though with a glance at God’s great gift to mankind. With us peace is a negative concept, the absence of war. But the Hebrew equivalent, šālôm, is concerned with ‘wholeness’, ‘soundness’, and signifies prosperity in the widest sense, especially prosperity in spiritual things. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, šālôm was rendered by eirēnē (the word used here), and thus, for those steeped in the Old Testament, peace is this broad concept of the prosperity of the whole man, more especially