1   Wisdom, working through a holy prophet, brought them success in all they did. 2   They made their way across an unpeopled desert and pitched camp in untrodden wastes; 3   they resisted every enemy, and beat off hostile assaults. 4   When they were thirsty they called upon thee, and water to slake their thirst was given them out of the hard stone of a rocky cliff. 5   The self-same means by which their oppressors had been punished were used to help them in their hour of need: those others found their river no unfailing stream of water, 6   but putrid and befouled with blood, 7   in punishment for their order that all the infants should be killed, while to these thou gavest abundant water unexpectedly. 8   So from the thirst they then endured, they learnt how thou hadst punished their enemies; 9   when they themselves were put to the test, though discipline was tempered with mercy, they understood the tortures of the godless who were sentenced in anger. 10   Thy own people thou didst subject to an ordeal, warning them like a father; those others thou didst put to the torture, like a stern king passing sentence. 11   At home and abroad, they were equally in distress, for a double misery had come upon them, 12   and they groaned as they recalled the past. 13   When they heard that the means of their own punishment had been used to benefit thy people, they saw thy hand in it, O Lord. 14   The man who long ago had been abandoned and exposed, whom they had rejected with contumely, became in the event the object of their wonder and admiration; their thirst was such as the godly never knew.

15   In return for the insensate imagination of those wicked men, which deluded them into worshipping reptiles devoid of reason, and mere vermin, thou didst send upon them a swarm of creatures devoid of reason to chastise them, 16   and to teach them that the instruments of a man's sin are the instruments of his punishment. 17   For thy almighty hand, which created the world out of formless matter, was not without other resource: it could have let loose upon them a 18   host of bears or ravening lions or unknown ferocious monsters newly created, either breathing out blasts of fire, or roaring and belching smoke, or flashing terrible sparks like lightning from their eyes, 19   with power not only to exterminate them by the wounds they inflicted, but by their mere appearance to kill them with fright. 20   Even without these, a single breath would have sufficed to lay them

Divine wisdom in history low, with justice in pursuit and the breath of thy power to blow them away; but thou hast ordered all things by measure and number and weight.

21   Great strength is thine to exert at any moment, and the power of thy arm no man can resist, 22   for in thy sight the whole world is like a grain that just tips the scale or a drop of dew alighting on the ground at dawn. 23   But thou art merciful to all men because thou canst do all things; thou dost overlook the sins of men to bring them to repentance; 24   for all existing things are dear to thee and thou hatest nothing that thou hast created—why else wouldst thou have made it? 25   How could anything have continued in existence, had it not been thy will? 26   How could it have endured unless called into being by thee? Thou sparest all things because they are thine, our lord and master who lovest all that lives;

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