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Righteousness.
The Hebrew word translated "righteous" (§Œdîq)
and its related nominal and verbal forms has the basic meaning of someone or
something proven true, especially in a legal context. It therefore has the
meaning "innocent" and is applied in the Bible especially to moral
conduct and character. But the scope of righteousness is much wider than
judicial procedures and embraces the whole covenanted life of the people under
God. The specific meaning depends on circumstances: for a ruler, it means good
government and the deliverance of true judgment (Isaiah
32.1; Jeremiah
23.5); for ordinary people,
it means treating one’s neighbor as a covenant partner, neither oppressing
nor being oppressed (Amos
5.6–7; Amos
5.21–24); and for
everyone it means keeping God’s will as conveyed in the Torah (Deuteronomy
6.25). Sometimes human
righteousness is seen as a response to or reflection of the divine
righteousness or graciousness (Isaiah
56.1; Isaiah
58.8), and essentially it
is the acknowledgment of God in worship of him alone and in living as he wants
(Ezekiel 18.5;
Ezekiel 18.9).
God’s righteousness means that he is a just and reliable
judge ( Psalm 9.4)
who keeps his side of the covenant and who thus delivers Israel from her
enemies, so that they experience that righteousness as punishment, while
Israel experiences it as salvation and vindication (Judges
5.11). Indeed in some
places God’s righteousness and salvation are virtually synonymous (Isaiah
51.1–3), and from the
exile onward we find God’s righteousness as an object of hope (Jeremiah
23.5; Daniel
9.24).
In rabbinic literature of the Tannaitic period, righteousness
is often specified to mean generosity in general and almsgiving in particular.
There is also development of the biblical tendency for righteous to refer to
Israel, or a group within Israel, everyone else being at least relatively
unrighteous; this may reflect experience of oppression. In the Dead Sea
Scrolls we find the Qumran sect regarding themselves as the only truly
righteous. Righteousness is still, however, essentially conformity to the
divine ordinances, that is, covenantal obedience. In the Septuagint there is
very high consistency in rendering the derivatives of the Hebrew root §dq
by the Greek dikaiosunÙ
and its cognates, whose semantic field overlaps considerably with that of the
Hebrew words.
In the New Testament, righteousness occurs with greatest
frequency in the gospel of Matthew and in Paul’s letters. In the case of
Matthew, there is discussion about whether he uses the word for life under God
in the Christian community or reserves it for life under God before Christ
came and outside the Christian community, and whether righteousness is not
only a divine requirement but also a divine gift, especially in Matthew
3.15; Matthew
6; Matthew
6.33.
For Paul, the issues are even more widely debated. It is
usually agreed that sometimes he uses righteousness in a broadly biblical
fashion but in a Christian context for the life of the people of God ( Philippians
4.8; 2
Corinthians 5.14; 2
Corinthians 9.10). It is
also usually agreed that "the righteousness of God," whether or not
we can speak of a fixed formula, means God’s saving activity (Romans
1.18), characteristically
seen in justification by his grace through faith (Romans
3.21–26). Indeed one of
the reasons why the apostle is often held to be quoting a pre-Pauline formula
in the last passage is that in Romans
3.25 God’s righteousness
can be held to mean God’s justice in a strictly judicial sense and not his
saving activity. Under the influence particularly of Galatians
3 and Romans
4 and the terminology of
reckoning, there has traditionally been a view that in justification Christ’s
righteousness is placed to the account of sinners (is "imputed" to
them).
The question remains whether in some places righteousness and
justification are synonymous in Paul or at least that righteousness can
sometimes be a purely forensic or relational word. The best evidence for this
is Galatians 2.21,
but it is widely held for other passages as well. Nevertheless, it has also
been maintained that Paul consistently uses "justify" (dikaio¿)
for the restoration and maintenance of the relationship with God and
"righteousness" (dikaiosunÙ)
for the consequent life as his people, with both justification and
righteousness being by faith. But there is disagreement about the exact
meaning of most of the relevant passages. Some scholars find the key to the
whole matter in the idea of God’s righteousness as a power, with the gift of
righteousness being inseparable from God, the giver, so that the believer is
drawn into the sphere of his power.
In the New Testament apart from Paul and Matthew,
righteousness normally means life as God wants it and in relation to him. It
is not surprising that righteousness is sometimes found as a particular
predicate of Jesus Christ (e.g., 1
John 2.1; 1
John 2.29; 1
Peter 3.18).
(Oxford Companion to the Bible John Ziesler)
Mercy of God.
The concept of a loving and merciful god is ancient, found in hymns to
Egyptian, Sumerian, and Babylonian deities. In the Ugaritic texts, the high
god El is formulaically described as merciful and compassionate, with a
cognate of the same word used two millennia later in Muslim characterization
of God. Several Hebrew words have traditionally been translated by the
English word "mercy," including úŒnan,
úesed,
and especially rŒúamîm.
The last is derived from the word for uterus (reúem),
and is remarkable both for its maternal nuance and for its persistence in
biblical and nonbiblical descriptions of male deities. The nuance is made
explicit in Isaiah 49.14–15,
a rare instance of maternal metaphor to describe the God of Israel.
One of the oldest characterizations of Yahweh is found in Exodus
34.6–7, quoted or
alluded to frequently (e.g., Numbers
14.18; Joel
2.13; Psalm
86.15; Psalm
103.8; Psalm
111.4; Psalm
145.8; Nehemiah
9.17; Jonah
4.2; Ephesians
2.4; cf. Psalm
77.7–9). This ancient
liturgical fragment describes Yahweh as "merciful (raúûm)
and gracious (úannûn),
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love … forgiving iniquity and
transgression and sin … yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting
the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s
children," and thus raises one of the most profound dilemmas of
monotheism, the tension between divine mercy and justice. Biblical tradition
itself offers a partial corrective to the theory of inherited, and thus
implicitly collective, guilt, notably in Ezekiel
18. But the more profound
paradox of a God believed to be merciful and forgiving on the one hand and
ultimately just on the other remains unresolved. The Bible is of course not
an abstract theological treatise, and so it is not surprising that there is
no detailed exposition of the problem. But it is one to which biblical
writers frequently return, in narratives (Jonah; Luke
15), dialogue (Job; cf.
Ecclesiastes; Romans 9),
and especially in prayers (Psalm
130.3–4; Daniel
9.7–9; cf. Habakkuk
3.2), where the hope of
the worshipper is that God’s mercy will prevail over his justice (see Hosea
11.8–9; James
2.13). This hope is based
on the realization of the essential unworthiness of those chosen by God; the
election of Israel, and the salvation of the Christian, were motivated by
gratuitous divine love (Deuteronomy
7.7–8; Psalm
103.6–18; Titus
3.5).
God’s mercy is also a model for human conduct. "Those
who fear the Lord" are characterized as "gracious ( úannûn),
merciful (raúûm),
and righteous" in Psalm
112.4, phrasing that
echoes the immediately preceding description of Yahweh in the similarly
acrostic Psalm 111.4.
Resuming this theme, Jesus commands his followers to imitate divine mercy
according to Luke 6.36
(cf. Matthew 5.43–48).
See Also Covenant;
Evil;
Grace;
Suffering.
(Oxford Companion to the Bible Michael D. Coogan)
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