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About this book

Psalms of Solomon

About this book

The Righteous and the Sinner

Psalm 3

1 Why are you sleeping, my soul, and not blessing the Lord? Sing a new song to God who is worthy to be praised.⁠ 2 Sing and stay awake to watch for His awakening, for a psalm (sung) to God from a joyful heart is good.

3 The righteous remember the Lord at all times, with thanksgiving and by declaring that the Lord’s judgments are righteous. 4 The righteous person does not despise the Lord’s discipline; His desire is always in the Lord’s presence.

5 The righteous person stumbles and acknowledges that the Lord is righteous: He falls and watches for what God will do to him; He searches for where his rescue will come from. 6 The firm resolve of the righteous is from God their deliverer; Sin does not pile up in the righteous person’s house. 7 The righteous person continually searches his house, to remove completely (all) wrongdoing (done) by him unintentionally.⁠ 8 He makes atonement for (sins of) ignorance by fasting and humbling himself, and the Lord counts every faithful man and his household as free from guilt.⁠

9 The sinner stumbles and curses his life, the day he was born, and his mother's labor pains. 10 He adds sin to sin while he lives (?); He falls, his fall is truly terrible, and he never rises again. 11 The destruction of the sinner is forever, and he will not be remembered when God attends to the righteous person.

12 This is the fate of sinners forever. But those who fear the Lord shall rise to eternal life,⁠ And their life (shall be) in the light of the Lord, and will never end.⁠

Texts in conversation

Compare Daniel 12:2 and Psalms of Solomon 3:12

Hebrew Bible · Pseudepigrapha, Wisdom and Poetry

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Summary

Psalms of Solomon 3 echoes Daniel 12 by describing the resurrection in similar language, a future awakening in which the righteous receive eternal life in contrast to the unrighteous.

Passages

Daniel 12:2

Hebrew Bible
1 “At that time Michael, the great prince who watches over your people, will arise. There will be a time of distress unlike any other from the nation’s beginning up to that time. But at that time your own people, all those whose names are found written in the book, will escape. 2 Many of those who sleep in the dusty ground will awake—some to everlasting life, and others to shame and everlasting abhorrence. 3 But the wise will shine like the brightness of the heavenly expanse. And those bringing many to righteousness will be like the stars forever and ever. 4 “But you, Daniel, close up these words and seal the book until the time of the end. Many will dash about, and knowledge will increase.”
200–101 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Daniel

Psalms of Solomon 3:12

Pseudepigrapha, Wisdom and Poetry
10 He adds sin to sin while he lives (?); He falls, his fall is truly terrible, and he never rises again. 11 The destruction of the sinner is forever, and he will not be remembered when God attends to the righteous person. 12 This is the fate of sinners forever. But those who fear the Lord shall rise to eternal life, And their life (shall be) in the light of the Lord, and will never end.
65–30 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in the Psalms of Solomon

References

"... John was familiar with sayings about the kingdom of God. He presumably also knew the tradition that 'the kingdom of God' was the central theme of Jesus’ preaching (compare Mark 1:14–15; Matthew 10:7–8 / Luke 10:9). If so, then the Fourth Evangelist deliberately displaced 'the kingdom of God' with 'life eternal'. Put otherwise, he did systematically what Matthew did once: he turned “kingdom of God” into “(eternal) life.” So, when John’s Jesus, in 3:3–16, unfolds the meaning of his own statements about “the kingdom of God” (verses 3, 5), it does not startle us that his subject becomes “eternal life” (verses 15–16). Nor is one surprised that what is true of the kingdom in the Synoptics is true of “eternal life” in the Fourth Gospel: it is both a promise for the future as well as a present reality (5:24, 29; 6:40; 11:25); it is like a possession (3:15, 16; 5:40; 6:47; 10:10); it is a gift of God (5:21; 6:27, 33, 63; 10:28); it is something that one can “see” (3:36); and it is the antithesis of eschatological death (3:16, 36; 5:24). How does this bear on one’s understanding of 'the kingdom of God' in the Jesus tradition? 'Life eternal' was a standard Jewish expression for the future lot of the righteous, for the state that the redeemed will enjoy after death or in the eschatological future (See, for example, Daniel 12:2; 1QS 4:7; Psalms of Solomon 3:12; 1 Enoch 15:4, 6 ...) ..."
Dale C. Allison Jr., Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 188.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Daniel 12:2 and Psalms of Solomon 3:12

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