Anonymous (Septuagint) · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| But you, our God, are kind and true, patient, and governing all things in mercy.
2| For even if we sin, we belong to you, aware of your might; yet we will hold back from wrongdoing, since we understand that you count us among your own.
3| For to know you is complete righteousness, and to know your power is the root of immortality.
4| Neither did the malicious invention of men lead us astray, nor the fruitless labor of painters, a form smeared with varied colors,
5| whose sight comes to fools as an incitement to lust, so that they desire the lifeless form of a dead image.
6| Lovers of evil, and worthy of such hopes, are they — both those who make them, and those who desire them, and those who worship them.
7| For a potter, kneading soft earth, laboriously molds each vessel for our service; but from the same clay he fashions both the vessels meant for clean uses and the opposite ones, all alike; and as to what the use of each of these different ones is, the clay-worker himself is the judge.
8| And with wasted labor he molds a worthless god out of the same clay, he who but a little before was made from earth and after a short while goes back to that from which he was taken, when the debt of his life is demanded back.
9| But his concern is not that he is going to wear out, nor that his life is short-lived, but he vies with workers in gold and silver, and imitates those who cast in bronze, and counts it glory that he molds counterfeit things.
10| His heart is ashes, his hope is cheaper than earth, and his life is of less worth than clay,
11| because he failed to know the one who shaped him and breathed into him an active soul and blew into him a living spirit.
12| Rather, he reckoned our life to be a plaything, and existence a money-making festival, for he says one must get profit from anywhere, even from evil.
13| For this man, more than all others, knows that he sins, when he fashions out of earthy matter fragile vessels and carved images.
14| But all the enemies of your people who have oppressed them are utterly foolish, and more pitiable than an infant's soul.
15| For they reckoned as gods all the idols of the nations, which have no use of eyes for seeing, nor nostrils to draw in air, nor ears to hear, nor fingers on their hands to feel with, and their feet are useless for walking.
16| For a man made them, and one who has borrowed his own breath shaped them; for no man has the strength to shape a god like himself.
17| Being mortal, he fashions a dead thing with lawless hands; for he is better than the things he worships, since he at least once lived, but they never did.
18| And they even worship the most hateful of animals; for compared in mindlessness, such creatures are worse than the rest.
19| Nor, so far as one might desire it, do they turn out beautiful even as animals go to look at — no, they have escaped both the praise of God and his blessing.