Righteousness: Volume 2: Old Testament

By Jeffrey J. Niehaus

The second volume of this three-volume work exegetes and comments on every occurrence of the Hebrew terms for righteousness in the Old Testament. It begins with a discussion of apperception and deductive method and concludes with an afterword on righteousness and ontology. The ontological argument affirms that God's aseity is the foundation of righteousness in the Bible, and thus of all true righteousness. Righteousness is being true to God, and God is always true to himself, including in his self-existence. Other terms in the righteous word group, such as "righteous" and "justify," are considered, along with the important word pair, "righteousness and justice," in semantic domain studies in the first three chapters. Semantic domain studies show that terms like "upright," "blameless," and "good" are qualifiers of righteousness. Whatever the flavor or nuance of the terms for righteousness may be in different OT contexts, however, study shows that the underlying sense of righteousness is conformity to God's Being and doing, and the same is true of the righteousness of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Oct 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666798210

Jeffrey J. Niehaus

Jeffrey Jay Niehaus is a poet and Senior Professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He has written a number of scholarly works, including God at Sinai, Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology, a three-volume Biblical Theology, and a monograph, When Did Eve Sin? Niehaus received his PhD in English literature from Harvard University in 1976 and is the author of Preludes: An Autobiography in Verse, Sonnets Subtropical and Existential, Sea Grapes and Sea Oats, and God the Poet: Exploring the Origin and Nature of Poetry.

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Prolegomena to Volume II

Apperception and Deductive Method

A Short Note on Semantic Domain Studies

He leads me in paths of righteousness

for his name’s sake. (Ps

23

:

3)

God created all things (Gen 1:1). As John says:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John

1

:

1

–

3

)

Without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:3). Moreover, nothing exists that has not been made or called into existence by God: God calls into existence the things that do not exist (Rom 4:17). God, then, is the source of all things. That means God is the source of righteousness. He is also the archetype of righteousness. God’s aseity is the primary evidence for God’s archetypal righteousness.

As noted in Volume I (Prolegomena), the consonantal text of the divine self-naming in Exod 3:14 implies more than one possible vocalization of the verb, to be. One possible reading asserts God’s aseity: I will cause to be what I will be. In other words, I will [from imperceptible instant to imperceptible instant] (re)create myself. God does that in a way that is always true to the Norm of himself—that is, he does it righteously.

David’s statement about the Lord in Psalm 23 relates that divine fact to righteousness in David’s own life. God leads him in paths of righteousness (צדק)—that is, paths true to the standard of God—for the sake of, or on account of (למען), his name (Ps 23:3). Now if God’s name is his essential nature, then God’s name is emblematic of God’s aseity because God’s essential nature is that he is always true to the Standard or Norm of himself and that is also the case in his self-existence—his ongoing self-recreation (hence the name God revealed at Exod 3:14). Put another way, God is always true to himself in his doing—as he does the ongoing and eternal work of aseity. On earth David understands that God leads him in paths that are also outworkings—or doings—true to God’s righteousness or "righteous Being" (צדק).

What was true of David was paramountly true of great David’s greater son, Jesus. Jesus Christ the righteous (1 John 2:1) embodied as a man God’s perfect conformity to the standard of himself—that is, he embodied God’s righteousness. That is obvious as it relates to God’s Being, because Jesus said of himself, Whoever has seen me has seen the Father (John 14:9), and I and the Father are one (John 10:30). It is also obvious as it relates to God’s doing, because Jesus said of himself, Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise (John 5:19). Jesus was perfectly righteous because he reflected perfectly his Father’s Being and doing.

Ludwig Diestel, whose work was considered in Volume I, came remarkably close to saying the same thing. Comparing Jesus to the great OT prophets he said:

The Son of man stands in relation to the statutory law not only as freely as those great prophets; in him, who was more than a Jonah, than a Solomon, than the temple, lies the power also to render judgments over the foundational institutions of the Law in such a way as is appropriate to the innermost essence and the highest conception of the Torah. It is the same whether the disciples are persecuted because of Christ or on account of righteousness; for he himself is righteousness, Matt.

5

:

10

–

11

.¹

Diestel did not understand God’s righteousness in terms of God’s faithfulness to his own Being and doing, but his statement is fully compatible with such an understanding. That is apparent in the way the verses he cited (Matt 5:10–11) relate to one another:

a b

v.

10

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake

a’ b’

v.

11

Blessed are you when others . . . persecute you on my account.

The statements parallel those who are persecuted and the reason for their persecution: for righteousness’ sake // on my account. Diestel did not diagram the parallelism to illustrate its implication but concluded: "It is the same whether the disciples are persecuted because of Christ or on account of righteousness; for he himself is righteousness" (emphasis added).

What Diestel intuited but did not pursue has been made the core proposal of the present work. A German contemporary of the 19th century theologians already considered attempted, but failed, to reach a similar conclusion about righteousness by using an inductive approach.

I. Emil Kautsch’s Attempt

²

A. Kautsch and Apperception

God reveals his righteousness in both Testaments. His righteousness is not a concept abstracted from a mass of particular cases and made into a universal idea. Rather it is the universal Ground of all examples of righteousness realized in divine action and in the created order. That is the premise of the present work and the basis of this deductive study.

Because the interpreters already considered have proceeded inductively, and because Kautsch (uniquely) raised the matter of apperception, which is closely related to induction, it is appropriate now to discuss apperception and induction to understand how they are similar and different.

1. Apperception Defined

Kautsch produced his work on the root, צדק, in 1881, and Kant had written about the transcendental unity of apperception a century before Kautsch. We take a much more recent definition of apperception consonant with the sense in which Kautsch used the term. This is done for purposes of illustration and because it addresses a fundamental act of mind:

Apperception is the ability to form a conscious percept of a sensory impression (e.g., an object), which can be thought of as the construction of different visual attributes of the stimulus into a whole percept.³

The act of apperception as applied to words or lexemes, then, is: the combination or construction of different attributes or aspects of a word or lexeme (e.g., of צדק or of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ) into a whole percept, or, for our purposes, a composite but whole concept.

Apperception is a synthesizing act of the mind, whether the term is understood as a synthesizing of various qualities of an object into one percept (impression or idea) of that object, or as a synthesizing of various senses of a word or lexeme into one concept (sense or idea) of that word or lexeme.

2. Induction Defined

We now introduce two formal definitions of induction, not because the term is not well known (with its several nuances), but because of its affinity (when used in certain senses) with apperception. The OED gives a number of definitions for induction. The two most pertinent for our purposes are as follows:

The bringing forward, inducing, or enumerating of a number of separate facts, particulars, etc., esp. for the purpose of proving a general statement.

or

The process of inferring a general law or principle from the observation of particular instances (opposed to DEDUCTION).⁴

The fundamental idea of both terms (apperception and induction) is the formation of a general idea from a group of related or, perhaps better, constituent particulars.

3. Kautsch and Induction

The approach we propose is deductive. Emil Kautsch, by contrast, took an inductive approach in hopes of discovering a ground or fundamental sense of righteousness that would be demonstrable throughout the Bible. He reckoned first with the role of apperception, a process by which the mind draws on particular examples to form an abstract and whole concept that might then be universally recognizable. Regarding the meaning of a word, Kautsch noted how removed from its physical origins an abstracted idea may be:

In numerous cases the physical base-concept employed by apperception has so completely disappeared from linguistic usage that it can only be ascertained by means of scholarly labor along the path of comparative linguistics. In other cases it is still present, but in a different sense, so that the original connection must likewise still be established through laborious reflection.⁵

Kautsch added two examples from German: "The first best examples, such as ‘idea’ [Begriff] and ‘to grasp’ [begreifen], ‘to deal/trade/bargain’ [handeln] and ‘action’ [Handlung] are enough to prove what has been said."⁶

Kautsch described the development of abstract ideas from whatever physical realities a root may originally have denoted. In doing so he also effectively described what an inductive study does. His account might be taken as a characterization of the process by which Diestel, Ritschl, Cremer, and their followers could start with a word whose root concept means straight (צדק) and conclude that in usage it means purpose, grace, relationship or covenant-faithfulness. That is so because apperception and induction are analogous processes. An inductive study, then, attempts to discover a term’s universal sense produced over time, and to do so by a process analogous to apperception. That, too, involves scholarly labor and laborious reflection.⁷

Kautsch recognized that an inductive exploration, although it may appear conceptually simple at first blush, has its challenges. Among those are problems raised by context and chronology, and by subjectivity and literary criticism.

4. Problems: Contextual and Chronological

One problem Kautsch recognized is that a word may occur in various contexts with different meanings conditioned by the contexts in which they occur. Another has to do with changes of meaning—or accretions to an original meaning—that can and often do occur through time. He addressed these as methodological considerations at the outset of his work:

The possibility is not even excluded that the strong emergence of some word-connotation rests more on accident or on the idiosyncratic nature of the religious material; failure to recognize this possibility can easily lead to a false judgment about actual linguistic usage. A further difficulty lies in the circumstance that often one and the same word will still be used in an older sense, long after other concepts have attached themselves to the same word.⁸

Matters of this sort are not unknown to interpreters. As an example of the former case, we have noted how von Rad cited the special nuance of צדיק (and relatedly צדקה), which originally meant straight, later having to do with access to the cult.⁹

As an example of the latter sort we briefly note a Hebrew usage not recognized by all translations. Although it does not involve the righteousness word group it is worth noting as a case in point, namely, how the word, נפש, is used in two senses in Jonah 2: first in the primordial and physical sense of throat/neck and then in the later, more abstract and spiritual sense of soul/self.

The waters engulfed me up to the neck [נפש];the watery depths overcame me. (Jonah

2

:

5

HCSB)

and then

As my life [נפש] was fading away,I remembered Yahweh.My prayer came to You,to Your holy temple. (Jonah

2

:

7

HCSB)

This is a case where, to quote Kautsch, one and the same word will still be used in an older sense, long after other concepts have attached themselves to the same word. In the case of נפש the development of the idea of soul or life from the physical reality of throat is fairly easy to detect: if one cannot breathe—through one’s throat—then one loses one’s life and one’s soul is no more on the earth.

5. Problems: Subjective and Higher-Critical

Kautsch recognized and addressed two more problems at the outset of his study: (1) the subjectivity of the modern interpreter, who is culturally and temporally remote from the ancient culture in which the language he studies was a living language, and (2) the very different problem posed by how one understands the development of the sense of a word over the course of OT literary history.¹⁰ Regarding the last problem Kautsch said:

A last difficulty arises, finally, because the determination of the results is dependent at every turn on literary-historical criticism. To the one who sees in Deuteronomy or even in the so-called Priestly Code the relatively oldest component of Old Testament literature, the developmental history of certain concepts will present itself in a completely different sequence than it will to the one who assigns their place after the so-called Jehovist and the Prophets of the eighth century.¹¹

Kautsch recognized here a problem, or an issue, that we have seen with Diestel, Ritschl, and Cremer. The present work does not have that problem, because it does not subscribe to the Historical-Critical reconstruction of the OT. But Kautsch undertook his study in the face of this challenge, which might seem insurmountable to anyone who hopes to establish a unified idea of biblical righteousness.

6. Kautsch’s Results

Kautsch surveyed four terms associated with the root צדק: the verb, the adjective, and the masculine and feminine forms of the noun.¹² Of special interest to us are his conclusions regarding the nominal forms. Of צדק he said:

1.Old Testament linguistic usage throughout associates the concept of a norm appropriate state or a norm-appropriate conduct with ‘צ.

2.That which standardizes is sometimes an objective (physical) norm, sometimes a spiritual standard of evaluation, as has been produced of itself by the idea of God, as well as by the idea and definition of man.¹³

He said that the results for צדקה are much the same.¹⁴ That result of course does not benefit from the distinction between צדק and צדקה discovered later by Jepsen.¹⁵

Nonetheless, Kautsch’s conclusion that the norm of righteousness is the idea of God and correspondingly the idea and definition of man, who is, we recall, made in God’s image and likeness—and whose idea and definition are shown by the unfallen Adam—is not far from the idea of righteousness that we propose, even if Kautsch came to it by an inductive process that yielded only approximate results. He did note that usage of the word group moves . . . almost exclusively in the spiritual and indeed predominantly in the ethical sphere ("bewegt sich . . . fast . . . ausschliesslich in der geistigen und zwar vorwiegend in der ethischen Sphäre"), as the Wisdom literature and the Prophets show.¹⁶ He concluded from his survey of the materials that צדק and צדקה in particular were virtually religious termini technici that had to do with the essence of the theocratic relationship between God and Israel.¹⁷

More particularly, and to our point, Kautsch thought usage of צדק and צדקה occured in the sphere of a norm-appropriate or objective state or personal quality ("in der Sphäre einer normgemässen oder objective Beschaffenheit oder persönlicher Eigenschaft").¹⁸ He added:

Never is the idea, despite all appearances, transposed into one of objective blessing or salvation/welfare, and still less in the Old Testament can an attempt be established for that usage, which fixes the idea of a norm-appropriate action on individual concrete actions or even on the product of the same.¹⁹

With this summary Kautsch rejected the inductive result achieved by Diestel and endorsed by those who followed him, who identified the idea of biblical righteousness with the idea of purpose or its effects—blessing or salvation/welfare or God’s gracious action.

As far as it goes, that conclusion is appropriate. Kautsch’s results however are less definite than one might wish. At the end of the process he did not arrive at the unified and governing idea of righteousness that he hoped to discover. The conclusion of his work makes this clear. In that conclusion he demonstrated variability in the idea of righteousness by making some observations on the similarity of Arabic and Hebrew usages, in which he cited the examples of two objects: a lance and a date. A lance can be a righteous lance if it is what a lance should be—that is, if it conforms to the idea of a lance. So, a righteous lance is straight and hard. A date can be a righteous date if it is what a date should be—that is, if it conforms to the idea of a date. So, a righteous date is sweet and soft. Kautsch concluded: The accessible concept of צדק is ‘the condition, that corresponds in some way to a determining/governing norm.’²⁰ But he never located a single and underlying norm conclusively.

We argue that there is an underlying norm. A lance or a date can indeed be righteous, if the lance or date conforms to the idea of a lance or date that existed in the mind of God before any lance or date was created. Conformity of a created entity to God’s Being and doing includes its conformity to the idea of that entity in God’s mind before the entity came to be. God himself, including his ideas, is the Norm.

B. Eichrodt on Kautsch

Walther Eichrodt rejected the idea of any abstract, formal concept that might lie at the root of biblical righteousness. This rejection of course stands opposed to the approach taken in the present work: In Hebrew thinking there is no such thing as an abstract formal concept, which might be classified according to an objective standard, thus presupposing a universal idea of righteousness.²¹ This view of the matter naturally meant Eichrodt would reject Kautsch’s effort to find just such a universal idea:

E. Kautzsch made an attempt along such lines to discover the point at which all the various meanings of righteousness converged, making at one time the objective norm of truth or the subjective one of righteousness, at another the objective divine command or the subjective conscience, at another even the idea of God or the idea of man the focal point; but such an attempt intrudes conceptions quite foreign to the Hebrew mind for which there is no basis in the naively realistic thinking of the Israelite.²²

Eichrodt’s characterization of Hebrew thought provokes—or ought to provoke—a question: How can one say the Israelite mind exemplified naively realistic thinking? Such a concept is itself likely to be an impressionistic result of the mental process by which a person makes sense of an idea by assimilating it to the body of ideas he or she already possesses. In other words, as one reads the OT, one accumulates impressions that lead one to think he or she has acquired an idea of the Hebrew mind. Even though it may be true that the balance of what one might call materiality and spirituality weighs more on the side of the material (the realistic) than the spiritual in the OT—and the opposite may be true in the NT (e.g., For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal, 2 Cor 4:18)—that does not preclude the presence of abstract or metaphysical or spiritual concepts in the OT.²³

In the OT God revealed his own Being and doing, from which all things flow. It does not depend on what Israel may have thought, because the Bible gives us more than that. It depends on what God has revealed. For example: when God reveals his Name to Moses on Sinai (Exod 3:14–15) we find an invitation to ponder something very abstract—or better, metaphysical and spiritual.

The terms metaphysical and spiritual are preferable to the term abstract, and for the following reasons. The term abstract suggests an idea or definition that has been drawn into one from many examples—that is, abstracted from them and artificially combined to form one ideal concept. Abstraction, then, is like induction. On the other hand, what is metaphysical or spiritual in the Bible comes via revelation: it is handed down to us, not abstracted and composed by us. Such revelation is then like deduction. The great example that forms in a sense the bedrock of this work is the divine self-naming in Exod 3:14–15. One does not understand that self-naming by assembling various other exemplars and forming an abstract idea of God’s name from them. One understands it in and of itself—as God gave it; one may then deduce other facts from it, such as God’s aseity and its implications for the righteousness of God, and so on.

C. Apperception and Induction

1. Apperception: Organization by Abstraction and Synthesis

Apperception is a term that has been used for the way a human mind makes sense of an observed phenomenon by abstracting and synthesizing the various aspects of that phenomenon into one whole idea of it (a percept). Analogously, and taken to a higher level in the realm of language, the idea of righteous as true or correct or conforming to some (even moral) standard was putatively synthesized from certain realities in the physical world: e.g., a path that was straight (and thus not misleading, but leading in the right way toward some proper destination), or weights and measures that were right or true (and thus not deceptive or misleading). The mental capacity for percept-formation, or apperception, was supposedly able to produce the moral terminology of righteous and righteousness by abstracting and synthesizing the qualities of such material examples. Diestel’s thought clearly moved in this direction, and so (with a more explicit focus on the importance of apperception) did Kautsch’s. Even if this picture of things has true explanatory power, however, such ability in the imago Dei remains grounded in God.²⁴

2. Induction: Replicating Apperception

Induction is similar. It seeks to abstract from various particular instances or cases—the phenomena it perceives—some general idea that is capacious enough to be true to each particular case, even though no one particular case may be tantamount to the more general idea. Again, as applied to language, an inductive approach to צדק would note, first, the use of the term to mean that whatever possesses it is straight (as in a path), and to mean weights and measures that were right or true, and also note other cases where, for example, righteousness might occur along with more immaterial objects such as uprightness or faithfulness or salvation etc. in poetical parallelism. The inductive work would then move in a decidedly abstract direction and synthesize a general idea of righteousness such as has been observed in the theologians: e.g., צדק/צדקה characterized as saving purpose, grace, or covenant-faithfulness.

Put differently: induction seeks to replicate the process of apperception, and thus, it is hoped, achieve the true percept, or rather concept or idea, of righteousness. It is the linguist’s or theologian’s way of arriving, by a mechanical process of comparison and evaluation, at the same general idea of righteousness/righteous that came about historically, but not deliberately, as humans applied the root, צדק, to a broadening array of objects—that is, in new and different ways.

Our deductive approach is quite different. We assume that God gave us a God-breathed Scripture. That means, among other things, that righteousness and its cognate terms contained values imparted to human beings (e.g., uprightness, justice, purity, etc.)—such was their idea"—and those values, or that idea, expressed in those words, are always true to what God meant them to be, irrespective of any human perversion of them.²⁵ Our deductive procedure is based on the idea that righteousness biblically means conformity to God’s Being and doing. God is the supreme idea and the source of all values that can be called righteous.

II. Deductive Method and Meaning

A. How to Arrive at Meaning

Charles Lee Irons, in his book The Righteousness of God, has helpfully reviewed types of error that can occur when one seeks to understand the meaning or sense of a term. The following discussion follows his outline, so the debt to his discussion will be clear even as we hope to show that our proposed way of understanding righteousness and the righteousness of God does not fall into the errors against which he would guard us.²⁶

1. Lexical Sense vs. Discourse Sense

Irons starts his methodological discussion with a review of caveats that are important when one seeks to understand the meaning of a biblical word or phrase. The first and most important caveat: one should distinguish between a word’s lexical meaning or sense on the one hand, and its discourse meaning or reference on the other hand.

A word’s discourse meaning comes from its reference in a given context. Its meaning in a particular context depends upon how it relates to that context. Accordingly Irons observes: words usually have a range of senses, not just one sense.²⁷ He cites the Greek term ἀγάπη as an example:

It is well known that the New Testament writers frequently use the word ἀγάπη in reference to God’s love for humanity, especially as expressed in the self-abnegating love of Christ in giving himself up for our sins. But failure to distinguish between sense and reference leads some scholars to argue, fallaciously, that the word ἀγάπη itself (along with its cognates) means divine, self-sacrificial love. This argument is made in spite of the fact that ἀγάπη is clearly used in both the Septuagint and the New Testament to refer to baser and even sinful forms of love. For example, the verb ἀγαπάω is used of Amnon’s lust for Tamar (LXX

1

Kgdms

13

:

15

), and in the sentence, Do not love the world (

1

John

2

:

15

). Thus, while ἀγαπάω can be used to refer to God’s love, it does not in and of itself mean God’s love. Sense and reference must be clearly distinguished.²⁸

One may wonder why this warning has to be given. After all, when one opens a lexicon one normally finds a range of meanings or senses for most entries, once due notice of the root sense has been given. Still, not everyone has avoided the confusion Irons discusses.

2. Illegitimate Totality Transfer

James Barr used another way of framing the error just discussed, calling it illegitimate totality transfer. Although it is not essentially different from what has just been reviewed, it is noted here because the very expression might seem to characterize our proposal regarding the fundamental meaning of biblical righteousness. Irons cites Barr to this point:

The attempt to relate the individual word directly to the theological thought leads to the distortion of the semantic contribution made by words in contexts; the value of the context comes to be seen as something contributed by the word, and then it is read into the word as its contribution where the context is in fact different.²⁹

One might wish Barr had written a little more clearly, but the example using ἀγάπη and its cognates, cited above, illustrates the point well enough.³⁰

Irons notes, moreover, that there is a subtler form of this error. Again he references Barr:

But, as Barr himself recognized, there is a more subtle version of this error in which concepts derived from some contexts are read into the lexical sense of the word. It is this subtler form of the error that I believe has been committed by Cremer, Käsemann, Stuhlmacher and the New Perspective scholars.³¹

He adds:

Stuhlmacher is in danger of blurring the distinction between discourse concepts and lexical concepts, so that the grand theological themes (the age-spanning, creational, in-the-beginning existing, now-as-Word-existing and in-Christ-personified liberating right of the Creator to and over his Creation) bleed over into the lexical concept of the lexeme δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ.³²

It is important to understand at this point just what is being criticized: namely, the importation of a sense that has been taken or synthesized from one or more occurrences of a word, or a lexeme such as δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ, and the forcing of that sense into any given occurrence of the word, or lexeme, where in fact the imposed sense might not truly be at home, because a context into which it has been imported and imposed may actually suggest a different sense for the word, or lexeme, in that context. So it was with the verb, ἀγαπάω, noted by Irons, and with the term, ἐκκλησία, noted by Silva.

Given the results of inductive procedures by Diestel, Ritschl, and Cremer, the more general observations of Barr, Silva and Irons seem to be appropriate: although each of those German theologians documented a cluster of kindred yet distinguishable senses that relate to צדק/צדקה (e.g., salvation, uprightness, faithfulness), each of them derived a different, supposedly overarching, sense for righteousness (e.g., purpose, grace, relationship) from the OT contexts.

How does all this relate to our proposed understanding of צדק/צדקה? The answer to that question depends a great deal on whether one’s approach to the matter (in this case, the sense of biblical righteousness) is inductive or deductive. Our approach, unlike those that came before, is not inductive but deductive. Consequently, it is not likely we would be in danger of synthesizing a meaning or sense from various occurrences of צדק/צדקה in different contexts, and then trying to impose that sense in any and all contexts in which either word (or both words) occur. There would be no risk of any illegitimate totality transfer with a deductive approach, because there would be no synthesized totality to transfer.

On the other hand, one might object that there was something very much like an illegitimate totality transfer with our approach, even if the totality turns out to be only a fundamental concept: that righteousness everywhere entails the fundamental idea of conformity to God’s Being and doing.

What disqualifies our approach from such a charge is this: the idea that righteousness, biblically, is conformity to God’s Being and doing plays out in different ways in different contexts, just as God’s divine nature plays out in a variety of ways in the various aspects of the created order—as must be the case if his nature is apparent in the totality of the created order (Rom 1:20) which, after all, is very diverse. In other words, the underlying meaning of righteousness may always be conformity to God, but the nuance or discourse sense of righteousness may not make that underlying meaning immediately apparent in every context (as discussion of Lev 19:36 has shown).

B. Synonymity and Hebrew Poetry

Irons has also raised reasonable concerns about how past interpreters understood the significance of parallelism in OT poetry, in particular as regards such key parallels as righteousness and salvation or righteousness and faithfulness. He rightly tracks some published works that document an increased awareness of an important reality: that synonymous terms are not necessarily identical.³³ Arguably, however, this newly published awareness is an awareness that also existed—and very vividly so—before the twentieth century. We will show that the older German theologians, Diestel, Ritschl, and Cremer, understood this principle very well. First however we take an example from the Psalms as illustration.

1. An Example from the Psalms

Psalm 7 is a lament by David concerning Cush, a Benjamite. David appeals to the Lord as his refuge, and calls on him for salvation and deliverance from all who pursue him (Ps 7:1–2). In the course of his lament David utters the following imprecation, which is diagramed for parallelism:

Parallelism Syllable Count

c b a

בראשו עמלו ישוב

8

May his trouble return upon his head

a’ b’ c’

ירד חמסו קדקדו ועל

10

on his pate may his violence descend. (Ps

7

:

17

, my translation)

Chiastic parallels:

return // descend

his trouble // his violence

on his head // on his pate

What would Bishop Robert Lowth, who might be called the rediscoverer of parallelism in Hebrew poetry (for non-Jews at any rate!) say about this verse? Lowth did not quote or diagram Ps 7:17 when he delivered his Oxford lectures on Hebrew poetry, but he was aware of the sort of example it presents—one among many such in the Psalms and the Prophets.

Lowth, who delivered his lectures in Latin, would have had no trouble discerning that there was a difference between return and descend, between head and pate, and even between trouble (which is fairly general) and violence (which is also somewhat general, but is nevertheless a more specific sort of trouble).³⁴ In other words, he did not assume that synonymous parallelism meant the parallel terms were equivalent. Rather, one term gave further nuance to, or told more about, the other. As an educated man Lowth could assume that an Oxford student, or a future reader of his De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, would understand that synonymity in synonymous parallelism did not necessarily mean equivalence.

2. Definition of Synonym

The Oxford English Dictionary has also understood this fact about what a synonym is:

Strictly, a word having the same sense as another (in the same language); but more usually, either or any of two or more words (in the same language) having the same general sense, but possessing each of them meanings which are not shared by the other or others, or having different shades of meaning or implications appropriate to different contexts.³⁵

The OED quotes an example from Boswell’s Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1791), roughly contemporary with Bishop Lowth (conversation of 18 April, 1783 between Walker and Johnson):

Walker. Do you think, Sir, that there are any perfect synonimes in any language?

Johnson. Originally, there were not; but by using words negligently, or in poetry, one word comes to be confounded with another.³⁶

Clearly, literate people in the 18th century were well aware that synonymous did not ipso facto mean equivalent, although it could—even mistakenly in a given context—be taken that way.

The OED notes as examples: ship, vessel and enormous, excessive, immense; one can find just such synonyms in OT synonymous parallelism—Ps 7:17 being a case in point. Other OT examples are: the parallelism of three sins and four in Amos 1:3—2:6, known nowadays as step parallelism, where four is not the same as three; the synonymous parallel of delights and meditates . . . day and night in Ps 1:2, where, for example, delight is not identical to meditation on God’s Law day and night.

Like Lowth, people centuries before the work of Kugel and others knew that synonymous parallelism in OT poetry was not tantamount to mere equivalence—that the synonyms used were not always, or even usually, synonymous in the strict sense.

3. Diestel

Diestel understood all of this as well. He did not assume strict synonymity when he said that righteousness and salvation, and righteousness and faithfulness were synonymous. In fact, he pointed out the difference in each case.

Diestel spoke of the synonymity [of righteousness] with ישועה. In doing so he cited two passages from Isaiah: I bring near my righteousness [צדקה]; it is not far off, / and my salvation [תשעוה] will not delay (Isa 46:13 NKJV); "My righteousness [צדק] is near, / My salvation [ישע] has gone forth" (Isa 51:5 NKJV).³⁷ The cited verses contain synonymous parallelisms; such parallelisms in Hebrew poetry unquestionably indicate a relationship between the parallel terms. Nonetheless, synynomity does not mean simple equivalence, as Diestel knew. He justly saw both an affinity and a difference between salvation and righteousness:

After all, the difference between תשועה and צדק can hardly be misunderstood. The former is the act itself, insofar as it brings deliverance from adversity and collapse; but Zedekah is the inner logic of the divine exercise of care out of which those acts of salvation proceed, the agreement of the at once present divine purpose [Zweck] and will [Wille] with all demonstrations of his power.³⁸

The terms are synonymous but different: salvation connotes the act itself, whereas righteousness connotes (by Diestel’s definition) the inner logic of the divine exercise of care out of which those acts of salvation proceed.

Diestel likewise saw a difference between synonymously parallel righteousness and faithfulness in Ps 143:1 (In your faithfulness [אמונה] answer me, and in your righteous action [צדקה], my translation):

Righteousness is often in close accord with covenant faithfulness; it enters into synonymity with אמונה Ps

143

,

1

. Only that here the concept of the enduring, lasting lies at the foundation, there of the right/straight [Gerade], that here the thought must be of an inherent quality, there more of a principle of action.³⁹

The terms are synonymous but different: faithfulness connotes the enduring, lasting and is an inherent quality, whereas righteousness connotes the right/straight and is a principle of action.

As Diestel (and one may add Ritschl and Cremer) understood, synonymous parallelism in Hebrew poetry does not mean strict equivalence. The nineteenth century theologians should not be charged with failing to understand what scholars in a subsequent century have said about synonymous parallelism—just because no one in the nineteenth century saw fit to produce a treatise on what those older theologians already knew.

4. Ritschl

Ritschl understood that righteousness in the OT had different nuances of meaning, and this was also the case in OT poetry, where the terms, righteous (צדיק) and upright (ישר) occur in parallel:

Etymologically צדקה signifies straight, right, correct [gerade, recht, richtig]. . . . [I]t is synonymous with ישר. In that this concept now is applied to the domain of the divine, as to the human, will [Wille], so it is now conceivable in relation to a constant purpose [Zweck].⁴⁰

Ritschl said that righteous was synonymous with upright, yet with a difference: it had a basic sense of straight, right, correct (which is close to the sense of upright), but applied to the divine and human will it related to "a constant purpose (which is not so obviously related to upright). His friend and colleague Diestel had also, incidentally, noted the similarity of the two words: The expression ישרים, the just (Luther: the honest/upright [redlich]), who lead a straight way of life, which does not depart from the right way, comes very close to צדיק."⁴¹ In other words, for both theologians, the two Hebrew words could be found in synonymous parallelism, and were very close in meaning but not identical.

It is clear that Ritschl, like Diestel before him (and Cremer after him), recognized a synonymity in poetry that may include a lot of what one might call overlap—as in a Venn diagram—yet is not tantamount to strict equivalence. A path can be straight, but that is not identical with a man’s being upright.

Moreover, although Ritschl seemed to emphasize the quality of grace as the chief nuance of righteousness in the OT, he did in fact identify a cluster of ideas that pertain to righteousness, e.g., salvation, faithfulness, uprightness, etc., all of which may be found in parallel with righteousness."

In other words: Ritschl did recognize a variety of nuances for righteousness in the Bible, and they were illustrated by the parallelism of righteousness with a variety of terms in the poetry of the OT. Nonetheless, no one term was uniformly identical—strictly synonymous—with righteous/righteousness.

5. Cremer

As many have noted, Cremer thought righteousness was a relational matter. But Cremer also understood righteousness in connection with judgment, faithfulness, grace and truth. Speaking of God’s judgmental righteousness he said:

One need not be closed to the fact that צדק and its derivatives are always used in the social and forensic sense and refer to a relationship in which one has to become just/equitable [gerecht, i.e., righteous] toward the other, and be able nonetheless to acknowledge that there is no conflict between righteousness and God’s grace, that his judgmental righteousness is salvation-forming and stands in closest connection with his goodness and faithfulness, so that righteousness and faithfulness can be used synonymously, righteousness and grace can be used in parallel.⁴²

Cremer said God’s judgmental righteousness is salvation-forming and stands in closest connection with his goodness and faithfulness, so that righteousness and faithfulness can be used synonymously, righteousness and grace can be used in parallel. Cremer’s statement (which is structured by parallels!) echoed Ritschl, who said The righteousness of God appears . . . in immediate connection with his exercise of judgment accompanied by grace and covenant-faithfulness. Cremer said, "righteousness and faithfulness can be used synonymously [synonym], righteousness and grace can be used in parallel. He echoed Diestel, who recognized an association of biblical righteousness and covenant faithfulness, to the point of synonymity [Synonymie]." Consequently Cremer, despite his difference with Ritschl (and thereby with Diestel) regarding the inclusion of retribution in the biblical concept of righteousness, nonetheless agreed with them that biblical righteousness is closely associated with God’s grace and covenant-faithfulness and is always salvific in its purpose. None of these scholars insisted on a