Rectitude

Righteousness (also called rectitude) is a theological concept in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It is an attribute that implies that a person's actions are justified, and can have the connotation that the person has been "judged" or "reckoned" as leading a life that is pleasing to God.

William Tyndale (Bible translator into English in 1526) remodelled the word after an earlier word rihtwis, which would have yielded modern English *rightwise or *rightways. He used it to translate the Hebrew root צדקים (TzDYQ), tzedek, which appears more than five hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, and the Greek word δίκαιος (dikaios), which appears more than two hundred times in the New Testament.

Righteousness is one of the chief attributes of God as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. Its chief meaning concerns ethical conduct (for example, Leviticus 19:36; Deuteronomy 25:1; Psalm 1:6; Proverbs 8:20). In the Book of Job the title character is introduced to us as a person who is perfect in righteousness.

The New Testament continues the Hebrew Bible's tradition of the ethical (1 Thessalonians 2:10) and legal (1 Corinthians 4:4) aspects of righteousness. William Lane Craig argues that we should think of God as the paradigm, the locus, the source of all righteousness. Matthew's gospel contains the most utterances of the word. In Matthew's account of the baptism encounter Jesus tells the prophet "it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness" as Jesus requests that John perform the rite for him. The Sermon of the Mount contains the memorable commandment "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness". The Greek word dikaiosune also means justice and the sole translation using this rendering for Matthew 6:33 is the New English Bible.

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