This is the first time that I have read The Wisdom of Solomon and Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach. After reading just the chapters mentioned in the title of this blog, I see somethings that are very similar to scripture in these books, and thought they might be good. But after quickly doing some research on sites that I know and trust, such as gotquestions.org, I understood why they are not in the canon of scripture. I will put links to the gotquestions.org articles for these two books as recommended reading.
The Wisdom of Solomon 1-11
The first thing that caught my attention in the Wisdom of Solomon were the verses of 2:12-20. It starts off with men planning to “lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to” them, and towards the end they plan to “test him with insult and torture,” and they want to “condemn him to a shameful death.” The middle section tells us why these men want to do this, “He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange.” “…he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father.” The righteous man reminds me of Jesus, just from the way they describe him, and their own planning and scheming reminds me of the Sanhedrin, who wanted to kill Jesus.
The following chapters talk about the righteous verses the unrighteous. There is even mention of one being so righteous that God took him away early, which reminds me of Enoch who “walked with God; then he was not there because God took him” at the age of 365 (Genesis 5:21-24). After reading these chapters, I believe that the “righteous man” of chapter 2 is not necessarily one person, and therefore not a prophecy of Christ. Though, I have no doubt that the New Testament authors would have pointed to this as a prophecy if it were scripture, and they probably would have joined it to the suffering servant passage of Isaiah 53. These chapters of the Wisdom of Solomon do talk about God protecting His righteous followers, which He does at times, but we also know that sometimes He does not.
Chapter 6 talks about wisdom. Verses 17-19 stick out the most to me. “The beginning of wisdom is the most sincere desire for instruction, and concern for instruction is love of her, and love of her is the keeping of her laws, and giving heed to her laws is assurance of immortality, and immortality brings one near to God.” While this kind of sounds like Proverbs 1:7 “The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and discipline,” I wonder if it is not more like the mystery religions, with secret knowledge and the idea that the more wisdom you gain, the more like God you can become; which is what Satan tempted Eve with back in Genesis 3:5. I only say this because the writer starts with wisdom instead of with God. However, the writer does then tell monarchs to seek wisdom, which is good advice in general, aside from being tied to the mystery religion.
Chapter 10 and the first verse or so of chapter 11 mention interactions with wisdom and certain individuals. There is only one person so leaves wisdom, and it hurts him, while the rest stay with wisdom and are helped. These individuals are not named, but if you know Genesis and Exodus, then you know who they are.
The Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach 44-51
There is not much to say about these chapters from this work. The writer starts by leading us into “praise [for] famous men, and our fathers in their generations” ([] mine). Then follows a recounting of some of the peoples, along with a paraphrase of their story. We start with Enoch, then jump to Noah, then Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to Moses and Aaron, then Phinehas, then Joshua and Caleb, jumping to the judges and Samuel, then David and Nathan, Solomon, and Rehoboam. As we read, we also notice that we get more and more detail in the commentary/paraphrase as we go through the history. This makes sense in light of the fact that we get more detail in pages of scripture as well. The next in line is Elijah and Elisha, Hezekiah and Sennacherib (who was the king of Assyria), Josiah, then Ezekiel, Jeshua, and Nehemiah. Then special honor is given to Enoch, Joseph, Shem, Seth and Adam.
To be honest, I found all of that rather boring. Possibly because my major is in the Old Testament, and these were all stories that I have known from my youth. However, the last chapter (51) was better. In this chapter, the writer gives praise and thanks to God. It kind of sounds like some of the praise Psalms, especially of David. All in all, based on these chapters, I would say that they writer of the Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach had a deep and abiding knowledge of and love for the Old Testament.
Recommended Reading
