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From: Wisdom 2:1a, 12-22

Life Leads to Death (Continuation)

[1a] For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,
[12] “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man,
because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;
he reproaches us for sins against the law,
and accuses us of sins against our training.
[13] He professes to have knowledge of God,
and calls himself a child of the Lord.
[14] He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;
[15] the very sight of him is a burden to us,
because his manner of life is unlike that of others,
and his ways are strange.
[16] We are considered by him as something base,
and he avoids our ways as unclean;
he calls the last end of the righteous happy,
and boasts that God is his father.
[17] Let us see if his words are true,
and let us test what will happen at the end of his life;
[18] for if the righteous man is God’s son, he will help him,
and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.
[19] Let us test him with insult and torture,
that we may find out how gentle he is,
and make trial of his forbearance.
[20] Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for, according to what he says, he will be protected.”

The Origin of Evil and Death

[21] Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray,
for their wickedness blinded them,
[22] and they did not know the secret purposes of God,
nor hope for the wages of holiness,
nor discern the prize for blameless souls.

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Commentary:

1:16-2:24 This section describes the way the ungodly think and behave, and
their error in so doing. Righteousness is immortal; but the ungodly think that life
ends at death and therefore they try to strike a bargain with death (1:16-2:19).
Moreover, they hound the righteous man because he thinks and acts differently
from the way they do (2:10-20). They have no idea what life is all about (2:21-24).

1:16-2:9. The sort of thinking attributed here to the ungodly connects up with ma-
terialistic and hedonist philosophies, maybe with Epicureanism. The sacred wri-
ter probably also had in mind some Jews who, turning their backs on their faith,
fell victim to the materialism and skepticism associated with certain streams of
Greek thought. Philosophers of such schools based their arguments on two veri-
fiable facts: death is inevitable, and life is short. They had no notion of immortali-
ty, and no faith, and therefore only one policy seemed to make sense: seize eve-
ry chance that life offers for pleasure and enjoyment. It is reminiscent of the “Let
us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (Is 22:13; 1 Cor 15:32).

2:10-20. Not content with enjoying the pleasures of life, the ungodly go further:
they persecute the just man because he is a constant reproach to them. They
want to see if God, whom the just man calls his father, will protect and rescue
him. He calls God his father? Let us see what protection God gives him. If God
fails to come to his aid, then they are proved right, and the just man wrong. Their
words are echoed in the insults offered by scribes and Pharisees to Jesus when
he was on the cross (cf. Mt 27:40-43; Mk 15:31-32; Lk 23:35-37).

Interestingly, the just man calls himself a “child of God” (v. 13). This is some-
thing new in Jewish thinking, because prior to this it was the entire people of Is-
rael or the king their representative who was considered a “son of God” (cf. Ex
4:22; Deut 14:1; 32:6; Ps 2; Is 30:1, 9; Hos 11:1). But in the later books of the
Old Testament (for example, in Sir 23:4; 51:14) we begin to see the fatherhood
of God towards every just person. The title of “child of God” is applied to all the
righteous, and more properly to the Messiah, who is the Righteous One.

As the RSV note “e” points out, the Greek word “pais” which it translates as
“child” can also mean “servant”. The “servant” in the Old Testament acquires
special significance from the book of Isaiah forward, where the “Suffering Servant”
appears (cf. Is 52:13-53:12). This man will, through his suffering, set Israel free
of its sins. This dual meaning of “pais” prepares the way for the revelation of
Jesus Christ, Son of God and Servant of the Lord.

2:21-24. The mistake of the ungodly is to think that nothing lies beyond death.
But this way of thinking stems from the wickedness of their lives which prevents
them from knowing God’s purposes and causes them to despise the way upright
people live. The inspired author takes issue with them and spells out God’s plan
for man and how death came to be (vv. 23-24). But here again “death” has a far-
reaching meaning: it means losing that incorruptibility which, as the author sees
it, lies beyond physical death. The death that entered the world through the devil’s
envy, the death experienced by those who belong to the devil’s “party”, means to
be reduced to nothing, to become “dishonored corpses” (4:18), through losing the
incorruptibility that comes from God. What the author is saying here presupposes
the Genesis account of how man was created in the image and likeness of God
(Gen 1:26) and therefore with a seed of immortality, and how the devil tempted
man to commit the original sin that resulted in the loss of immortality (cf. Gen
3-4). But the author of Wisdom goes further than that: he says that only those
who belong to the devil lose the “immortality” (which he terms “incorruption”) of
the human person as an entity made up of soul and body. On the basis of this
interpretation and in the light of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, St Paul teaches
that death, both physical and spiritual, reaches all human beings through the sin
committed by Adam; but Christ, the new Adam, redeems all from death.

The devil, in Greek “diabolos”, means “accuser, calumniator” and is the usual
translation given for the Hebrew “Satan”. These verses do not quote Genesis ex-
plicitly, but Genesis is in the background, for it is there we find the serpent iden-
tified as God’s enemy and man’s. The New Testament writer remind us that the
devil was a murderer from the beginning (cf. Jn 8:44); and in its account of the
battle between good and bad angels, the book of Revelation will say: “The great
dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Sa-
tan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Rev 12:9).

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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.

Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.