In the Bible the wicked person is often compared to chaff carried away by the wind. Some commentators saw in the corresponding Hebrew word an indication not of wind, but of...
In the Bible the wicked person is often compared to chaff carried away by the wind. Some commentators saw in the corresponding Hebrew word an indication not of wind, but of the Spirit of God, since wind and spirit in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament are indeed denoted by one word. But this does not change the essence of the matter: whether by a wind sent from God or by His own breath, the wicked person is carried away all the same. Wickedness, rejection by God, is associated both by the prophets and by the hymnographers with lightness, with the weightlessness of the rejected person, with his emptiness. Sometimes this emptiness is revealed on the day of the Last Judgment, sometimes on the day of calamity, which the prophets often view as a day of preliminary judgment, not yet final but already significant: every such judgment becomes God’s indication of human sinfulness and wickedness.
What stands behind the emptiness of the wicked person? One can, of course, see in it only a literary image, similar to the way we speak in Russian of an empty person who amounts to nothing. But the matter, it seems, is not only literary images. In biblical books death is often spoken of as the emptying of the dying person, who loses his vital strength and increasingly turns into a shadow, into an empty shell of his former self. Death, as the prophetic books and the book of Psalms speak of it, often begins not when a person dies physically, for a person may leave this world, on the contrary, “full of life,” as the Torah says, for example, about the death of the patriarchs, but when he loses God, when he turns away from Him. This is not surprising: the fullness of life is with God, and the one who ignores God or resists Him naturally and gradually loses participation in life, first spiritual and then physical.
The first thing that departs when God’s life is lost is stability: first spiritual, then psychological, and in the end sometimes physical as well. Then a person no longer begins to rejoice during sacrifice, but to be ashamed of his condition, for to reveal weakness at a solemn and responsible moment is not the most joyful event in life. Thus the loss of the spiritual core empties a person, making him easy prey for any wind that blows upon him.
4 The prophet shews their numerous sins, and the judgments consequent upon them, Hos 4:1-19.
4:19 The wind - The whirlwind of wrath from God hath seized this old adulteress, and carried some of her children away already.They shall be ashamed - What they made their confidence, shall be their shame.