The Book of Wisdom

The book of Wisdom is the last of the great wisdom books of the Old Testament, and one of the last written before the coming of Christ. A Jew of Alexandria composed it directly in Greek, around the first century before Jesus Christ, for his brothers of the diaspora tempted by pagan life and Greek philosophy. He writes under the name of Solomon, the wise king, to defend the faith of Israel and answer those who doubted God’s justice and life beyond death. In nineteen chapters, he proclaims the immortality of the righteous, sings of divine Wisdom in terms very close to the mystery of Christ, and rereads the whole history of salvation.

The last wisdom book, written in Greek

The book of Wisdom, or Wisdom of Solomon, closes the series of wisdom books, alongside Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and the Psalms. It is also one of the very last written books of the Old Testament. Its particularity is that it was composed directly in Greek, without passing through a Hebrew original, which is rare in the Bible. Its author thinks in the categories of Greek philosophy while remaining faithful to the faith of Israel, and this is why he speaks of the immortality of the soul with a clarity no earlier book had reached. Like Sirach, it is a deuterocanonical book: received by the Catholic Church as fully part of Scripture, though absent from the Hebrew canon, it belonged to the Greek Bible of the Septuagint that the apostles read, and the New Testament keeps many echoes of it.

A book of Alexandria

Alexandria, in Egypt, was the great city of the Jewish diaspora and a crossroads of Greek learning. It was there that the author lived, a Jewish sage nourished both on the Law of Moses and on Greek thought. In his day, the faith of Israel met head-on the philosophy and seductions of a pagan city, its cults, its idols, its pursuit of pleasure. Some Jews were tempted to abandon their faith, doubting that God was just, that the faithful were rewarded, that there was anything after death. The author’s purpose is pastoral: to strengthen the scattered believers, to show that true wisdom comes from God, and to answer the doubt of those who see the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer. He puts the tools of Greek culture at the service of the faith of Israel, without ever dissolving that faith into them.

Attributed to Solomon

The author writes in the person of Solomon, the wise king to whom Israel traced its wisdom books. He never names him, but speaks as a king who received Wisdom through prayer and preferred her to scepter and throne. He addresses the powerful: “Love righteousness, you who govern the earth.” Wisdom 1:1 And he tells of his love for Wisdom: “I loved her and sought her out from my youth, and I resolved to take her for my bride, in love with her beauty.” Wisdom 8:2 To place a work under the name of a great figure was a recognized practice, not to deceive, but to enroll it in his tradition. The book thus gathers the whole heritage of wisdom under the patronage of the wisest of kings.

A bridge to the New Testament

The book of Wisdom stands at the threshold of the Gospel. It says things the Old Testament had only glimpsed: the immortality of the righteous, reward and judgment beyond death, which prepare the announcement of the resurrection. It speaks of divine Wisdom in terms so close to the language the New Testament will use for Christ, the Son "the radiance of God’s glory," that the Church has always read it of the Word. And its portrait of the persecuted righteous man, condemned to a shameful death because he calls God his father, reads like a prophecy of the Passion. Between the Old Testament and the New, this book is a bridge.