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Wisdom 14
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Chapter 14
1
Or someone else, taking ship to cross the raging sea, invokes a log[*a] even frailer than the vessel that bears him.
2
No doubt that ship is the product of a craving for gain, its building embodies the wisdom of the shipwright,
3
but your providence, Father, is what steers it, you having opened a pathway even through the sea, a safe way over the waves,
4
showing that you can save, whatever happens, so that even without skill a man may sail abroad.
5
It is not your will that the works of your Wisdom lie idle, and hence men entrust their lives to the smallest piece of wood, cross the high seas on a raft and come safe to port.
6
Why, in the beginning even, while the proud giants were perishing, the hope of the world took refuge on a raft[*b] and, steered by your hand, preserved the germ of a new generation for the ages to come
7
For blessed is the wood which serves the cause of virtue,
8
but accursed that hand-made thing and its maker, he for having made it, the perishable thing itself because it has been called god.
9
Yes, God holds the godless and his godlessness in equal hatred;
10
work and workman alike shall be punished.
11
Hence judgement shall fall on the idols themselves of the heathen, since, although part of God’s creation, they have become an abomination, snares for the souls of men, a pitfall for the feet of the reckless.
The origin of the cult of idols
12
The invention of idols was the origin of fornication,[*c] their discovery the corrupting of life.
13
They did not exist at the beginning, they will not exist for ever;
14
through human vanity they came into the world and hence a sudden end has been designed for them.
15
A father afflicted by untimely mourning makes an image of his child so swiftly taken, and now he honours as a god what yesterday had only been a dead man, bequeathing mysteries and initiations to his dependents.
16
Then in the course of time the godless custom hardens, and is observed as law
17
and, by command of princes, the carved images receive worship. Of those who lived too far away to be honoured in person men would make a portrait from a distance and produce a visible image of the king they honoured, meaning, by such zeal, to flatter the absent as if he were with them.
18
Even people who did not know him were stimulated into spreading his cult by the idealism of the artist;
19
for the latter, doubtless wishing to please the ruler, exerted all his skill to make the likeness finer than reality
20
and the crowd, carried away by the beauty of the work, accorded divine honours to him whom only recently they had honoured as a man.
21
And this became a pitfall for life, that men, whether slaves to misfortune or princely power, should have bestowed the incommunicable name on sticks and stones.
The consequences of idolatry
22
Soon it is not enough for them that their knowledge of God should be at fault; in the great struggle to which ignorance condemns their lives they next give such massive ills the name of peace.
23
With their child-murdering initiations, their secret mysteries, their orgies with outlandish ceremonies,[*d]
24
they no longer retain any purity in their lives or their marriages, one treacherously murdering the next or doing him injury by adultery.
25
Everywhere a welter of blood and murder, theft and fraud, corruption, treachery, riots, perjury,
26
disturbance of decent people, forgetfulness of favours, pollution of souls, sins against nature, disorder in marriage, adultery, debauchery.
27
For the worship of unnamed[*e] idols is the beginning, cause, and end of every evil.
28
Either that, or they rave in ecstasy, or utter false oracles, or lead lives of great wickedness, or perjure themselves without hesitation;
29
for since they put their trust in lifeless idols they do not reckon their false oaths can harm them.
30
But justice will overtake them on two counts: as idolaters, for degrading the concept of God, as frauds, for swearing in despite of truth, in defiance of all that is holy.
31
For it is not the power of the things by which men swear but the retribution due to sinners that always overtakes the offence of the guilty.
Chapters of Wisdom
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
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