Book of Wisdom

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The Book of Wisdom — also called the Wisdom of Solomon — is a Jewish wisdom text written in Greek, cast in the voice of King Solomon, that exhorts its readers to seek divine Wisdom and promises that the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God. It belongs to the deuterocanonical books: scripture for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, an apocryphal writing for Protestants and for the Jewish canon, which never received it. The two designations are confessional rather than descriptive — the same nineteen chapters are deuterocanonical to one communion and apocryphal to another — and which word a reader reaches for says only which body did the receiving.

The pseudonymous frame

The first-person speaker of the book is a king who rules a great people, who prays for wisdom and is granted it, who builds and judges and surveys the order of the cosmos. He is never named, but the description is unmistakable, and the ancient title settled the matter: this is Solomon, the wise king of Israel to whom an older tradition had already attached Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. The attribution is a literary convention of the kind common to Hellenistic Jewish writing, where a living author lends his work the authority of a revered ancestor — the same device that produced the Psalms of Solomon, a separate and unrelated collection of the same era. Solomon’s name on the book is not a claim modern scholarship credits, and the internal evidence forbids it: the work is composed in supple, idiomatic Greek several centuries after Solomon and a thousand miles from his city.

That Greek is the decisive testimony against the royal byline. It is polished and rhetorical, free of the wooden quality of a translation, ornamented with the figures of the Greek schools — chiasmus, alliteration, paronomasia, and the chained reasoning called the sorites, in which one term draws on the next until a conclusion is reached, as in the climbing argument of the sixth chapter that runs from the desire for wisdom to a place beside the throne of God. The vocabulary is steeped in the terminology of Hellenistic philosophy. Where the author imitates the parallelism of Hebrew verse, he does so as a stylist reaching for a venerable cadence, not as a man whose first tongue it was. The homogeneity of that style across all nineteen chapters is itself an argument: since Carl Grimm’s nineteenth-century commentary, most readers have taken the uniformity of language and the single sustained polemic — against apostasy and idolatry — as the signature of one mind.

Alexandria, and the reader pressed by Greek culture

The work is almost universally placed in the Jewish community of Alexandria, the largest and most learned Greek-speaking diaspora of the ancient world, most often in the late first century BCE or the early first century CE. David Winston, whose Anchor Bible commentary set the modern terms of the question, argued for a date as late as the reign of Caligula, 37 to 41 CE — the years of the violent pogrom against the Alexandrian Jews and the embassy to Rome that Philo of Alexandria recorded — reading the book’s warnings against persecuting rulers as marked by that crisis. Other scholars place it earlier, and the full range of proposals stretches across three centuries; what is not in dispute is the city and the milieu. This is a book of Second Temple Judaism in its most thoroughly Hellenized form, written for fellow Jews living inside Greek culture — pressed by its prestige, its idolatry, and at times its hostility — and answering that pressure by showing that the wisdom the Greeks prized was, properly understood, the gift of the God of Israel.

The author’s quarrel is not with Greek thought as such. He plunders it. He deploys the four cardinal virtues of the philosophers — temperance, prudence, justice, courage — as the very gifts that Wisdom teaches; he describes the created order in the language of the Stoics and the Platonists; he speaks of God fashioning the world out of “formless matter,” a phrase the Platonist schools used for the unshaped substance that preceded the cosmos, and which is foreign to the older Hebrew language of creation by command. What he refuses is the conclusion the Greeks drew — that such wisdom is the achievement of the philosophers, or that the cosmos is itself divine. The wisdom is real; its source is the Lord; and the man who reads the heavens and worships them has missed the maker for the made.

The three uneven parts

The book moves through three sections of unequal length and temper.

The first, chapters one through six, sets the destinies of the just and the wicked against each other. It states plainly that God did not make death, and that he created all things that they might have being; death entered the world through the envy of the adversary, not from the hand of the creator. The wicked, reasoning that life is short and the grave final, resolve to oppress the righteous man and put him to a shameful death to test his claim that God is his father — a scene Christian readers would later hear as a prophecy of the Passion. But their reasoning is blind. The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment touches them; in the sight of the foolish they seemed to die, yet they are at peace, and their hope is full of immortality. The reversal is announced with great rhetorical force: at the judgment the wicked will see the one they despised standing in confidence, and will groan at the folly that took his suffering for defeat.

The second part, chapters six through nine, turns to Wisdom herself. Here the speaker, in the persona of the king, tells how he prayed for her and preferred her to scepters and thrones, to health and beauty and light itself, and received with her every good thing. Wisdom is described in language of striking elevation — a feminine figure, Hebrew Hokhmah rendered into Greek Sophia, who is at once an attribute of God and an agent who acts in the world. She is the breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of his glory, a reflection of the everlasting light, a spotless mirror of his working, present with him at the founding of the world and ordering all things well. More than that, she does not remain aloof: in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God and prophets, for God loves nothing so much as the one who dwells with Wisdom. The section closes with the great prayer of the ninth chapter, in which the king asks for the Wisdom that sits beside God’s throne to be sent down from the holy heavens, that he might know what is pleasing in God’s sight.

The third and longest part, chapters ten through nineteen, retells the story of Israel from Adam to the Exodus as a sustained meditation on how Wisdom has saved the righteous and confounded their enemies. The narrative settles on the deliverance from Egypt and reads the plagues and the crossing of the sea through a single governing idea: that creation itself fights on the side of the righteous and against the wicked, so that the same elements that nourish the chosen people turn to instruments of judgment against their oppressors — fire that burns in water, manna that suits every taste, a darkness that imprisons the Egyptians while Israel has light. Into this retelling is folded the book’s most sustained attack, a long and bitter polemic against the worship of images and of nature: against those who take the works of God for gods, who deify fire or wind or the circle of the stars, and against the carpenter who carves a god from the leftovers of his own firewood and prays to a thing that cannot stir. This is the passage that the apostle Paul would draw on closely in the opening chapter of Romans, where idolatry and its consequences are arraigned in the same order and almost the same terms.

The two afterlives

Two features have carried the book far beyond the community that produced it.

The first is its teaching on immortality. Where the older Hebrew scriptures say little of any life beyond death — the dead descend to Sheol, and the hope of Israel rests on the people and the land rather than the individual soul — Wisdom speaks with confidence of incorruption, of righteousness that is immortal, of souls that are in peace and whose reward is with the Most High. The book joins the Hebrew hope of God’s vindication to the Greek conviction of the imperishable soul, and at points goes further than the surrounding tradition in a Platonist direction: it speaks of the body as a tent that weighs down the soul, and of the speaker as a good soul that came into an undefiled body — a sentence Winston judged as plain a statement of the preexistence of souls as one could wish. Here immortality is not the resurrection of the flesh that other strands of Second Temple Judaism awaited, but the deathlessness of a soul that was always meant to live with God.

The second is Sophia. The portrait of Wisdom as a divine mediator — an emanation through whom God knows and orders and acts upon the world, distinct enough to be addressed and yet not a second God — stands very close to the Logos, the divine Word and reason, that the contemporary Alexandrian Philo made the hinge of his own system. Both figures answer the same pressure: how the utterly transcendent God of Israel can also be the immediate agent of creation and the presence that meets the human mind. Philo’s solution was a masculine Logos, the reason and instrument of God standing between the unknowable First and the made world; Wisdom’s is a feminine Sophia who is breath, mirror, and radiance, and who enters souls rather than merely governing matter. The two are not the same construction, and the book is not Philo in verse — it has no allegorical machinery, no systematic philosophy, no running commentary on the Torah. But they are products of one intellectual climate, the same Alexandrian Jewish reading culture that produced Philo’s treatises and the contemplative community of the Therapeutae he described, in which the God of Moses and the vocabulary of Plato and the Stoa were being thought together as one inheritance. The convergence of Sophia and Logos is the clearest single sign of what that culture was attempting. The convergence was not lost on later readers. Christian writers took up the language directly — the word the Letter to the Hebrews uses for the Son as the radiance of God’s glory, apaugasma, occurs in the whole Greek Bible only here and in Wisdom’s description of Sophia — and read the figure of Wisdom as a foreshadowing of Christ. Clement of Alexandria and the Alexandrian theologians who followed him wove the book into the developing doctrine of the divine Word. Much later still, the same Wisdom-figure was taken up by Gnostic and esoteric currents that made a Sophia into a character in their own cosmic dramas, a fallen or exiled emanation whose descent and recovery structured a myth of the soul — a development the book itself does not contain, and whose Sophia is not the Wisdom of these pages. The line from the spotless mirror of God’s working to the aeon of the Gnostic systems is a line of later reading, not of authorial intent.

Text, translation, and scholarship

The book survives in Greek as part of the Septuagint, the Greek scriptures of the Alexandrian diaspora, and through it entered the Latin and Christian biblical tradition. The foundational English public-domain apparatus for the Hellenistic Jewish wisdom literature remains R. H. Charles’s The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), in which the Wisdom of Solomon was translated and annotated by Samuel Holmes of Jesus College, Oxford; the volume’s general introduction set the inspiration of a book like Wisdom incomparably above that of canonical Esther, a judgment that captures the esteem the Alexandrian inheritance commanded. Charles’s edition is hosted in full at CCEL. Earlier English commentary translations include W. J. Deane’s of 1881 and J. A. F. Gregg’s of 1909, and the substantial commentary of A. T. S. Goodrick, The Book of Wisdom (1913). The King James Apocrypha of 1611 and Sir Lancelot Brenton’s Septuagint with Apocrypha (1851) carry the text in older English dress.

The modern critical foundation rests on the great French commentary of Chrysostome Larcher (three volumes, 1983–85) and, in English, on David Winston’s The Wisdom of Solomon in the Anchor Bible (1979), which argues for the Caligula-era date and for a single author working in the Middle Platonist register. The rhetorical and generic analyzes of James M. Reese, Hellenistic Influence on the Book of Wisdom and Its Consequences (1970), and the structural studies of Addison G. Wright established the book’s debt to Greek protreptic and the careful symmetry of its design. John J. Collins’s Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age (1997) places it within the wider current that runs from Proverbs through Sirach to the Alexandrian synthesis, and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Wisdom Literature surveys the present state of the question. The relationship between Wisdom’s indictment of idolatry and Paul’s in the Letter to the Romans is among the most debated questions of its New Testament afterlife.

How far Wisdom is genuinely shaped by Greek philosophy, and how far it merely borrows its diction, remains debated. What is not in dispute is the position the book occupies: a hinge where the wisdom traditions of Israel and the thought of the Greek world are held in a single argument, neither surrendered to the other.

→ In the library: Charles — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913)

→ Related: Logos · Gnosis · Book Of Enoch · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Philo Of Alexandria · Alexandria · Second Temple Judaism · Deuterocanonical Books · Apocrypha · Sirach · Proverbs · Psalms Of Solomon · Jewish Philosophy · Clement Of Alexandria