Wisdom 16:29
For the hope of the unthankful shall melt away as the winter's ice, and shall run off as unprofitable water.
Open Wisdom 16:29 in the Motif Searcher, word by word across all five texts →Show on the spiral →The verse in its languages
- Vulgate (Clementine)
- Ingrati enim spes tamquam hibernalis glacies tabescet, et disperiet tamquam aqua supervacua.
- Septuagint (Swete)
- ἀχαρίστου γὰρ ἐλπὶς ὡς χειμέριος πάχνη τακήσεται, καὶ ῥυήσεται ὡς ὕδωρ ἄχρηστον.
Haydock's commentary
Water. The ungrateful and negligent shall find their hopes frustrated, (Calmet) as well as the wicked, who expect salvation (Worthington) without a change of manners. (Haydock)
Ingratitude stops the fountain of grace. (Menochius)
From Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859, in the transcription made by Todd Easton and kept online by John Paul Wohlschied at johnblood.gitlab.io/haydock.
The Fathers on this verse
St John Chrysostom The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom, Matthew VII. 28
5. Now what great thing doth He ask, in requiring us to be thankful in return for such tender care? Let us then obey, and everywhere keep up this. Since neither were the Jews by anything ruined so much, as by being unthankful; those many stripes, one after another, were brought upon them by nothing else than this; or rather even before those stripes this had ruined and corrupted their soul. “For the hope of the unthankful,” saith one, “is like the winter’s hoar frost;”it benumbs and deadens the soul, as that doth our bodies.
The Fathers are given as they wrote. Where a passage lays the Passion on the Jewish people, the Church teaches that it cannot be charged against all the Jews then living, nor against the Jews of today, and that all sinners were its authors (CCC 597, 598).