Book of Wisdom

← Encyclopedia

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.

Solomon’s name on the book is a literary convention, not a claim modern scholarship credits. The Greek is polished and rhetorical, steeped in the vocabulary of Hellenistic philosophy, and the work is almost universally placed in the Jewish community of Alexandria, most often in the late first century BCE or the early first century CE. Its author wrote for fellow Jews living inside Greek culture — pressed by its prestige, its idolatry, and at times its hostility — and answered that pressure by showing that the wisdom Greeks prized was, properly understood, the gift of the God of Israel.

The book moves through three uneven parts. It opens by contrasting the fate of the just and the wicked, and states plainly that God did not make death, that the souls of the righteous only seem to die. It then turns to Wisdom herself, personified as a feminine figure — Sophia — who is described in language of striking elevation: a breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of his glory, a spotless mirror of his working, present with him at the founding of the world and passing into holy souls in every generation. The closing chapters retell the Exodus, reading Israel’s deliverance and Egypt’s plagues as proof that creation itself fights on the side of the righteous, and mount a sustained polemic against the worship of images and of nature.

Two features have given the book a long afterlife beyond its own community. The first is its teaching on immortality. Where older Hebrew scripture says little of life beyond death, Wisdom speaks confidently of incorruption and of souls at peace with God, a position that reads as the Hebrew hope met with Greek ideas of the imperishable soul. The second is Sophia. The portrait of Wisdom as a divine mediator, an emanation through whom God acts upon the world, stands close to the Logos of the contemporary Alexandrian Philo and was later drawn on by Christian writers reading Christ into the figure. The same Wisdom-figure became important, much later, to Gnostic and esoteric currents that made Sophia a character in their own cosmic dramas — a development the book itself does not contain, and would not have recognised.

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