Wednesday, October 4, 2023

Lee Martin McDonald on 1 Corinthians 13:4, 7

  

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.

 

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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)