Scripture Daily

Context No. 712 of 4322 · Wisdom

Context · Reflection

Wisdom 11:1-16: in context

1Wisdom prospered their works in the hand of a holy prophet. 2They traveled through a desert without inhabitant, and they pitched their tents in trackless regions. 3They withstood enemies and repelled foes. 4They thirsted, and they called upon you, and water was given to them out of the flinty rock, and healing of their thirst out of the hard stone. 5For by what things their foes were punished, by these they in their need were benefited. 6When enemies were troubled with clotted blood instead of a river’s ever-flowing fountain, 7to rebuke the decree for the slaying of babies, you gave them abundant water beyond all hope, 8having shown by the thirst which they had suffered how you punished the adversaries. 9For when they were tried, although chastened in mercy, they learned how the ungodly were tormented, being judged with wrath. 10For you tested these as a father admonishing them; but you searched out those as a stern king condemning them. 11Yes and whether they were far off or near, they were equally distressed; 12for a double grief seized them, and a groaning at the memory of things past. 13For when they heard that through their own punishments the others benefited, they recognized the Lord. 14For him who long before was thrown out and exposed they stopped mocking. In the end of what happened, they marveled, having thirsted in another manner than the righteous. 15But in return for the senseless imaginings of their unrighteousness, wherein they were led astray to worship irrational reptiles and wretched vermin, you sent upon them a multitude of irrational creatures to punish them, 16that they might learn that by what things a man sins, by these he is punished.

The Wisdom of Solomon spends its last chapters rereading the exodus, looking for the logic in it, and this passage states the pattern it finds. Moses, the holy prophet, leads the people through a trackless desert; they thirst, they cry out, and water pours from the flinty rock. The writer sets that beside what happened to Egypt, where the water of the Nile had turned to blood, and draws his rule from the pair: by the very things their enemies were punished, the people in their need were helped. The same element, water, was a curse to one and a rescue to the other.

Two ideas hold the chapter together. The first is that the difference lay not in the water but in the relationship: God tested Israel like a father correcting a child, and judged Egypt like a stern king condemning a criminal, though the events ran side by side. The second is stated as a maxim the writer keeps returning to: by the things through which a person sins, by these he is punished. Egypt had bowed to animals, so swarms of animals were sent against it. Sin, in this reading, does not so much get an arbitrary penalty as reap the shape of itself.

The same water was mercy to one people and judgment to another, and the difference was whose they were. Where am I meeting an event as a stern king's sentence, when to a child of the Father it would be correction?

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