NOTES for Pro 10:3

The words about God, who will not let the righteous go hungry and will take away what the wicked has accumulated, can be understood in different ways. Among other things, precisely this kind of aphorism has more than once led thinking Christians not only to the question of social justice, but also to suppositions about the need for a radical redistribution of property, and by violent means.

Reading the rebukes of the prophets, it is not hard to see that they too spoke for social justice, though they trusted not in revolution but in society's return to the Torah, to its norms and values. Yet the aphorism quoted here is not limited to social questions alone, since the problem of wealth and poverty has two sides.

On the one hand, it really must be discussed as a social problem, the problem of a just distribution of public income, and the Torah offers quite definite mechanisms for redistributing that income in favor of the poor. In modern language, a state founded on the Torah would be a social state.

But this question has another side as well, connected with one's attitude to property, to wealth or poverty, and in general to one's own life. It is enough to recall the story once mentioned in the press of the suicide of a millionaire who wrote in his farewell note that he could not live decently on the two million of annual income left to him.

Apparently the main problems begin when a person starts determining for himself how much he will need "for happiness." And the main problem usually turns out to be that a definite sum which had seemed sufficient sooner or later, and usually sooner, always becomes too little. The root of all these problems is connected with the fact that fallen man is accustomed to determine for himself the meaning, goals, form, and content of his own life.

The path of righteousness excludes such self-determination: in this case a person no longer belongs to himself. God determines how and for what he is to live, and the chief meaning of life becomes the person's acceptance of God's determination. The level of annual income turns out to be only one of the determinations, and not the most important one, though it is significant. Otherwise the Torah would not give so much attention to questions of social justice and the redistribution of public wealth in favor of the poor.

In the end everything comes down to the Savior's words, "seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." By "all these things," judging by the context of the saying, He means everything that pagans seek in earthly life. Everything is decided by the system of priorities: if it is right, the righteous person will not be left without food, unless, of course, his persecutors deliberately deprive him of that food, but that is another story.

The wicked person loses everything not because people will take everything from him, though such a turn of events is not impossible, but because he will receive neither the Kingdom nor salvation, so that with all his wealth he will share, in the biblical expression, "the way of all the earth." A way leading nowhere, as the authors of the biblical books say of it.