i72
RIDICULOUS
RIGHTEOUSlSrESS IN OT
(Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, pp. 386, 387), * are put in the form of riddles. NVlio is mighty ? Wlio IS a fool ? Who is happy ? A whole class of popular plirases in the Talmud and Midrash are nothing more nor less than folkriddles, the chief exponents being women and children ; hut distin- guished Rahbis also utilized this language of wisdom. Ethical works of the Middle Ages abound in philosophical riddles. Riddles found their way into the prayer-book for the I'assover Eve. It goes without sayin", therefore, that many Hebrew riddles of the Middle Ages were serious intellectual exercises.' To keep up atten- tion and to stimulate interest while the intricate subtleties of the law are being expounded, such an assertion as this would be announced — ' There was a woman in Egypt who brought forth at one birth "six hundred thousand men.'" The interpreta- tion follows : the woman was Jochebed, the mother of Moses, who was himself equal to the whole armed host of Israel who came out of Egynt. Talmudic lore records a story of Rabbi Jeliuda, sage and saint, akin to that related of Tarquin the Proud. The emperor Antoninus Pius sent him a message to say the imperial exchequer was empty : how could it be replenished ? The Rabbi took the messenger into the garden and tore up the big radishes and planted young ones in their place. He did the same with the turnips and the lettuces. The emperor understood the hint ; he dismissed the old officials and put new in their place. Many of the riddles that thus delighted the Jewish fancy seem trivial enough. For example : ' The fish is roasted with his brother, is placed in his father, is eaten with his son, and thereafter is helped down with his father,' where his ' brother ' is the salt which comes like himself from the sea, his ' father ' is the water from which he is taken, and his ' son ' the sauce in which he is served ! Riddles whose solution depends upon the numerical values of the Hebrew letters are common. ' Take 30 from 30 and the remainder is 60.' The ex- planation is that 30=DT'?i? : remove S, whose numerical value is 30, and the remainder is c-iV = 60. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet have also a lingual meaning, and a good example of a riddle whose solution depends upon such a mean- ing is the following : ' There was a she mule in ray house : I opened the door and she became a heifer.' To be solved thus : From the Hebrew for ' she- mule ' .tt;5 take away the letter n {Daleth = door) and there remains n-jB ' heifer.'
Plays ujion words scarcely come under the scope of tills article. They are found most abundantly in the Prophets and in the rhetorical passages of Job, but they occur also with considerable fre- quency in the Proverbs, and they are to be met with, though rarely, in the Psalms. In those plays upon proper names which are found in the etymological explanations of the name of the law- giver of Israel (Ex S'" ; cf. Jos. c. Apion. i. 31), of the name of Samuel (1 S l-*), and many more, the Talmud is said to be especially rich. (Upon ' Paronomasia in the OT,' see Casanowicz, JBL (1891), pp. 105-167).
LiTERATORS.— For the usage ot the Hebrew word JTl'n see Oxf, U'.b. hex. i.v.\ Delitzsch, Zur Geschichte der Jiidwchen Pnesie : Cheyne, Joh and Soloim.n ; Toy, Proverbs. On Biblical and Tahnudic riddles— Hamburger's JiE ; Low, Die Leberut- alter; Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle ^ei\ Wiinsche, Die Jldtltsclwritsheit bei den Hebrdem. T. NlCOL.
RIDICULOUS Only Sir 34'»' He that sacriliceth
of a thing wrongfully gotten, his offering is ridicu- lous.' The meaning is active, derisive, mocking (Gr. wpoatpopi luixuK-qnivri, RV ' his offering is made in mocki^ry '). Cf. Shaks. Love's Labour's Lost, iii. 78, ' The heaving of my lungs provokes me to ndiculous smiling.'
RIGHTEOUSNESS in OT.— The idea of Right- eousness is one of the most complex and difficult of the ruling ideas of the OT. The subject may be introduced by one or two statements of a general nature. (I) Rijjhteousness in the OT ii strictly a personal attribute. There are a few instances where the word is used of things, but these are undoubtedly secondary (see below, p. 274*). So also are the eases where it is applied to a social aggregate like the people of Israel ; these arise either through personihcation of the community, or through the virtues of representa- tive individuals being conceived as leavening the mass. (2) The personal relations indicated by the term are of three kinds : forensic, ethical, and religious. Righteousness, e.g., may denote [a) a forensic right, as wlien Judah says of Tama«, 'she has been in t/ie right against me' (Gn 3S'^') ; or (6) a moral state, as Gn 6* 'Noah was a right- eous, blameless man in his generation ' ; or (c) a direct relation between man and God, as in Gn 15* ' Abraham believed J", and he counted it to hira ioT righteousness.' But under each of these heads the notion breaks up into a j;reat variety of dis- tinct applications, while the hgurative extensions of {a) into the spheres of (6) and (c) create subtle distinctions which at times defy classification. (3) It may be remarked that the history of the idea in the OT exhibits a development in almost ex- actly the opposite direction to that observed in the case of Holiness. Holiness (which see) is prima- rily a religious term, which gradually acquires ethical content under the influence of the reve- lation of God as a Being of perfect moral purity. Righteousness, on the contrary, belongs in the first instance to the region of moral ideas, and be- comes a technical term of religion by a process whose outlines can be traced in the OT. — It will be convenient in the present art. to treat the subject under three main divisions, correspond- ing broadly to three stages in this development ; viz. (i.) The meanings of Righteousness in ordi- nary popular speech ; (ii.) the conception of Right- eousness in the pre-exilic prophets (Amos to Jere- miah); and (iii.) the theological developments of the idea, chiefly in exilic and post-exilic writings.