Wisdom 17

¹For your judgments are great, and hard to interpret;

therefore undisciplined souls went astray.

²For when lawless men had supposed that they held a holy nation in their power,

they, prisoners of darkness, and bound in the fetters of a long night,

kept close beneath their roofs,

lay exiled from the eternal providence.

³For while they thought that they were unseen in their secret sins,

they were divided from one another by a dark curtain of forgetfulness,

stricken with terrible awe, and very troubled by apparitions.

⁴For neither did the dark recesses that held them guard them from fears,

but terrifying sounds rang around them,

and dismal phantoms appeared with unsmiling faces.

⁵And no power of fire prevailed to give light,

neither were the brightest flames of the stars strong enough to illuminate that gloomy night;

⁶but only the glimmering of a self-kindled fire appeared to them, full of fear.

In terror, they considered the things which they saw

to be worse than that sight, on which they could not gaze.

⁷The mockeries of their magic arts were powerless, now,

and a shameful rebuke of their boasted understanding:

⁸For those who promised to drive away terrors and disorders from a sick soul,

these were sick with a ludicrous fearfulness.

⁹For even if no troubling thing frighted them,

yet, scared with the creeping of vermin and hissing of serpents,

¹⁰they perished trembling in fear,

refusing even to look at the air, which could not be escaped on any side.

¹¹For wickedness, condemned by a witness within, is a coward thing,

and, being pressed hard by conscience, always has added forecasts of the worst.

¹²For fear is nothing else but a surrender of the help which reason offers;

¹³and from within, the expectation of being less

prefers ignorance of the cause that brings the torment.

¹⁴But they, all through the night which was powerless indeed,

and which came upon them out of the recesses of powerless Hades,

sleeping the same sleep,

¹⁵now were haunted by monstrous apparitions,

and now were paralyzed by their soul’s surrendering;

for sudden and unexpected fear came upon them.

¹⁶So then whoever it might be, sinking down in his place,

was kept captive, shut up in that prison which was not barred with iron;

¹⁷for whether he was a farmer, or a shepherd,

or a laborer whose toils were in the wilderness,

he was overtaken, and endured that inescapable sentence;

for they were all bound with one chain of darkness.

¹⁸Whether there was a whistling wind,

or a melodious sound of birds among the spreading branches,

or a measured fall of water running violently,

¹⁹or a harsh crashing of rocks hurled down,

or the swift course of animals bounding along unseen,

or the voice of wild beasts harshly roaring,

or an echo rebounding from the hollows of the mountains,

all these things paralyzed them with terror.

²⁰For the whole world was illuminated with clear light,

and was occupied with unhindered works,

²¹while over them alone was spread a heavy night,

an image of the darkness that should afterward receive them;

but to themselves, they were heavier than darkness.