The Origins According to the Wisdom of Solomon

Abstract

The purpose of these pages is to show the importance and meaning which, in his reflection, the author of Wisdom of Solomon attaches to the origins. To put the question more clearly, what role does recalling the origins have in the argumentation of this author? It is evident that throughout his book he refers to what happened in the beginning. Already in the first pages of his book, he appeals to the divine plan when God created all things (Wis 1:13-14; 2:23). Then his presentation of the wise man is inspired by the biblical tradition concerning the first wise man in Israel, Solomon (Wis 7:1-21; 8:2-21), whose famous prayer pronounced at Gibeon forms the basis of a re-reading or relecture (Wis 9). Finally, the second half of the book (Wis 10–19) is a re-reading of the Exodus events, introduced by a brief reminder of the great figures of Genesis. My purpose is not to recall all this1, but to show how three kinds of beginning belong together. In other words, the origins of the world and humanity, the constitutive origin of Israel during the Exodus, and biblical wisdom’s origin in the figure of Solomon are not three separate themes, independent from one another, but all of them together form the basic argumentation of the author of Wis. It is then this argumentation which concerns me in the present article. Such a study has no sense unless, at the level of historical criticism, we can assert the unity of the book, directly written in Greek by only one author. On this point, recent commentators agree, even if they disagree about the literary genre of the book. A majority of them acknowledges the “epideictic” genre of the Greek rhetoric, but for some of them, following J.M. Reese2, Wis is a “protreptic”, whereas for others, like myself, it is an “encomium”, a eulogy. Let me also add that, according to our author, history includes the first pages of the Bible. The creation narratives of Gen 1–3 and even Gen 1–11 are for him as historical as the narratives about the Patriarchs, the Exodus or Solomon.