Judgment is magnificent.
If you struggle to link the subject of that sentence to its predicate, you are not alone. Most Christians carry a negative connotation to judgment. Why would we praise something that conjures up associations of a self-righteous, discriminatory and ultimately condemning attitude?
That’s how many of us think about judgment. And we think we have the Bible on our side. Did Jesus not say, “Judge not, lest ye be judged”?
We’ll return to that statement. But before we do, let’s take note of another one:
“For I, the Lord, love judgment.”
That sentence comes from Isaiah 61. It follows the prophet’s famous declaration about the coming of Christ into the world—words that Jesus himself read from the temple scroll and proclaimed “fulfilled in your midst”.
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Continue reading and you run into the inevitable pair: Mishpat and tsedeq. Judgment and justice.
God loves judgment. He hates robbery and wrong. He will cover those who turn to him in a robe of justice. He will cause justice to sprout up before the nations. That’s the rest of the chapter.
If God loves judgment, why do we abhor it? What happened? Whatever we mean by judgment, Isaiah clearly sees it as perfectly aligned with the miraculous salvation he has just foretold.
According to that other great prophet, Jeremiah, to miss this is to miss the essence of who God is.
Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, judgment, and justice in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.
There it is again—mishpat and tsedeq, this time coupled with love.
One of the reasons why we don’t quite get this is that most Bibles render the above as “the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth”. Mishpat is typically translated as justice instead of judgment in modern translations, and tsedeq as righteousness instead of justice.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Translators acknowledge that judgment is a more accurate translation for the root meaning of mishpat, namely a legal decision or ruling. This explains why the King James Version translates mishpat as judgment/s almost 300 times out of its 421 appearances. However, they argue that justice is preferable in modern ethical contexts because “judgment” sounds like negative criticism or a harsh sentence in everyday English. Also, justice fits the regular Biblical association between mishpat and a stable social order where everyone is treated fairly. This is why the ESV translates mishpat as judgment/s less than a hundred times.
But there is another twist to all this—lesser-known and hardly spoken about. Translating mishpat as justice provides an opportunity to keep the word justice in the Bible. Tsedeq is no longer fulfilling that purpose as it is rendered as righteousness in modern translations for reasons all of its own. To have an English Bible without the word justice in it is, obviously, unthinkable. Whilst malice has certainly not played a role in the reshuffling of these words in our English Bibles, the result is certainly convenient.
The sophisticated argument used by translators is that of “semantic range”. The English “judgment” has become too narrow for a formidable word that has more to do with establishing a fair society than with harsh punishment. Mishpat overlaps sufficiently with justice to warrant its use in the place of judgment. So the argument goes.
But there is a problem. Justice also comes with a semantic range, and that range is sometimes too narrow to do what mishpat does in Hebrew. Sometimes the allusion to actual judgment—the proclamation of a verdict, the discernment of what is fair—is so unmistakeable that justice won’t work as a translation. The solution is to make a convenient exception in such cases: keep judgment as the translation. Hence the ESV’s ratio of one out of four.
But this leads to another problem. I am reading my Bible in English and I have someone else deciding for me which particular meaning of a single word in the original language applies to my reading. I find that intrusive and massively disturbing, like having an assigned interpreter to accompany me into the holy of holies. I would much rather have the semantic range of the English equivalent of that particular word expanded in my own brain than being handed a related but essentially different word to compensate for my ignorance. Solving my ignorance by removing semantic possibilities from the translated text is a convenient but dangerous shortcut. The challenge is to wrestle with the obvious question:
What kind of judgment does God love?
So I don’t like the word judgment. WHY? What am I not understanding about the original intent of that word? What is it about God that I am not getting? Why do I feel threatened by the notion of a just verdict? Why do I allow socially constructed connotations of a word to interfere with the voice of God in my life?
And, most importantly: How do I shut up all of that background noise?
We’ll get to that in the next post.