2.12 ἐνεδρεύσωμεν τὸν δίκαιον, ὅτι δύσχρηστος ἡμῖν ἐστιν καὶ ἐναντιοῦσται τοῖς ἔργοις ἡμῶν καὶ ὀνειδίζει ἡμῖν ἁμαρτήματα νόμου καὶ ἐπιφημίζει ἡμῖν ἁμαρτήματα παιδείας ἡμῶν· The just person is here the mouthpiece of Sophia, and that is why the impious desire his destruction. 2.13 ἐπαγγέλλεται γνῶσιν ἔχειν θεοῦ καὶ παῖδα κυρίου ἑαυτὸν ὀνομάζει· One can hear a bit of an indignant tone here over the idea that the righteous claims “to have knowledge of God” and names himself παῖδα κυρίου. παῖδα here can carry the connotation either of “child” or, just as often, of “slave.” Biblically, one cannot help but think of figures like Moses, Elijah, or the anonymous prophet of Deutero-Isaiah, but classically, the figure sounds almost Socratic, claiming to be serving God in his ministry of reproving the deeds and thoughts of the impious, as clarified in 2.12 and 2.14. Socrates, similarly, claimed to be fulfilling the call of the god Apollo in response to the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement of him the wisest man on earth. 2.14 ἐγένετο ἡμῖν εἰς ἔλεγχον ἐννοιῶν ἡμῶν, βαρύς ἐστιν ἡμῖν καὶ βλεπόμενος, 2.15 ὅτι ἀνόμοιος τοῖς ἄλλοις ὁ βίος αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐξηλλαγμέναι αἱ τρίβοι αὐτοῦ· The notion that philosophy would make one an outlier in cultural norms was common, as was the recognition in the Greek world that Jews were a distinctive people among the Near Eastern societies that the Greeks conquered for their alternative lifestyle. The rhetorical figure of the just man here could feasibly be a stand-in for either cultural precedent. 2.16 εἰς κίβδηλον ἐλογίσθημεν αὐτῷ, καὶ ἀπέχεται τῶν ὁδῶν ἡμῶν ὡς ἀπὸ ἀκαθαρσιῶν· μακαρίζει ἔσχατα δικαίων καὶ ἀλαζονεύεται πατέρα θεόν. The idea that the just man “brags that his father is God” is the perspective of the impious, not the author of Wisdom. His “blessing” the last things of the just and calling upon God as father may well refer to Hellenistic synagogal prayers that included such material. Given Wisdom’s overall view of Israel’s relationship to the surrounding nations, especially in the Diaspora, identification of the just man as the nation in miniature is likely right. 2.17 ἴδωμεν εἰ οἱ λόγοι αὐτοῦ ἀληθεῖς, καὶ πειράσωμεν τὰ ἐν ἐκβάσει αὐτοῦ· 2.18 εἰ γάρ ἐστιν ὁ δίκαιος υἱὸς θεοῦ, ἀντιλήμψεται αὐτοῦ καὶ ῥύσεται αὐτὸν ἐκ χειρὸς ἀνθεστηκότων. The assumption of the future less vivid conditional here, that if the just man is indeed God’s son, then God will surely intervene to save him, is interesting because neither in Greco-Roman religion nor in Ancient Judaism was such intimacy between God and humanity as a “son of God” could possess thought to provide special exemption from suffering. If anything, sons of Zeus and sons and servants of the biblical god suffer all the more greatly for it (e.g., Herakles). The calculative reasoning of the impious reflects their worldly inebriation with pleasure, not the true state of things. They in fact become the instrument of suffering for the son of God. 2.19 ὕβρει καὶ βασάνῳ ἐτάσωμεν αὐτόν, ἵνα γνῶμεν τὴν ἐπιείκειαν αὐτοῦ καὶ δοκιμάσωμεν τὴν ἀνεξικακίαν αὐτοῦ· βασάνος in this context is inquiry by torture, as in Herodotus Histories 2.88 and 8.110. This is also why they are interested in proving his ἐπιείκια, “equity,” and ἀνεξικακία, “forbearance” or “endurance.” The impious are here implied to hold a position of power in worldly affairs and to be able to subject the righteous to such suffering. 2.20 θανάτῳ ἀσχήμονι καταδικάσωμεν αὐτόν, ἔσται γὰρ αὐτοῦ ἐπισκοπὴ ἐκ λόγων αὐτοῦ. The ἐπισκοπὴ from the words of the just man hearkens back to God’s role as ἐπισκόπος of the heart and hearer of the tongue in an earlier verse, indirectly confirming the filial relationship between God and the just man, who exercises God’s ἐπισκοπή through his separation and reproof of the wicked. 2.21 Ταῦτα ἐλογίσαντο, καὶ ἐπλανήθησαν· ἀπετύφλωσεν γὰρ αὐτοὺς ἡ κακία αὐτῶν, 2.22 καὶ οὐκ ἔγνωσαν μυστήρια θεοῦ οὐδὲ μισθὸν ἤλπισαν ὁσιότητος οὐδὲ ἔκριναν γέρας ψυχῶν ἀμώμων. The “evil” (κακία) of the wicked blinds (ἀπετύφλωσεν) to the “mysteries of God” (μυστήρια θεοῦ) and the “reward…of holiness” (μισθὸν…ὁσιότητος) that is reserved for “blameless souls” (ψυχῶν ἀμώμων). The reward in question will go on to be clarified as eternal, immortal life. Given the context of Wisdom’s composition, the idea of “mysteries of God” which have to do with postmortem immortality cannot fail to have evoked the realities of the various mystery cults that proliferated in the first century BCE and first century CE, particularly those of Isis. Some Hellenistic Jews periodically imagined Judaism in the language of the mystery cult. 2.23 ὅτι ὁ θεὸς ἔκτισεν τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐπ’ ἀφθαρσίᾳ καὶ εἰκόνα τῆς ἰδίας ἀϊδιότητος ἐποίησεν αὐτόν· 2.24 φθόνῳ δὲ διαβόλου θάνατος εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον, πειράζουσιν δὲ αὐτὸν οἱ τῆς ἐκείνου μερίδος ὄντες. The last time we got the construction ὁ θεὸς ἔκτισεν or ἔκτισεν ὁ θεὸς, it was with respect to τὰ πάντα, “all things” or “the universe,” and we were assured that God created them so that they would exist (εἰς τὸ εἶναι) and that their origins (γενεσείς) were “saving” or “preservative” (σωτηρίοι). This was in the context of explaining that the impious invited death into the world through their evil speech and actions, which is why it has no true home in the universe. Here, we are told that the object of God’s creative efforts is the human being (τὸν ἄνθρωπον), that God has made him for incorruption (ἐπ’ ἀφθαρσίᾳ) and that “an image of his own eternity he made him” (εἰκόνα τῆς ἰδίας ἀϊδιότητος ἐποίησεν αὐτόν). This sets up an analogy between the kosmos and the human being: both are created by God, both are created essentially alive, and both become subject to death only through the choice to do evil. Both are also, crucially, created analogously to God, who stands as the origin and first term in this triad (God - world - human). Sophia mediates the triad, not so much as a fourth term within it as the reciprocity between each. Death (θάνατος) entered the kosmos through a διαβόλος. Is this the “Devil”? The NRSVue translates the word as “adversary,” but a long tradition of scholarship has understood this as the first appearance of “the fully fledged figure of the Devil” in a Jewish text.1 As he puts it, “‘Mot/Death is promoted here into the Devil and on him is laid the responsibility for bringing death into existence. The Greek word behind the translation ‘devil’ is diabolos and that translates the Hebrew satan in the LXX. To identify the serpent of Genesis 3 as Satan/the Devil or as the Devil’s agent (the serpent is not explicitly mentioned) and then attribute to him the origin of death is certainly a new move in Jewish mythology.”2 That is to say, Wisdom dovetails the evolving figure of Satan in ancient Jewish literature into a metaphysical explanation for the origin of death in the world.3 If true, this would indeed be the first time that the exegetical moves in question are made in Jewish texts that we’re aware of. That said, Ryan Stokes offers an alternative reading: “It is possible, however, that the diabolos of this verse does not refer to the serpent but to Cain, whose envy of Abel introduced death into the world.”4 This would make more contextual sense, given that the comment comes at the end of an extensive section detailing the plans of the impious to kill the righteous, just as Cain killed Abel, and the text is upbraiding their poor understanding of the reward of the righteous by mistaking the origin and character of death. Jason M. Zurawski also suggests that “[b]y taking for granted that the diabolos must be the devil, commentators, both ancient and modern, have given the devil a place in a text where he does not belong,” since Wisdom’s “worldview has no room for supra-human evil which tempts humanity to do wrong or for an original sin which fundamentally altered the structure of the cosmos and humanity’s place in it.”5 Instead, διαβόλος, which is a relatively late term in the history of Greek usage when used as a substantive, never signifies “some sort of evil, non-human force” in non-Jewish Greek; while it does translate the Hebrew שָׂטָן, often in the sense of the heavenly adversary (not an evil being but the divine inquisitor of the heavenly court), nevertheless “the various translators never used the Greek term to signify an inherently evil, anti-divine force.”6 Diabolos most explicitly becomes “the Devil” in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve and in 3 Baruch 4.8, where the envy (φθόνος) of the Devil deceives the protoplasts into eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowing Good and Evil. But both of these texts postdate Wisdom, and their apocalyptic worldview differs from Wisdom’s sapiential outlook (inclusive of some apocalyptic elements but not others) in multiple ways.7 Most damning for the case, however, that the διαβόλος of Wisdom 2:24 is “the Devil” is the fact that such a character never recurs in the remainder of the book and serves no further role. The more straightforward reading is the one that Zurawski argues at length, which is to see 2:23-24 in parallel to 1:14-16, as I suggest above. Zurawski also offers the intuitive idea that the aorists are meant to be gnomic aorists, present-tense in meaning: God creates all things to exist//God creates humanity for incorruption; the impious summon death by their hands and words//through an adversary’s envy death enters the world; the impious are worthy to be of death’s party are those who, in 2:24b, “belong to death’s party” and “put humanity to the test” (πειράζουσιν).8 Instead, the point is that it is humans who create death through their impiety and injustice, not God, and not the righteous; they do so ignorant of the reward that justice brings, which is the immortality of the soul, which is to say, the natural state of the human being.
A.P. Hayman, “The Survival of Mythology in the Wisdom of Solomon,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 30 (1999), 133.
Hayman, “The Survival of Mythology in the Wisdom of Solomon,” 133 fn. 31.
See Ryan E. Stokes, The Satan: How God’s Executioner Became the Enemy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019).
Stokes, The Satan, 217 fn63.
Jason M. Zurawski, “Separating the Devil from the Diabolos: A Fresh Reading of Wisdom of Solomon 2.24,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 21 (2012), 368.
Zurawski, “Separating the Devil from the Diabolos,” 379.
Zurawski, “Separating the Devil from the Diabolos,” 381-382.
Zurawski, “Separating the Devil from the Diabolos,” 389.