[125] Or _like its bowels_, referring to the sea.
_THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ISRAEL AND THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD._
In the chapters which we have been studying we have found some difficulty with one of our prophet's keynotes--_right_ or _righteousness_. In the chapters to come we shall find this difficulty increase, unless we take some trouble now to define how much the word denotes in Isa. xl.-lxvi. There is no part of Scripture, in which the term _righteousness_ suffers so many developments of meaning. To leave these vague, as readers usually do, or to fasten upon one and all the technical meaning of righteousness in Christian theology, is not only to obscure the historical reference and moral force of single passages,--it is to miss one of the main arguments of the prophecy. We have read enough to see that _righteousness_ was the great question of the Exile. But what was brought into question was not only the righteousness of the people, but the righteousness of their God. In Isa. xl.-lxvi. righteousness is more often claimed as a Divine attribute, than enforced as a human duty or ideal.[126]
Ssedheq, the Hebrew root for righteousness, had, like the Latin "rectus," in its earliest and now almost forgotten uses, a physical meaning. This may have been either _straightness_, or more probably _soundness_,--the state in which a thing is _all right_.[127] _Paths of righteousness_, in Psalm xxiii., ver. 4, are not necessarily straight paths, but rather sure, genuine, safe paths.[128] Like all physical metaphors, like our own words "straight" and "right," the applicability of the term to moral conduct was exceedingly elastic. It has been attempted to gather most of its meaning under the definition of _conformity to norm_;[129] and so many are the instances in which the word has a forensic force,[130] as of _vindication_ or _justification_, that some have claimed this for its original, or, at least, its governing sense. But it is improbable that either of these definitions conveys the simplest or most general sense of the word. Even if _conformity_ or _justification_ were ever the prevailing sense of ssedheq, there are a number of instances in which its meaning far overflows the limits of such definitions. Every one can see how a word, which may generally be used to express an abstract idea, like _conformity_, or a formal relation towards a law or person, like _justification_, might come to be applied to the actual virtues, which realise that idea or lift a character into that relation. Thus righteousness might mean justice, or truth, or almsgiving, or religious obedience,--to each of which, in fact, the Hebrew word was at various times specially applied. Or righteousness might mean virtue in general, virtue apart from all consideration of law or duty whatsoever. In the prophet Amos, for instance, _righteousness_ is applied to a goodness so natural and spontaneous that no one could think of it for a moment as conformity to norm or fulfilment of law.[131]