1.1 Ἀγαπήσατε δικαιοσύνην, οἱ κρίνοντες τὴν γῆν, φρονήσατε περὶ τοῦ κυρίου ἐν ἀγαθότητι καὶ ἐν ἁπλότητι καρδίας ζητήσατε αὐτόν. Wisdom opens with three imperatives: “love,” “think,” and “seek.” “Love justice,” “think about the Lord,” and “seek him.” The priority of loving justice over thinking about the Lord or seeking him emphasizes the higher importance of δικαιοσύνη over εὐσεβεία: intimacy with God is predicated on one’s prior commitment to justice. Appropriate mindfulness of the Lord takes place in the “goodness” such love of justice engenders. One can then seek him in “simplicity of heart,” with true earnest. 1.2 ὅτι εὑρίσκεται τοῖς μὴ πειράζουσιν αὐτόν, ἐμφανίζεται δὲ τοῖς μὴ ἀπιστοῦσιν αὐτῷ. “Because he is found by those not trying him, and he appears to those not unfaithful to him.” Again: God cannot be found without prior rectification of life, and makes himself manifest to those who have already become faithful to God’s commands. 1.3 σκολιοὶ γὰρ λογισμοὶ χωρίζουσιν ἀπὸ θεοῦ, δοκιμαζομένη τε ἡ δύναμις ἐλέγχει τοὺς ἄφρονας. What it means to be unfaithful to God is parsed in terms of the inner life of the mind and folly. The “crooked calculations” of the “foolish” or “senseless” ones are the substance of impiety. The verb ἐλέγχει signals a conception of God’s reproof of fools as a rhetorical act. 1.4 ὅτι εἰς κακότεχνον ψυχὴν οὐκ εἰσελεύσεται σοφία οὐδὲ κατοικήσει ἐν σώματι κατάχρεῳ ἁμαρτίας. The parallelism between the previous verse’s insistence that σκολιοὶ γὰρ λογισμοὶ χωρίζουσιν ἀπὸ θεοῦ and this verse’s insistence that σοφία, Wisdom—henceforth Sophia to distinguish her from the book’s English name—will not come into a “soul of ill-intent” nor “settle in a body indebted to sin,” sets up the major theological, cosmological, and anthropological idea of the treatise: Sophia is the go-between for God, world, and self. The prior necessity of justice and right-living is rooted in this intermediary role: thinking about the Lord in goodness, pursuing him, finding him, and being recipient to his appearance is equivalent to Sophia entering the soul and body, but Sophia will only do this if soul and body have been sufficiently morally purified. 1.5 ἅγιον γὰρ πνεῦμα παιδείας φεύξεται δόλον καὶ ἀπαναστήσεται ἀπὸ λογισμῶν ἀσυνετῶν καὶ ἐλεγχθήσεται ἐπελθούσης ἀδικίας. πνεῦμα is translated into Latin as spiritus, whence the English “spirit.” At the time of Wisdom’s composition in the late first century BCE, probably in Alexandria, the dominant philosophical school was Stoicism, with the dogmatic revival of Platonism under Antiochus of Ascalon only still just underway and largely incorporating Stoic thought. The Stoics divided their philosophy into three sections, ethics, logic, and physics, of the third of which theology, study of the divine, was the highest form. For the Stoics, only corporeal things—things with three-dimensional extension—really existed: god was the active principle in the cosmos, the body that was hot, fiery spirit, which was also rational λόγος, and matter was the passive principle. God was thus equivalent to the world soul, and the universe a rational animal, its material component God’s body. Education and embrace of the philosophical life, the Stoics thought, helped a person conform their life to the divine by conforming to the rational structure of the universe. The Platonists agreed, inspired by Socrates’ Platonic comment in Theaetetus 172c2-177c2 that humans should assimilate to god. The holy spirit “of education,” παιδεία, secures the connection here. Yet “the holy spirit” in Wisdom should not be confused for the Christian “Holy Spirit.” 1.6 φιλάνθρωπον γὰρ πνεῦμα σοφία. Sophia is here equated with πνεῦμα, specifically the “holy spirit of education,” and that holy spirit is “philanthropic”; this is Hellenistic benefactor language. καὶ οὐκ ἀθῳώσει βλάσφημον ἀπὸ χειλέων αὐτοῦ. “And she does not hold guiltless the blasphemer from his lips.” ὅτι τῶν νεφρῶν αὐτοῦ μάρτυς ὁ θεὸς καὶ τῆς καρδίας αὐτοῦ ἐπίσκοπος ἀληθὴς καὶ τὴς γλώσσης ἀκουστής. God as the “witness” evokes Hellenistic language. God as the “witness” of the kidneys, the “true overseer” of the heart, is malaphoric, mixing the biblical metaphor of priestly superintendence over kidneys and other viscera in sacrificial activity (also applied to God in the Prophets and Psalms) with a common office in the Hellenistic city. God is also the “hearer of the tongue.” 1.7 ὅτι πνεῦμα κυρίου πεπλήρωκεν τὴν οἰκουμένην, καὶ τὸ συνέχον τὰ πάντα γνῶσιν ἔχει φωνῆς. The concept of the οἰκουμένη as the “whole inhabited world” of Greek civilization or as the “whole inhabited world” of human habitation generally is also a Hellenistic conception of human civilization. Sophia is here the “spirit of the Lord” who “has filled the οἰκουμένη,” and this is provided as the explanation for 1.6’s assertion that Sophia does not exonerate blasphemers and God is the true hearer of the tongue. There is nowhere someone can go where God cannot hear them. 1.8 διὰ τοῦτο φθεγγόμενος ἄδικα οὐδεὶς μὴ λάθῃ, οὐδὲ μὴ παροδεύσῃ αὐτὸν ἐλέγχουσα ἡ δίκη. “Because of this no one speaking unjust things escape, nor does judgment reproving pass him by.” δίκη here may be a synonym of δικαιοσύνη, “justice,” but it could also be profitably distinguished as “judgment,” referring back to its original meaning of a court case or trial. 1.9 ἐν γὰρ διαβουλίοις ἀσεβοῦς ἐξέτασις ἔσται, λόγων δὲ αὐτοῦ ἀκοὴ πρὸς κύριον ἥξει εἰς ἔλεγχον ἀνομημάτων αὐτοῦ· The oratorical/legal/judicial/educational context of the metaphorical role of Sophia in relationship to human beings imagines the reproof of the impious in the context of “deliberations” (διαβουλίοις), and the presentation of his heard words to the Lord as a “reproof” or “reproach” of his misdeeds. 1.10 ὅτι οὖς ζηλώσεως ἀκροᾶται τὰ πάντα, καὶ θροῦς γογγυσμῶν οὐκ ἀποκρύπτεται. Since Sophia, the spirit, has filled all things, she also hears all things. 1.11 Φυλάξασθε τοίνυν γογγυσμὸν ἀνωφελῆ καὶ ἀπὸ καταλαλιᾶς φείσασθε γλώσσης· The text shifts from its explanatory view of the relationship between Sophia and the kosmos to its didactic, instructional purpose: the first step in coming to love justice and therefore drawing close to God is to guard the tongue from “destructive grumbling” and slander. ὅτι φθέγμα λαθραῖον κενὸν οὐ πορεύσεται, στόμα δὲ καταψευδόμενον ἀναιρεῖ ψυχήν. The power of the tongue to destroy the soul (ψυχή) should not be too quickly metaphorized. 1.12 μὴ ζηλοῦτε θάνατον ἐν πλάνῃ ζωῆς ὑμῶν μηδὲ ἐπισπᾶσθε ὄλεθρον ἐν ἔργοις χειρῶν ὑμῶν· This verse transitions the reader’s attention away from evil speech to evil deeds, which bring death through the error of life (θάνατον ἐν πλάνῃ ζωῆς) and attract destruction (ἐπισπᾶσθε ὄλεθρον). Is the implication that Sophia, who has brought the report of evil speech to God for reproof, now metes out divine judgment on the evildoer as well through death and destruction? The issue is complicated by the following verses. 1.13 ὅτι ὁ θεὸς θάνατον οὐκ ἐποίησεν οὐδὲ τέρπεται ἐπ’ ἀπωλείᾳ ζώντων. God neither created death nor delights in the destruction of the living. The earnest reader of the Hebrew Bible will sometimes get a vision of God that corresponds to this basic sentiment, but this theology certainly stands in contrast to some strands of earlier Israelite, Judahite, and Jewish theology which envision the deity as active rather than passive in judgment and giddy rather than reluctant to mete out destruction to his enemies. 1.14 ἔκτισεν γὰρ εἰς τὸ εἶναι τὰ πάντα, καὶ σωτήριοι αἱ γένεσεις τοῦ κόσμου, καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν αὐταῖς φάρμακον ὀλέθρου οὔτε ᾅδου βασίλειον ἐπὶ γῆς. “For he created all things so that they would be, and the becomings of the kosmos are preservative, and there is not in them a poison of destruction nor a palace of Hades on earth.” My sense is that this verse is often intentionally mistranslated to avoid some of its direct implications—specifically, that the γένεσεις, plural, of the kosmos are preservative or delivering. One can take this as implying multiple principles of “becoming” (singular) of the universe that are all contemporaneous with one another, or one can take it in its more basic, straightforward sense as implying numerous births or becomings of the universe. Given the cyclical cosmology that was common in much Greek philosophy, particularly the Stoicism that predominated in Alexandria and that has already appeared in the text through the description of Sophia as a πνεῦμα, it is almost certainly the case that the latter is in view. God created (singular) all things so that they might exist, and the periodic rejuvenations of the kosmos are “preservative” or “delivering,” keeping all things in existence. Σώτηρ was a frequent honorific applied to Hellenistic kings in view of their preservation of state and, metaphorically, of cosmos, particularly the Ptolemies (who adopted the office and regalia of pharaoh). In the essence of things there is no drug of destruction or “palace of Hades” on earth, which may in fact be a joke about the dearth of temples to the underworld deity, Hades, in Greek antiquity by comparison to other cults. 1.15 δικαιοσύνη γὰρ ἀθάνατός ἐστιν. Here “justice” acquires a cosmic and divine, not merely human, significance. The suggestion that there is no death inherent in the generative principles or re-becomings of the universe, in the world as God creates the world, and that “justice is immortal,” implies that it is God’s justice which keeps the world in existence and preserves it in being. Why love justice? Why cultivate justice before drawing near to God? Justice is what God himself does. 1.16 Ἀσεβεῖς δὲ ταῖς χερσὶν καὶ τοῖς λόγοις προσεκαλέσαντο αὐτόν, φίλον ἡγησάμενοι αὐτὸν ἐτάκησαν καὶ συνθήκην ἔθεντο πρὸς αὐτόν, ὅτι ἄξιοί εἰσιν τῆς ἐκείνου μερίδος εἶναι. αὐτόν refers back to death. The “impious” (ἀσεβεῖς) called death forth (προσκαλέω) into the kosmos by their hands (that is, the evil deeds of their hands) and by their words, taking him to be their friend, making a covenant with him, and being worthy of his “portion,” that is to say, non-existence.
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