebrew cultures. The underlying beliefs and values, the intention, and other influences upon the authors concerned drastically affected the use of literary and cultural forms. The different, more sublime, and spiritual manner of use meant that in the Hebrew Bible these could receive the status of a sacred word within a sacred history of redemption.

The essential unity of the spheres of history and of the divine law derives from the Hebrew concept of God. This concept also explains why law and wisdom are so harmoniously integrated in the historical and prophetic literature, as well as within the Hebrew canon as a whole. The created world and the history of humankind are not opposed but correlated spheres of God’s activity. An essential unity too, therefore, exists in the knowledge derived from nature and historical interpretation. Historical events illustrate basic beliefs and moral principles. To view the two spheres as being so directly and absolutely linked was only possible after the cosmic and collective-social religions of the great cultures had been superseded by a religion of absolute personalism. The overwhelming historical, literary, and theological arch of the Hebrew Bible is, therefore, a perpetual challenge and inspiration for interpretation in all directions.

The view that history possesses an inner unity, and that there is a purposeful development of the world from its original creation to some undefined messianic or eschatological moment, is characteristic of biblical history. Characteristic too is the view that God’s election and covenant forms the basis of history’s meaning. Furthermore, human beings can receive grace that is greater than they deserve. God’s law must be consistently obeyed. Repentance must be shown. God’s mercy and forgiveness is supreme. The Hebrew religion is therefore teleological, and not archetypal, in nature.

The great surprise of the Bible, however, is the revelation of the divine law of mercy and reconciliation. This is the law of God’s innermost thoughts, of his elemental love for his creation. The more universal and unitary the historical perspective, the more mysterious God’s ways to humankind seem. It is only against this background that the validity of God’s promise to Israel can be assessed. The acceptance of the unitary teleological perspective of history is crucial to an interpretation of those biblical passages which are obscure or ambiguous. Seen in isolation, quite a number of narratives, oracles and psalms, and other genres could be interpreted equally easily in a polytheistic or monotheistic manner. It is the canonical framework which indicates that they form part