The Wisdom of Solomon: The Righteous Man They Planned to Kill

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Not Solomon. An unknown Jewish teacher who wrote in fine Greek, almost certainly in Alexandria in Egypt, and spoke in Solomon’s voice.

When: Probably between about 50 BC and AD 40, so in the generation before my birth or in my own lifetime.

Where it fits: It speaks as Solomon, the king who asked God for wisdom (1 Kings 3), and retells the Exodus. It was written for Jews living among Greeks in Egypt under Roman rule.

Which Bibles keep it: Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Protestant Bibles moved it to the Apocrypha, and most later dropped it.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Its plot against the righteous man who calls God his father is close to the mockers at my cross (Matthew 27:43). Its Wisdom, an effulgence from everlasting light, lies behind Hebrews 1:3 and the Word of John 1. Paul’s argument about idols in Romans 1 follows chapters 13 and 14.

How close it stays to me: Close on the poor, the widow and the powerful judged. Far in calling a whole people accursed from birth.

If you only read three chapters: Wisdom 2, Wisdom 3 and Wisdom 7.

Words to Know

Wisdom — in this book, more than good sense. It is pictured as a woman who sits beside God’s throne, made the world with him, and comes to live in good people. In Greek, Sophia.

Alexandria — the great Greek city in Egypt, founded by Alexander the Great, home in my time to the largest Jewish community outside the land of Israel.

Immortality — not dying. This book teaches that the souls of the righteous live on with God.

Hades — the Greek name for the place of the dead.

The Book in Brief

The book falls into three parts.

Chapters 1 to 5 contrast the righteous and the ungodly. The book opens by telling the rulers of the earth to love justice. In chapter 2 the ungodly speak: life is short and ends in nothing, so let us enjoy ourselves, crush the poor and the widow, and kill the righteous man who shames us by calling God his father. Chapter 3 answers them: the souls of the righteous are in God’s hand, and only seem to die. In chapter 5 the ungodly see the righteous man in glory at the judgment and confess they were wrong.

Chapters 6 to 9 are spoken by Solomon. He tells kings to seek wisdom, says he was born like every other human being, describes how he loved wisdom and asked for her, praises her as the breath of God’s power and the reflection of eternal light, and prays for her to be sent to him.

Chapters 10 to 19 trace wisdom through history, from Adam to the Exodus. Then the book compares how God punished the Egyptians with how he cared for Israel, and in chapters 13 to 15 mocks the worship of nature and of idols, showing how idol-making began and what evils followed. It ends with the plagues of Egypt and the crossing of the sea, with creation itself fighting for the righteous.

Listen to them talk. These are the ungodly in chapter 2, and they are speaking about a man who stands in their way.

He professes to have knowledge of God, And names himself servant of the Lord … And he vaunts that God is his father (Wisdom 2:13, 16).

Let us see if his words be true, And let us try what shall befall in the ending of his life. For if the righteous man is God’s son, he will uphold him, And he will deliver him out of the hand of his adversaries (Wisdom 2:17–18).

With outrage and torture let us put him to the test … Let us condemn him to a shameful death (Wisdom 2:19–20).

Now read what Matthew says the priests and elders said as they stood at my cross. He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now, if he wants him; for he said, ‘I am the Son of God’ (Matthew 27:43).

You can see why Christians loved this book. It was written before me. It is not about me by name; it is about every righteous man the powerful have found inconvenient. But Matthew, who knew it or knew words like it, heard it at Golgotha.

Solomon did not write it

The book speaks in Solomon’s voice. You did choose me before my kindred to be king of your people … You gave command to build a sanctuary in your holy mountain (Wisdom 9:7–8). That is Solomon, the king who built the first Temple.

But Solomon lived nearly a thousand years before this book was written. Its Greek is polished and full of the words of Greek philosophy. Its writer uses the Greek translation of the scriptures, and may never have read them in Hebrew. Almost every scholar places him in Alexandria, among the great Jewish community of Egypt, in the generation before me or in my own.¹

Even the early Christians knew it was not Solomon’s. An old list of the books read in the church at Rome, from around the year 200, includes this book among the books of the New Testament, and says it was written by friends of Solomon in his honor.²

Go deeperA Jew writing to Greeks, and to Jews among Greeks

Alexandria in my time held half a million people or more, and Jews were one of its largest communities. They spoke Greek. Their scriptures had been translated into Greek there, in the Septuagint. Some of them, like the philosopher Philo, born a little before me, wrote long books explaining the law of Moses in the language of Plato.³

That world is all over this book. It speaks of the four great virtues of the Greek philosophers: self-control, understanding, justice and courage (Wisdom 8:7). It says God made the world out of formless matter (Wisdom 11:17), a phrase a Greek reader would know. It teaches that the soul can live on after death, a Greek idea that the older Hebrew scriptures rarely state so plainly.

But its purpose is not to become Greek. It is to stay Jewish among Greeks. Its last ten chapters retell the Exodus, the great story of my people leaving Egypt, to Jews who were living in Egypt again. And its long mockery of idols, in chapters 13 to 15, was written for people who walked past Egyptian and Greek temples every day and were tempted to think them grand.

In the year 38, a few years after my death, mobs in Alexandria attacked the Jewish quarter, burned synagogues and killed many. Some scholars think this book was written around that time, under the emperor Caligula, by a man who had seen it come or was living through it.³

What the ungodly say

Go back to chapter 2 and listen to the ungodly before they start plotting. Their speech is the most honest thing in the book.

Short and sorrowful is our life … Because by mere chance were we born, And hereafter we will be as though we had never been (Wisdom 2:1–2). There is nothing after death, so enjoy what you have. Let us fill ourselves with costly wine and perfumes … Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds, before they be withered (Wisdom 2:7–8).

And then, without a pause:

Let us oppress the righteous poor; Let us not spare the widow, Nor reverence the hairs of the old man gray for length of years. But let our strength be to us a law of righteousness; For that which is weak is found to be of no service (Wisdom 2:10–11).

That is the whole creed of the people who have always run the world. Life is short, so take it. The weak are useless. Might makes right. And notice where it leads: from wine and roses straight to the poor, the widow and the old. Pleasure for the few is paid for by the weak.

Then they turn on the righteous man, because he is of disservice to us, And is contrary to our works (Wisdom 2:12). He is bad for business. His life shames theirs. So they decide to kill him.

I knew men like that. They ran the Temple and they governed for Rome. They found me of disservice, and they did what this book says they would do.

The souls of the righteous

The book’s answer comes in chapter 3, and you may have heard it at a funeral.

But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, And no torment will touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died … But they are in peace (Wisdom 3:1–3).

The ungodly said death is the end. The book says: not for the righteous. They only seemed to die. And later, at the judgment, the ungodly will see the righteous man they killed standing in glory and say, too late, that they were the fools (Wisdom 5:1–5).

This is one of the clearest statements before me that the righteous live on with God. When I answered the Sadducees, who said there was no resurrection, I told them God is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Mark 12:27). This book had said something like it already, in Greek, for the Jews of Egypt.

Kings are mortal too

When Solomon begins to speak about himself, the first thing he says is that he is no different from anyone.

I myself also am mortal, like to all … And I also, when I was born, drew in the common air … Uttering, like all, for my first voice, the selfsame wail … For no king had any other first beginning; But all men have one entrance into life, and a like departure (Wisdom 7:1–6).

A king who says he was born crying, like every baby. And he speaks to the rulers of the world like a prophet: your dominion was given you from the Lord … Who will search out your works … For the man of low estate may be pardoned in mercy, But mighty men will be searched out mightily (Wisdom 6:3, 6).

The greater the power, the harder the judgment. I said the same: To whomever much is given, of him will much be required (Luke 12:48).

Wisdom beside the throne

In the middle of the book, Solomon praises Wisdom, and these are some of the most beautiful lines in this volume.

For she is a breath of the power of God, And a clear effluence of the glory of the Almighty … For she is an effulgence from everlasting light, And an unspotted mirror of the working of God, And an image of his goodness (Wisdom 7:25–26).

She sits by God’s throne (Wisdom 9:4). She made all things with him. And from generation to generation passing into holy souls She makes men friends of God and prophets (Wisdom 7:27).

Now read how the letter to the Hebrews begins, speaking of me: His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance (Hebrews 1:3). And how John begins: In the beginning was the Word … All things were made through him (John 1:1, 3).

The first Christians took what this book said about Wisdom and said it about me. I did speak of Wisdom as a person. I said the wisdom of God said, ‘I will send to them prophets and apostles’ (Luke 11:49). But the great hymns to me as God’s eternal Word and radiance are built from books like this one, by people who came after me and reached for the highest language they knew.

Go deeperPaul read this book

Chapters 13 and 14 of Wisdom are a long argument against idols. Its steps are these. People should have known the Creator from the beauty and power of what he made, but they worshipped the things instead (Wisdom 13:1–5). Then they made idols. And the devising of idols was the beginning of fornication (Wisdom 14:12): from false worship come all the other sins, which the book lists one after another (Wisdom 14:22–27).

Now read the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made (Romans 1:20). The people knew God but worshipped images instead, so God gave them up to their passions, and Paul then lists their sins (Romans 1:21–32).

It is the same argument, in the same order. Most scholars think Paul knew this book, or the teaching it contains, well.⁴

Notice what Paul does with it. Wisdom aims its argument at the idol-worshipping nations, to reassure Jews that they were right. In Romans, Paul springs a trap: after his readers have nodded along with the condemnation of the nations, he turns on them in the next chapter and says they do the same things (Romans 2:1). He used this book as the opening move of his own argument about everyone’s guilt.

That argument became one of the foundations of what churches later taught about sin. It is worth knowing that its first half was borrowed from a Jewish book that most Protestants were never allowed to read.

Where Wisdom and I part

The book praises God’s mercy beautifully. For you love all things that are, And abhor none of the things which you did make; For never would you have formed anything if you did hate it (Wisdom 11:24).

But a chapter later, it says the opposite about the peoples who lived in the land before Israel. It accuses them of child sacrifice and cannibalism, and says God destroyed them slowly, Not being ignorant that their nature by birth was evil, and their wickedness inborn … For they were a seed accursed from the beginning (Wisdom 12:10–11).

A whole people, evil by birth, accursed from the beginning. That sentence cannot stand next to the one before it. If God abhors none of the things he made, no people is accursed from birth. And that same kind of sentence, written about other peoples, has been used for two thousand years to justify killing them, including, again and again, my own people.

I told a story in which the hero was a Samaritan, from a people my listeners thought accursed. I would not have written chapter 12.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Wisdom 2:12–20, then Matthew 27:39–43.

You will find: the righteous man who calls God his father, tested with outrage and torture to see if God will deliver him, and the mockers at my cross saying, Let God deliver him now.

Then read Wisdom 2:10–11, the creed of the ungodly, and Wisdom 11:24 beside Wisdom 12:10–11.

The Short Version

• Wisdom was written in Greek, in Alexandria, by a Jewish teacher speaking as Solomon, in the generation before me or in my lifetime.
• Its ungodly say life ends in nothing, so oppress the poor and the widow and kill the righteous man who calls God his father. Matthew heard that at my cross.
• It answers that the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.
• Its Wisdom, the breath of God’s power and reflection of eternal light, is the language the first Christians used for me.
• Paul borrowed its argument against idols for Romans 1.
• It loves all God made, then calls a whole people accursed from birth. That is where it leaves me.