Tzedaqah / Dikaiosynē

Companion article: Fitting — Matthew 3:15, and the first recorded public words of Jesus. Told for an eight-year-old: Being Right With Someone.

The root is צדק, and its basic sense is conformity to a norm. What makes the Hebrew word different from the English one is what the norm is. It is not a rule book you measure yourself against on your own. It is the relationship you are actually standing in — this person, in front of you, who you owe something to.

A judge is tzaddiq when he judges as a judge should. A father is tzaddiq toward his children. A king is tzaddiq toward his people. Remove the relationship and the word has nothing to describe. This is why tzedaqah cannot be possessed the way "righteousness" can in English — there is always somebody on the other end of it.

Two consequences follow, and both are strange to English ears.

First: righteousness saves. In Isaiah especially, tzedaqah stands in parallel with salvation, as though the two were one thing.

A righteous God and a Saviour; there is none besides me. — Isaiah 45:21

I bring near my righteousness; it is not far off, and my salvation will not delay. — Isaiah 46:13

My righteousness draws near speedily, my salvation has gone out. — Isaiah 51:5

If righteousness were a moral quality, God's righteousness would be the reason he must judge. Because it is covenant faithfulness, it is the reason he rescues. Rescue is what loyalty looks like when the other party is in trouble.

Second: righteousness can be done to somebody. In later Hebrew, tzedaqah becomes the ordinary word for almsgiving — still its meaning in Jewish usage today. Not charity, which is optional and generous. Obligation: what you owe the poor because of who you both are. The drift is not a corruption of the word. It is the word being taken seriously.

Tzedaqah rarely travels alone, and its companions define it.

With mishpat. Justice and righteousness, over and over — let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:24). Mishpat is the verdict, the decision, the ruling that puts things right. Tzedaqah is the character of the one giving it. Judgement, and the rightness behind judgement.

With hesed. Steadfast love and righteousness, paired so often they function almost as a single term — your hesed and your tzedaqah (Psalm 36:10). Both are relational; neither can be held privately. The difference is angle: hesed names the loyalty, tzedaqah names what that loyalty does when the covenant is tested.

With emunah. Faithfulness. Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins (Isaiah 11:5).

The company a word keeps tells you what kind of word it is. Tzedaqah keeps company with loyalty, faithfulness and judgement — not with purity, blamelessness or innocence.

δικαιοσύνη dikaiosynē — in classical Greek, one of the four cardinal virtues.

For Plato it is the ordered soul, each part doing its proper work. In ordinary usage it is giving each man his due. It is a quality: something a person has, or fails to have, and could in principle be measured on.

When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek at Alexandria, from roughly the third century BC, the translators used dikaiosynē for tzedaqah. It was the nearest word available. It was not near enough.

What survives the crossing: the sense of rightness, of conformity to what is proper.

What is lost: the bond. A Greek reader meets a word about personal virtue where a Hebrew reader met a word about faithfulness to someone.

That loss is the same one that happens to hesed, rendered mostly as eleos, mercy — and mercy is what a stronger party may extend if it chooses, where hesed is what a bound party owes.

So the New Testament inherits Greek words carrying Hebrew freight, and a reader who has only the Greek surface will consistently read the wrong thing: virtue where the text means faithfulness.

Matthew uses dikaiosynē seven times, more than the other Gospels combined; Mark has none. In Matthew it is characteristically the conduct that answers to God's will — something that can be hungered for (5:6), suffered for (5:10), faked (6:1), sought (6:33), walked in (21:32), and exceeded (5:20). Its first appearance is Jesus' first recorded public words (3:15).

Paul uses the word for a status conferred rather than conduct performed — the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel (Romans 1:17), reckoned to those who trust. His two great statements are Romans 3:21–26 and Philippians 3:9.

These are not two words. They are one word used at two points in the same transaction, which is why the argument over "imparted" and "imputed" righteousness has run for five centuries without either side being able to delete the other's texts.

The joint is Romans 3:26 — that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Read just as moral quality and the sentence is a contradiction with a bridge built over it. Read it as tzedaqah and there is nothing to bridge: God's righteousness is his keeping of the bond, and the cross is that keeping, not an exception to it.

That sentence is Exodus 34 in Greek. Abounding in hesed, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and by no means clearing the guilty — both clauses in one breath. Exodus states the difficulty. Romans attaches the resolution.

Righteousness entered English from rightwise-ness — the state of being right. From the start it named a property.

Modern English has narrowed it further, into a moral grade. Self-righteous survives precisely because that is what we now assume righteousness is: a possession, and therefore something a person can be smug about owning.

Nothing in the English word suggests a bond. That is not a translation error — there is no English word that does the job. But it means the reader is always one step behind the text, and has to put the relationship back in by hand.

See also: hesed · mishpat · emunah · tzaddiq