A psalm of David.
143:1 O LORD, hear my prayer!
Pay attention to my plea for help!
Because of your faithfulness and justice, answer me!
Your faithfulness and justice – Or, ‘faithfulness…righteousness’ (NASB).
Lee Irons: The pairing of these two expressions has been understood to be an instance of synonymous parallelism. This has enabled proponents of the ‘New Perspective on Paul’ to argue that the pairing has influenced Paul’s thinking, such that God’s righteousness = God’s faithfulness. However, since the work of James Kugel and Robert Alter in the 1980s, the scholarly consensus is that there is no such thing as strictly synonymous parallelism. The second term always adds something to the first term. In Kugel’s formula: ‘A, and, what’s more, B’.
The present verse should, perhaps, then be understood as a case of ‘hyponymy’, where the second term is a sub-category of the first term (just as a ‘dog’ is a sub-category of ‘mammal’). ‘Faithfulness’ is a sub-category (not a synonym) of ‘righteousness’. In other words:
‘faithfulness is a species of righteousness, that is, righteousness with regard to keeping one’s promises. The way God is “righteous” within the terms of a promissory covenant is by being faithful to keep his promises and delivering his people. But this does not mean that the lexical denotation of “righteousness” is “faithfulness to a promissory covenant.” Nor can we assume that all divine acts of righteousness are instances of being faithful to a covenant or keeping a promise.’
To put it another way:
‘all instances of faithfulness to a promissory covenant may be termed “righteousness,” but not all ”righteousness” is faithfulness to a promissory covenant.’