Wisdom - The Old Testament

¹ Or someone else, taking ship to cross the wild waves, loudly invokes a piece of wood frailer than the vessel that bears him.

² Agreed, the 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, and a safe way over the waves,

⁴ showing that you can save, whatever happens, so that, even without experience, someone may put to sea.

⁵ It is not your will that the works of your Wisdom should be sterile, so people entrust their lives to the smallest piece of wood, cross the waves on a raft, yet are kept safe and sound.

⁶ Why, in the beginning, when the proud giants were perishing, the hope of the world took refuge on a raft and, steered by your hand, preserved the seed of a new generation for the ages to come.

⁷ For blessed is the wood which serves the cause of uprightness

⁸ but accursed the man-made idol, yes, it and its maker, he for having made it, and it because, though perishable, it has been called god.

⁹ For God holds the godless and his godlessness in equal hatred;

¹⁰ both work and workman will alike be punished.

¹¹ Hence even the idols of the nations will have a visitation since, in God's creation, they have become an abomination, a scandal for human souls, a snare for the feet of the foolish.

¹² The idea of making idols was the origin of fornication, their discovery corrupted life.

¹³ They did not exist at the beginning, they will not exist for ever;

¹⁴ human vanity brought them into the world, and a quick end is therefore reserved for them.

¹⁵ A father afflicted by untimely mourning has an image made of his child so soon carried off, and now pays divine honours to what yesterday was only a corpse, handing on mysteries and ceremonies to his people;

¹⁶ time passes, the custom hardens and is observed as law.

¹⁷ Rulers were the ones who ordered that statues should be worshipped: people who could not honour them in person, because they lived too far away, would have a portrait made of their distant countenance, to have an image that they could see of the king whom they honoured; meaning, by such zeal, to flatter the absent as if he were present.

¹⁸ Even people who did not know him were stimulated into spreading his cult by the artist's enthusiasm;

¹⁹ for the latter, doubtless wishing to please his ruler, exerted all his skill to surpass the reality,

²⁰ and the crowd, attracted by the beauty of the work, mistook for a god someone whom recently they had honoured as a man.

²¹ And this became a snare for life: that people, whether enslaved by misfortune or by tyranny, should have conferred the ineffable Name on sticks and stones.

²² It is not enough, however, for them to have such misconceptions about God; for, living in the fierce warfare of ignorance, they call these terrible evils peace.

²³ With their child-murdering rites, their occult mysteries, or their frenzied orgies with outlandish customs,

²⁴ they no longer retain any purity in their lives or their marriages, one treacherously murdering another or wronging him by adultery.

²⁵ Everywhere a welter of blood and murder, theft and fraud, corruption, treachery, riot, perjury,

²⁶ disturbance of decent people, forgetfulness of favours, pollution of souls, sins against nature, disorder in marriage, adultery and debauchery.

²⁷ For the worship of idols with no name is the beginning, cause, and end of every evil.

²⁸ For these people either carry their merrymaking to the point of frenzy, or they prophesy what is not true, or they live wicked lives, or they perjure themselves without hesitation;

²⁹ since they put their trust in lifeless idols they do not reckon their false oaths can harm them.

³⁰ But they will be justly punished for this double crime: for degrading the concept of God by adhering to idols; and for wickedly perjuring themselves in contempt for what is holy.

³¹ For it is not the power of the things by which they swear but the punishment reserved for sinners that always follows the offences of wicked people.