The Hebrew word behind righteousness, and why in Jesus’ day it meant giving to the poor
Tsedaqah: Righteousness You Can Hand to Someone
Righteousness sounds like a quality, something a person has or lacks, and in most English mouths it sounds faintly disapproving. The Hebrew word behind it is a thing you do, usually for someone weaker than you, and by the first century it had become the ordinary word for almsgiving. Both halves of that history are in your Bible.
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Lesson 3 of 12 · Hebrew
Tsedaqah is rightness in a relationship, shown in what you do: fair dealing, a debt honored, a poor man’s cloak returned by sunset, a king judging the weak justly. It is not an inner glow and not a legal fiction; in the Old Testament it is measured by acts toward others, and it is so bound up with generosity that by the time of Jesus the word simply meant giving to the poor. That is the word Paul reaches for when he says God counted Abraham righteous, and the argument about what Paul meant has run for five hundred years. This lesson does not settle it. It shows the word the argument is about.
Counted to Abraham
The sentence on which more theology has been built than any other in Genesis uses the word about a man who has done nothing yet but believe.
He believed in Yahweh, who credited it to him for righteousness. — Genesis 15:6 · WEB
Read the comment on He believed Yahweh
He believed, and it was counted to him for righteousness. Paul quotes it in Romans and Galatians, James quotes it, and each does something different with it. Before asking what they did, it is worth knowing what the word ordinarily meant, because none of them was inventing it.
צְדָקָה tsᵉdâqâh H6666
from צָדַק; rightness (abstractly), subjectively (rectitude), objectively (justice), morally (virtue) or figuratively (prosperity); justice, moderately, right(-eous) (act, -ly, -ness).
From a root meaning to be straight, to be right, the noun names rightness in conduct and in relationship: justice from a judge, honesty in weights and measures, faithfulness to what one owes another. It is the standing of someone who has done right by the people they are bound to. In the later books and in the rabbis it narrows to the act that most shows such rightness — giving to those who have less — until tsedaqah simply means charity, which is what it means in Hebrew today.
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A cloak returned by sunset
The plainest definition the Old Testament gives is a law about a pawned garment.
You shall surely restore to him the pledge when the sun goes down, that he may sleep in his garment and bless you. It shall be righteousness to you before Yahweh your God. — Deuteronomy 24:13 · WEB
Read the comment on The Pledge and the Gleaning
Return the pledge at sunset so that he may sleep in his cloak and bless you, and it shall be righteousness to you before the Lord. Not "it will be counted as good": it is righteousness — the word names the act. A poor man’s coat handed back at dusk is what the word looks like when it is done.
“God, give the king your justice; your righteousness to the royal son. He will judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.” Psalm 72:1–2 · WEB
Give the king your righteousness, that he may judge the poor with justice: the word as what a ruler owes the weak.
“But let justice roll on like rivers, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Amos 5:24 · WEB
Justice like water, righteousness like an ever-flowing stream: the pair the prophets never separate.
“To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to Yahweh than sacrifice.” Proverbs 21:3 · WEB
To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable than sacrifice: the same order of priorities as Hosea’s hesed.
In every one of those the word is something done to someone. Righteousness in the Old Testament has a direction: it goes from the one who has toward the one who lacks.
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What Jesus’ hearers heard
By the first century the narrowing was complete. When Jesus warns against practicing righteousness to be seen, the next sentence is about giving to the poor, because that is what the word had come to mean.
“Be careful that you don’t do your charitable giving before men, to be seen by them, or else you have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. — Matthew 6:1 · WEB
Read the comment on Do Not Sound a Trumpet
The WEB says charitable giving outright; the King James says righteousness; and the Greek manuscripts divide the same way, some reading alms and the oldest reading righteousness. That is not a copyist’s slip. In the Aramaic Jesus spoke and the Hebrew his hearers read, the two had become one word, so a scribe replacing one with the other was not changing the meaning. The Greek behind the older reading is dikaiosyne, the New Testament’s word for righteousness throughout, and here it plainly means charity — which is why the WEB could translate it so. A reader who hears "righteousness" as an inner state has to explain why the next verse is about a trumpet at the almsbox.
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The argument, marked
Now the contested ground, stated rather than settled. Paul says Abraham was counted righteous by faith, apart from works, and the Reformation read "counted" as a verdict: a standing before God that is given, not earned, and that no act produces. The Old Testament word, as this lesson has shown, is about acts toward others, and James, quoting the same Genesis verse, says Abraham’s faith was completed by what he did. Readers have divided over how the two fit: whether Paul lifted the word into a legal sense the Old Testament does not have, whether James corrects Paul, or whether both are reading Genesis 15 in the light of Genesis 22, where the believing man acts.
Behold, his soul is puffed up. It is not upright in him, but the righteous will live by his faith. — Habakkuk 2:4 · WEB
Read the comment on The Righteous Will Live by His Faith
The righteous shall live by his faith: the verse Paul builds Romans on. Whether it means "the person in right standing lives by trusting" or "the person who does right lives by faithfulness," the Hebrew word will bear, and the argument is largely about which. What is not in doubt is what the word meant to the people who first read Habakkuk: a life that does right by God and by neighbor, and that keeps faith with both.
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What the word asks
It asks for a cloak returned at sunset. Whatever a reader concludes about Romans, the Old Testament word never lets righteousness stay inside a person; it goes out toward someone who needs it, or it is not the word. The prophets measured a nation’s righteousness by its courts and its poor, and Jesus measured a person’s by the almsbox and the motive at it.
Take one verse with righteousness in it and read it with "doing right by someone" in the word’s place. Then name the someone: who, in that verse, is the righteousness for?
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