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  • 21 - Reward and Retribution

  • from Part IV - Themes in the Wisdom Literature
  • Edited by Katherine J. Dell, University of Cambridge
  • Edited in association with Suzanna R. Millar, University of Edinburgh, Arthur Jan Keefer
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Wisdom Literature
    Published online:
    28 July 2022
    Print publication:
    09 June 2022, pp 414-432

  • Summary

    The contribution by Peter T. H. Hatton is dedicated entirely to conceptions of reward and retribution in the wisdom literature. He considers how well-placed and sometimes misplaced the paradigm can be, namely that wickedness brings retribution and righteousness brings reward. Such doctrines, he says, remain ‘key claims of a dominant interpretive tradition’ and have consequently formed a ‘pejorative paradigm’ that leaves the book of Proverbs out of favour in comparison to more nuanced books of the OT. The seminal work of 1955 by Klaus Koch – ‘Gibt es ein Vergeltungsdogma im Alten Tesament?’ (Is there a Dogma of Retribution in the Old Testament?) – receives special attention, as do subsequent, critical responses to it. Hatton suggests that the moral mechanism of act-consequence is just not that predictable and that in Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes the paradigm is principally relational. For ‘reward’ and ‘retribution’ are not mechanical but are rather conditioned by one’s relationship with the Lord.