Wisdom

The Book of Wisdom — Liber Sapientiae in the Vulgate, also called the Wisdom of Solomon — is the second of the wisdom books unique to the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament. Like Tobit, Sirach, Judith, Baruch, and the books of Maccabees, it is a deuterocanonical book: read in the Church since the earliest centuries, embedded in the Septuagint and the Vulgate, and definitively defined as canonical Scripture by the Council of Trent (1546). It does not appear in most Protestant Bibles.

Though written in the voice of Solomon, the book is the work of an anonymous Hellenistic Jewish author of Alexandria, almost certainly composed in Greek in the first century BC. The Solomonic voice is a literary device — the inspired author lends his teaching the authority of the wisest king of Israel, much as the Psalms are sung in the voice of David. Modern Catholic scholarship, freed by Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) to read each genre on its own terms, recognizes Wisdom as one of the most theologically advanced books of the Old Testament — a bridge between Hebrew revelation and the Greek world that would receive the Gospel.

The themes of Wisdom are the immortality of the soul, the providential government of the just, the foolishness of idolatry, and Wisdom herself — personified in luminous terms that the Church Fathers read as a foreshadowing of the eternal Logos. “The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them” (3:1) — a sentence that has consoled Christians at funerals for two millennia and is the basis of the antiphon in the burial liturgy. “For God created man incorruptible, and to the image of his own likeness he made him” (2:23) is one of the clearest Old Testament affirmations of the immortality of the soul.

The book's literary structure unfolds in three movements. Chapters 1–6 contrast the destinies of the just and the wicked: the wicked plot against the just man, who through suffering inherits eternal life. Chapters 7–9 are Solomon's encomium of Wisdom — Wisdom is “the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God's majesty, and the image of his goodness” (7:26), a passage Hebrews 1:3 echoes when speaking of Christ. Chapters 10–19 narrate how Wisdom guided Israel from Adam through the Exodus, contrasting the folly of Egypt's idolatry with the saving knowledge given to God's people.

In Catholic life, Wisdom is the Old Testament reading at every Mass for the funeral of the faithful: “The just man, though he be prevented with death, shall be in rest. For venerable old age is not that of long time, nor counted by the number of years” (4:7–8). The Church reads chapter 2 — the wicked plotting against the just man — as a literal prophecy of the Passion. And the personification of Wisdom in chapters 7–9 has shaped the Church's reflection on Christ as the Wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24) since the time of the Greek Fathers.