Wisdom 15

¹ But you, our God, are kind, loyal and slow to anger, and you govern all things with mercy.

² If we sin, we still are yours, since we acknowledge your power, but, knowing you acknowledge us as yours, we will not sin.

³ To acknowledge you is indeed the perfect virtue, to know your power is the root of immortality.

⁴ No invention of perverted human skill has led us astray, no painter’s sterile labour, no figure daubed with assorted colours,

⁵ the sight of which sets fools yearning and reverencing the lifeless form of some unbreathing image.

⁶ Lovers of evil and worthy of such hopes, are those who make them, those who reverence them and those who worship them.

⁷ Take a potter, now, laboriously working the soft earth, shaping all sorts of things for us to use. Out of the same clay, even so, he models vessels intended for clean purposes and the contrary sort, all alike; but which of these two uses each will have is for the potter himself to decide.

⁸ Then – effort very evilly spent – of the same clay he shapes a futile god – he who, so recently made out of earth himself, will shortly return to what he was taken from, once he is called to give an account of his life.

⁹ Even so he wastes no thought on imminent death or on the shortness of his life. Far from it, he strives to outdo the goldsmiths and silversmiths, apes the bronzeworkers too, and takes pride in the spurious models that he makes.

¹⁰ Ashes, his heart, meaner than dirt his hope, his life more ignoble than clay,

¹¹ since he misconceives the One who shaped him, who breathed an active soul into him and inspired a living spirit.

¹² What is more, he looks on this life of ours as a kind of game, and our time here like a fair, full of bargains. ‘However foul the means,’ he says ‘a man must make a living.’

¹³ He, more than any other, knows he is sinning, he who from the same earthly material makes both breakable vessel and idol.

¹⁴ But most foolish, more pitiable even than the soul of a little child, are the enemies who once played the tyrant with your people,

¹⁵ and have taken all the idols of the heathen for gods, which can use neither their eyes for seeing nor their nostrils for breathing the air nor their ears for hearing nor the fingers on their hands for handling; while their feet are no use for walking,

¹⁶ since a human being made them, a creature of borrowed breath gave them shape. Now no man can shape a god as good as himself;

¹⁷ subject to death, his impious hands can only produce something dead. He himself is worthier than the things he worships; he will at least have lived, but never they.

¹⁸ Even the most hateful animals are worshipped, worse than the rest in their degree of stupidity.

¹⁹ With no trace of beauty to prompt the inclination – as some animals might have – the praise and blessing of God do not come their way.