Wisdom 17 • The prison of darkness and fear — Greek text and reception
Each card preserves the Greek reading and its textual and reception notes. This source provides a Greek study edition; Hebrew counterparts and Hebrew–Greek classifications are not supplied.
Chapter 17 • The prison of darkness and fear
Hidden sins and a night of terror
Verse 17:1
Greek–English Saints Priority
For Your judgments are great and hard to recount;
therefore uninstructed souls went astray.
Textual & Reception Notes
Verse 17:2
Greek–English Saints Priority
For lawless people, supposing they could oppress a holy nation,
lay as prisoners of darkness and captives of a long night,
shut under their roofs, fugitives from eternal providence.
Textual & Reception Notes
The description ‘fugitives from eternal providence’ is retained as the text’s image, not a claim that God has ceased to govern.
Verse 17:3
Greek–English Saints Priority
For thinking they could escape notice in secret sins,
under a lightless covering of forgetfulness,
they were scattered, terribly astonished
and shaken by apparitions.
Textual & Reception Notes
Verse 17:4
Greek–English Saints Priority
For not even the recess that held them kept them free from fear;
terrifying sounds rang around them,
and gloomy specters with unsmiling faces appeared.
Textual & Reception Notes
The sounds and visible apparitions remain separate elements.
Verse 17:5
Greek–English Saints Priority
No force of fire could give light,
nor could the bright flames of stars
endure to illuminate that hateful night.
Textual & Reception Notes
Verse 17:6
Greek–English Saints Priority
Only a self-kindled fire
full of fear shone through to them;
terrified by that unseen sight,
they reckoned what they saw still worse.
Textual & Reception Notes
‘Unseen sight’ retains the difficult μὴ θεωρουμένης … ὄψεως construction. Its relation to the intermittent fire and fearful perception remains a review priority; no emendation is adopted.
Verse 17:7
Greek–English Saints Priority
The delusions of magical art lay prostrate,
and its boasting of understanding suffered a scornful exposure;
Textual & Reception Notes
The magic’s claim to understanding is undercut by what follows.
Verse 17:8
Greek–English Saints Priority
for those who promised to drive away the terrors and disturbances of a sick soul
were themselves sick with a ridiculous fear.
Textual & Reception Notes
The repeated sickness language turns the healers’ promise back upon them.
Verse 17:9
Greek–English Saints Priority
For even if nothing disturbing frightened them,
startled by the passing of beasts and the hissing of creeping things,
they perished trembling,
refusing even to look at the air, which cannot be escaped anywhere.
Textual & Reception Notes
The final air image is deliberately expansive: there is no refuge from the very surroundings they fear.
Conscience and the failure of reason
Verse 17:10
Greek–English Saints Priority
For wickedness is a cowardly thing, condemned by its own witness;
pressed by conscience, it always imagines grievous things.
Textual & Reception Notes
The inner witness is identified by the following conscience clause. The personification of wickedness is retained.
Verse 17:11
Greek–English Saints Priority
For fear is nothing but a betrayal of the helps that come from reasoning;
Textual & Reception Notes
This is the author’s description of fear in the passage, not a substituted modern clinical definition.
Verse 17:12
Greek–English Saints Priority
and as expectation within grows weaker,
it reckons ignorance more fearful than the cause that produces the torment.
Textual & Reception Notes
‘More fearful’ supplies the comparison’s contextual force; the Greek literally reckons ignorance ‘greater’ than the tormenting cause.
Verse 17:13
Greek–English Saints Priority
But they, sleeping the same sleep during that truly powerless night,
which had come upon them from the recesses of powerless Hades,
Textual & Reception Notes
The repeated ἀδύνατος is closely rendered powerless. Its exact application to night and Hades is difficult and remains for review; the repetition is not suppressed.
Verse 17:14
Greek–English Saints Priority
were at one moment driven by monstrous apparitions,
at another paralyzed by their soul’s betrayal;
for a sudden and unexpected fear poured over them.
Textual & Reception Notes
The alternating experiences and the unexpected onset are all explicit.
Verse 17:15
Greek–English Saints Priority
Then whoever it might be who fell there
was held under guard, shut in a prison without iron bars.
Textual & Reception Notes
The prison lacks iron but still confines; the material contrast is preserved.
Verse 17:16
Greek–English Saints Priority
For whether someone was a farmer or shepherd
or a laborer toiling in the wilderness,
once overtaken, he endured the inescapable compulsion;
for all were bound by one chain of darkness.
Textual & Reception Notes
One chain binds all the separately named workers.
Every sound becomes a terror
Verse 17:17
Greek–English Saints Priority
Whether a whistling wind,
or the melodious sound of birds among spreading branches,
or the rhythm of water rushing violently,
or the harsh crash of falling rocks,
Textual & Reception Notes
The list continues into the next verse; even pleasant bird sound participates in the terror.
Verse 17:18
Greek–English Saints Priority
or the unseen running of leaping animals,
or the voice of the fiercest roaring beasts,
or an echo rebounding from the hollows of mountains,
these terrified and paralyzed them.
Textual & Reception Notes
All seven sounds or movements across 17:17–18 are represented.
Verse 17:19
Greek–English Saints Priority
For the whole world was illuminated by brilliant light
and occupied with unhindered works;
Textual & Reception Notes
Verse 17:20
Greek–English Saints Priority
but over those alone a heavy night was spread,
an image of the darkness that was to receive them;
yet they were heavier to themselves than the darkness.
Textual & Reception Notes
This is the final verse of chapter seventeen in the declared publisher Greek text. The comparative burden of their own selves is retained.