13:4. Love is patient, love is
kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant. Patience has a longstanding approval rating
among the Jews. Sirach (ca. mid-second century b.c.),
for instance, admonishes his readers to patience in the face of adversity:
“Accept whatever befalls you, and in times of humiliation be patient. For gold
is tested in the fire, and those found acceptable in the furnace of
humiliation” (Sir. 2:4, nasv). See also Rom. 2:4; 2 Cor. 6:6;
Gal. 5:22. On the latter instance, love is not arrogant, earlier Paul says that
knowledge puffs up (8:1), or makes one arrogant, but Christians should rather
build up.
. . .
13:7. bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
Two of the characteristics of love that are at the end of Paul’s praise of love
are listed here (belief/faith and hope) are expressed here as they clarify the
meaning of love. In Hellenistic Judaism, both faith and love are listed as
important virtues. In 2 Enoch (ca.
first cent. b.c.–second cent. a.d.), for example, there is an appeal
to walk in love as one faces the various trials and circumstances of life.
Walk,
my children, in long-suffering, in meekness [honesty], in affliction, in
distress, in faithfulness, in truth, in hope, in weakness, in derision, in
assaults, in temptation, in deprivation, in nakedness, having love for one
another until you go out from this age of suffering, so that you may become
inheritors of the never-ending age. (2
Enoch 66:6, OT Pseud 1:194).
Similarly,
the author of Jubilees (ca. 161–140 b.c.) also extols the value of love and
faith in the example of Abraham: “And in everything in which he tested him, he
was found faithful. And his soul was not impatient. And he was not slow to act
because he was faithful and a lover of the Lord” (Jub. 17:9, OT Pseud
2:90). (Lee Martin McDonald, "1 Corinthians," in The Bible
Knowledge Background Commentary: Acts-Philemon, ed. Craig A. Evans and
Craig A. Bubeck [Colorado Springs, Colo.: David C. Cook, 2004], 339, 340)