Title: Holman Bible Dictionary
Author:
Old Testament The starting point is the Hebrew notion of God’s “righteousness.” The Hebrew mind did not understand righteousness to be an attribute of the divine, that is a characteristic of God’s nature. Rather, God’s righteousness is what God does in fulfillment of the terms of the covenant that God established with the chosen people, Israel (2 Chron. 12:6; Ps. 7:9; Jer. 9:24; Dan. 9:14). God’s righteousness was not a metaphysical property but that dimension of the divine experienced by those within the covenant community.
Most especially, God’s righteousness was understood in relation to the image of God as the Judge of created order (Ps. 96:13). God’s judgments are consistently redemptive in nature, God’s judgments protected, delivered, and restored Israel (Isa. 11:4-5). At times God’s righteousness was experienced in God’s delivering Israel from enemies and oppressors (Ps. 71); at other times, in God’s delivering Israel from the nation’s own sinfulness (Ps. 51:19). Such deliverance involved God’s righteousness of wrath against the persecutor and the wicked (Ps. 106). Salvation and condemnation exist together as the two sides of God’s righteousness; the leading side is always deliverance: God condemns only because He also saves (Ps. 97).
Righteousness is a religious concept applied to humans because Israel had entered into a covenant relationship to God. Because God had chosen Israel, the nation had the covenant responsibility of fulfilling the terms of the covenant. Precisely here, serious misunderstanding frequently flaws thought about Israel’s desire for righteousness. The Old Testament did not call on the people of Israel to attempt to earn God’s favor or to strive to merit God’s graces (Ps. 18). Indeed, the Old Testament teaches that God’s gracious favor had been poured out on the nation in God’s choosing of Abraham and his descendants. God acted to establish the covenant and in so doing bestowed salvation on Israel (Ex. 19). The law was given as an act of divine mercy to provide Israel with guidelines for keeping the nation’s own portion of the covenant (Lev. 16; Ps. 40). Rather than being a ladder that Israel climbed to get to God, the law was understood to be a divine program for the maintenance of a healthy relationship between Israel and God (Lev. 16). God expected Israel to keep the law not to earn merit but to maintain the status God had already given the nation. As Israel kept the covenant law, the nation was righteous. Thus human righteousness in relation to God was understood as faithful adherence to the law (Lev. 19). Even so, God did not leave humans with the hopelessly impossible task of performing the law perfectly: the law God gave contained provision for atonement through repentance and appropriate acts of contrition (Lev. 19).
The concept of righteousness as faithful fulfillment of the provisions of a covenant was also meaningful in strictly human terms. The person who met the demands of a variety of social relations was thought to be righteous, to have done righteousness, though the requirements of righteousness varied with the covenant/relational context. Some of the prominent areas were those of family (Gen. 38), friendship (1 Sam. 24), nation (Prov. 14:34), and even in relation to servants and certain foreigners (Job 31).
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