account for the fact that we find more than four times the number of occurrences of a “saving righteousness” of God than we do those involving a punitive divine justice? It is one matter to assert that the biblical conception is two-sided. It is another matter to explain satisfactorily the nature of the evidence.4 In a related way, there has been a continuing debate as to whether it is proper to speak of the vocabulary of righteousness in the Hebrew Bible as generally bearing the sense of “accordance