Blessed Assurance
Be assured, the evil person will not go unpunished, but the descendants of the righteous will be rescued. Proverbs 11:21 NASB
Be assured – You remember the old hymn, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine.” Fanny Crosby clearly didn’t get the idea from this Hebrew verse.
Why? Well, the words translated “be assured” are literally, “hand to hand,” and since this is obviously an idiom, we’ll have to know what it means, not how it’s written, before we can decide if the translation is correct.
Here’s the verse in Hebrew with the two words in red:
יָד לְיָד לֹא-יִנָּקֶה רָּע וְזֶרַע צַדִּיקִים נִמְלָט
You’ll recognize immediately that the second word is the same as the first with the simple addition of the preposition attached (לְ). The word is yād (hand) and the verse reads, “hand to hand.” But what does that mean?
“Significant theologically is the manifold way in which the word ‘hand’ is employed idiomatically.”[1] As such, it can be translated as authority (“under his hand”), victory “out of his hand), deliverance, power, strength, ability (“the hand reaches”), possession (“in his hands”), attacking (“stretch out the hand”), work (“to put into the hands”), killing (“to lay hands on”), blessing (with the same phrase), commissioning, or substituting. “The ‘uplifted hand’ expressed several nuances. First, it symbolized prayer as one lifted up his hands toward the sanctuary (Ps 28:2). Second, the uplifted hand periodically accompanied a public blessing (Lev 9:22). Third, it was common for one to lift up his hand in an oath.”[2] It is also used to signify consecration, establish ordinance, or silence (“hand to the mouth”). Maybe in there somewhere is the idea of guarantee, but I’m not so sure. Perhaps it’s more likely to find a root in the action of placing a hand under the thigh when making a vow (with obvious sexual overtones). But I suspect that this idiomatic expression might be found in the borrowed material from Egypt.
If we suppose that “be assured” is idiomatically correct, then we still have to ask the question, “Why does the author need to say this?” The answer is obvious. Human observation confirms that the wicked do go unpunished. They get away with it. Justice is not served. The righteous are not rescued. The ovens burned and no one, including God, stopped them. All the verbal assurances in the world don’t seem to make much difference, especially in a world where there was no settlement of moral debts after death. If this life is all there is, then what good is the pledge? You can understand the frustration of the rabbis when they noticed that afterlife judgment is virtually absent from the Tanakh. No wonder they incorporated the Greek idea of reward and punishment. But our author didn’t live in rabbinic times. His work borrows from Egyptian thought, and, of course, the afterlife was a large part of Egyptian thinking. Maybe that’s why he can confidently assert that the wicked will be punished. The assertion helps—later—but it’s not so good now. In a sense, this guarantee can only be eschatological.
Is that enough?
Topical Index: assurance, punishment, wicked, afterlife, Proverbs 11:21
[1] Alexander, R. H. (1999). 844 יָד. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 362). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Ibid.
