Name
This book in the Latin Vulgate is titled “The Book of Wisdom.” In the Greek Septuagint, it is titled “The Wisdom of Solomon.”
Genre
This book is wisdom literature, which gives rules of proper conduct, usually in the form of maxims, pithy insights, and “words to live by.” Wisdom literature attempts to show the way things are and the way things should be. Also of this genre are Job, Ecclesiastes, and the book of Wisdom.
The goal of wisdom in this context is to live the good life here and now, marked by length of days, prestige, and prosperity. Wisdom literature highlights patterns of living that brought happiness in the past, and exhorts readers to live those patterns in the hope of finding the same happiness in the future.
The way that wisdom literature teaches is not the way that we are accustomed to being taught in modern society. We want a full and linear explanation of something from beginning to end with all the finer points in between. Wisdom literature does not give us that. Rather, it gives us a thought or an image and invites us to sit with it, to probe the depths of it over an extended period of time. You could spend a lifetime praying with any of these verses and find something fruitful every single time! We usually don’t give ourselves the time and space to sit with scripture like that, and We lose so much when we rush over a passage to get to the next good thing.
Date
This book was written in the last half of the first century BC – about 50 years before Christ. The audience was Alexandrian Jews; they had been part of the Babylonian exile and ended up in Alexandria, Egypt, and never returned to the Jewish homeland. Alexandria was the largest concentration of Jews outside Palestine in Jesus’ time.
Canonicity
Wisdom is considered a deuterocanonical book. Because the primary text was in Greek, it is not considered part of the Jewish canon. But it was included in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible). The Latin Vulgate translation used the Septuagint as a base and, therefore, included books like Wisdom. The Roman Catholic canon is determined by the contents of the Vulgate; therefore, this book is a canonical one, albeit of secondary importance.
General Observations
This book is written in Greek and is very Greek in thought. The overall message is to stay firm and not leave the faith. It exhorts the diaspora Jews to stay firm in their faith as they live in a culture not their own. The ironic thing is it does this in the language and form of the surrounding culture because that is all the audience understood. It is a practical appeal that one’s learning should have an impact on one’s moral life. It’s a reminder that we can’t just keep all this stuff as head knowledge – we are called to live it out.
Outline
1:1 – 11:1 In praise of wisdom
11:2 – 19:22 God’s Fidelity to his people in the Exodus. This part of the book is a retelling of the nation’s history in an attempt to explore who God is. Remember – the people are in exile, the Temple is long gone. All the stories they have are connected to the land and to the temple – that’s how they knew God. Who is God now? And is any of that old history still relevant?