Quando, Quando, Quando
Be assured, the evil person will not go unpunished, but the descendants of the righteous will be rescued. Proverbs 11:21 NASB
Will be rescued – If you’re like me you might remember the song, Quando, quando, quando. Perhaps you never heard the original Italian version (here it is). Of course, it’s an Italian love song. “Tell me when you will be mine. When, when, when,” loosely translated. Maybe we need to keep that in mind when we try to figure out what the anthologist meant with this verse. A brief review of human history doesn’t seem to align with his statement. It’s more like quando, quando, quando.
The greatest evidence for God is history. God’s acts in human history speak louder than any theological declaration or philosophical argument. Unfortunately, the greatest evidence against God is history. History is littered with injustice, disasters (natural and otherwise), and the suffering of the righteous and innocent. How is it even possible to imagine that the righteous will be rescued!? God doesn’t seem to have done anything about the graveyards stuffed full of the righteous. Humanity’s treatment of the Jews would be enough to cast considerable doubt on this claim, but that is only a tiny fragment of the horrors perpetrated on the rest of us. Os Guinness wrote a book titled Unspeakable, examining the human history of genocide. It raises the most difficult question: Where was God when the enormous evil of the human heart exploded on the lives of the innocent?
Let’s begin an attempt to answer this question by looking at the Hebrew verb here, mālaṭ.
mlṭ is one word of the cluster that includes gāʾal, yāšaʾ, nāṣal, pālaṭ and šālôm. These words are translated in the LXX by several Greek words: sōzō (including diasōzō and anasōzō) about seventy times, hryomai eight times, and exaireō five times. This distribution suggests that they have similar meanings with somewhat different emphases. . . the most prominent facet of meaning [of mālaṭ] is of deliverance or escape from the threat of death, either at the hands of a personal enemy (I Sam 19:11; 23:13) or a national enemy (II Sam 19:10), or by sickness (Ps 107:20).[1]
Suppose Lloyd Carr is right that mālaṭ should be considered as escape from death. Does that help? Well, maybe. At least we know that the anthologist isn’t claiming that the righteous will escape suffering. That would be unfathomable. The righteous probably suffer more than the wicked. Of course, this verse tells us that the wicked will not go unpunished. That idea is the negation of nāqâ, “to be free, clear, innocent.” In the ancient world where public reputation was always at stake, this suggests that the wicked will not escape public guilt. The public knows their true character. That’s not the same as saying, “They’ll be tried and convicted.” Power often provides cover, but we all know the real story, even if they die comfortably in their beds. Punishment in the absence of an afterlife is about legacy, not retribution. The Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife, but not as a means of reward and punishment. They were obsessed because the barrier between the dead and the living was permeable. If you didn’t show proper respect and homage to the dead, they would come back to get you. When Israel left Egypt, God slammed the door shut on such transitions. Dead was dead—the end—no passage allowed. But that meant that the claim that the wicked would not go unpunished had to be about this world since there was no information about the next.
And that’s another point worth remembering. This claim comes from ancient Wisdom literature, most likely borrowed from prior Egyptian texts. It wasn’t written with heaven and hell in mind. It’s practical, everyday insight for this world, not the next. Rescue for the righteous is the opposite of punishment for the wicked, and if punishment for the wicked is about public reputation and legacy, then reward for the righteous follows the same path. In spite of the inequity of suffering, we know who the righteous are. Their legacy justifies them. It’s certainly not that they escape suffering—all of Job is about this. It’s that in the end they are immortalized as good people. They usually die before we realize we’ve been in the presence of saints, but such is life. Their reputations are rescued. In the end Job’s friends find out that he was right all along.
When the anthologist collects Proverbs 11:21, he isn’t transforming it into our Greco-Roman ideal of ultimate justice. He’s recording what the people of the 10th century B.C.E. needed to know. Suffering might not be avoidable, but time wounds all heels.
Topical Index: rescue, mālaṭ, nāqâ, punishment, reputation, Proverbs 11:21
[1] Carr, G. L. (1999). 1198 מָלַט. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 507). Chicago: Moody Press.
