3.1 Δικαίων δὲ ψυχαὶ ἐν χειρὶ θεοῦ, καὶ οὐ μὴ ἅψηται αὐτῶν βάσανος. That it is the “souls” (ψυχαὶ) of the just, but not the bodies, that are in the hand of God says something about the psychology, anthropology, and cosmology of the author of Wisdom. For him, the human being is principally spiritual or psychic, and only secondarily bodily; or, alternatively, the body that matters in the eyes of God is the body that the spirit or soul is (assuming a Stoic cosmology). 3.2 ἔδοξαν ἐν ὀφθαλμοῖς ἀφρόνων τεθνάναι, καὶ ἐλογίσθη κάκωσις ἡ ἔξοδος αὐτῶν 3.3 καὶ ἡ ἀφ’ ἡμῶν πορεία σύντριμμα, οἱ δέ εἰσιν ἐν εἰρήνῃ. Despite the false vision of the foolish (ἀφρόνων), the righteous who have died (τεθνάναι) are not really dead: they are, on the contrary (οἱ δέ), in peace. A similar vision is given in 1 Enoch 22, when Enoch sees a cave in the mountain of the dead where the souls of the righteous dead are kept in a state of peace and refreshment. This testifies to the fact that Hellenistic-era Judaism had internalized a positive afterlife for the righteous and had various ways of understanding it. Whether such beliefs preexisted the Hellenistic era are disputed, but our archaeological evidence of burial practices among Ancient Israelites and Judahites, our biblical authors’ distaste for consultation with the dead, and our knowledge of afterlife beliefs among Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Persians of the era all imply that such ideas probably existed in some form or another prior to Hellenistic invasion, even if they were certainly more popular afterwards. Note that in Wisdom, there is no distinctive moment of resurrection: what seems like death to the eyes of the foolish is actually translation to postmortem bliss. 3.4 καὶ γὰρ ἐν ὄψει ἀνθρώπων ἐὰν κολασθῶσιν, ἡ ἐλπὶς αὐτῶν ἀθανασίας πλήρης· This verse confirms the immediacy of translation: “For even if in the eyes of men they are punished, their hope is full of immortality.” In other words, manifest suffering is coextensive with glorification. 3.5 καὶ ὀλίγα παιδευθέντες μεγάλα εὐεργετηθήσονται, ὅτι ὁ θεὸς ἐπείρασεν αὐτοὺς καὶ εὗρεν αὐτοὺς ἀξίους ἑαυτοῦ· εὐεργετηθήσονται is benefaction language, implying that the righteous are recipients of divine benefaction though they have not received such from the human rulers that have made them suffer. The verse introduces the idea that the sufferings of the righteous has a pedagogical (παιδευθέντες) value for them, by which God has “tested” (ἐπείρασεν) them and “found them worthy of himself” (εὗρεν αὐτοὺς ἀξίους ἑαυτοῦ). This also forecloses the notion that the adversarial Death in view in Wisdom is bodily.1 Instead, it is the death of the soul that occurs through human election of evil speech, evil deeds, and evil thoughts. The periodic creations of the universe imply the instability of the material world and its need for regular rejuvenation by God; the immortality for which the human being is created is not an immortal body of flesh but an immortal soul or immortal body of spiritual matter. In fact, God freely makes use of bodily suffering and death in order to test and prove the just. 3.6 ὡς χρυσὸν ἐν χωνευτηρίῳ ἐδοκίμασεν αὐτοὺς καὶ ὡς ὁλοκάρπωμα θυσίας προσεδέξατο αὐτούς. This is the language of cult and sacrificial instruments, which picks up on a tradition already extant by the late first century BCE in Jewish literature of understanding martyrdom as a kind of expiatory sacrificial offering; the same idea occurs in Deutero-Isaiah, in Daniel, in 1-2 Maccabees, and will obviously become important to the New Testament later on. If David Winston is right that the book was actually authored during the time of Caligula around 40 CE, the context for thinking about a martyrdom as in some sense an expiatory sacrifice is even clearer.2 3.7 καὶ ἐν καιρῷ ἐπισκοπῆς αὐτῶν ἀναλάμψουσιν καὶ ὡς σπινθῆρες ἐν καλάμῃ διαδραμοῦνται· 3.8 κρινοῦσιν ἔθνη καὶ κρατήσουσιν λαῶν, καὶ βασιλεύσει αὐτῶν κύριος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. There is a long-lived debate in scholarship around whether Wisdom envisions an eschatological, sarkic resurrection of the dead or an eschatological, heavenly rule of the just over the nations. I side very much with the second position. Wisdom’s overall attitude towards the material body makes it impossible to envision that the book would look forward to or celebrate a reunion of soul and flesh. Moreover, this prediction, that “in the time of their visitation” or “oversight” (think again back to the use of ἐπισκόπος and ἐπισκοπή to this point in the book) they “will shine and like sparks in stubble will they run through,” and at that time they “will judge the nations and rule the peoples, and the Lord will be king over them for the ages” does not require that these actions take place on earth. More to the point, they seem to clearly evoke not the fleshy sort of resurrection in, say, Ezekiel 37 but the Book of Daniel, where the ascension of the Son of Man and his reception of an eternal, universal kingdom is interpreted as the vindication and exaltation of the “holy ones” of the people of Israel (Dan 7:9-14) and the resurrection imagined is from the dust of the earth to shine like the stars (Dan 12:1-3), implying astral immortality, not fleshy reconstitution. This appears to be a sapiential eschaton in which, at some point in the future, the righteous dead will, from their new, heavenly abode (where they “shine”), take ownership of the nations. The hope for heavenly translation to divine or angelic existence over against fleshy resurrection was common in Hellenistic Judaism. Pseudo-Phocylides writes that “we hope that the remains of the departed will soon come to light again out of the earth; and afterward they will become gods” (PsPhoc. 103-104); as it goes on to clarify, the flesh body is ultimately destroyed in this transition. 4 Maccabees is similarly interested in an eschatology of heavenly translation rather than bodily resurrection (4 Macc 9:8; 13:17; 16:25; 17:18-19). 3.9 οἱ πεποιθότες ἐπ’ αὐτῷ συνήσουσιν ἀλήθειαν, καὶ οἱ πιστοὶ ἐν ἀγαπῃ προσμενοῦσιν αὐτῷ· ὅτι χάρις καὶ ἔλεος τοῖς ἐκλεκτοῖς αὐτοῦ. Trust/fidelity, love, abiding, grace, mercy, and the concept of those chosen as a description of the just all appear here in a combination that anticipates later Christian formulae.
See M. Kolarcik, The Ambiguity of Death in the Book of Wisdom 1-6 (AnBib 127; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1991).
David Winston, The Book of Wisdom (AB 43; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979).