I know that my attorney liveth
The Old Testament talks about godly people being rewarded by respect ‘in the gates’. I believe that the gates of the Hebrew town were where public business was transacted. A Greek, therefore, might say ‘in the agora’, a Roman, ‘in the Forum’, and a modern, ‘in court’. The Old Testament seems to be saying, therefore, that if you walk with God your peers will fall silent when you speak. Or, in the modern idiom, ‘dey not be dissin’ you, mon’. The human need to climb hierarchies sounds so much more impressive in King James.
One of the payoffs of religion is that you have, not only an invisible friend, but an invisible vindicator – for ‘vindicator’ is a more accurate translation than ‘redeemer’ for the personage for whom Job claimed to be waiting. A vindicator’s job is to tell you that you were right all along, and then to tell everyone else that you were right all along, and if necessary to ram it down their throats. It’s like having a very high-powered lawyer. The emotional attitude with which a thus permanently vindicated person meets the unvindicated is ‘God likes me more than he likes you. Eat my dust.’
A survivor of the massacre of the Rhineland Jews in 1096 wrote: ‘May the Merciful One avenge the spilled blood of your servants – and the blood yet to be spilled – during the lifetime of those who survive us, before their very eyes.’ This seems just a little bit more honest than the Christian equivalent, since the Jew is not obliged to utter insincere hopes that his enemy will convert to his religion and thus become his ‘brother’.
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