4.7 Δίκαιος δὲ ἐὰν φθάσῃ τελευτῆσαι, ἐν ἀναπαύσει ἔσται· The “claim” that the just man has died is juxtaposed to his being in “repose,” implying his translation to heavenly status immediately upon death. 4.8 γῆρας γὰρ τίμιον οὐ τὸ πολυχρόνιον οὐδὲ ἀριθμῷ ἐτῶν μεμέτρηται, 4.9 πολιὰ δὲ φρόνησις ἀνθρώποις καὶ ἡλικία γήρως βίος ἀκηλίδωτος. Bodily old age is irrelevant: “prudence is gray hair for men and a blamess life is the time of old age.” Ancient cultures generally were obsessed with antiquity and eldership: the prize they laid upon youthful virility was subordinated to the respect they had for the wisdom assumed to be due to elders. Yet here, the righteous man possesses both youth and the wisdom of age. 4.10 εὐάρεστος θεῷ γενόμενος ἠγαπήθη καὶ ζῶν μεταξὺ ἁμαρτωλῶν μετετέθη· “The one having become well-pleasing to God was loved even though he was living among sinners was translated.” There is almost certainly an allusion in this line to the story of Enoch in LXX Gen 5:24: καὶ εὐηρέστησεν Ενωχ τῷ θεῷ καὶ οὐχ ηὑρίσκετο, ὅτι μετέθηκεν αὐτὸν ὁ θεός, “And Enoch pleased God and was not found, because God translated him” (notice the repetition of εὐαρέσκω and μετατίθημι). In 1 Enoch, there’s not a clear, explicit meaning to this verse beyond Enoch’s heavenly and cosmic journey to the ends of the universe, but in the subsequent Enoch tradition it is interpreted to mean that Enoch became an angel. Likewise, the just man in Wisdom is glorified by translation to heavenly status and life. 4.11 ἡρπάγη, μὴ κακία ἀλλάξῃ σύνεσιν αὐτοῦ ἢ δόλος ἀπατήσῃ ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ. 4.12 βασκανία γὰρ φαυλότητος ἀμαυροῖ τὰ καλά, καὶ ῥεμβασμὸς ἐπιθυμίας μεταλλεύει νοῦν ἄκακον. ἡρπάγη, in the context of heavenly translation, evokes a long history of humans “snatched” by gods in Greco-Roman mythology, typically female (but occasionally male; e.g., Ganymede) lovers made divine by their divine paramours. Wisdom spins the death of the just man, which is coterminous with his heavenly translation, as ultimately for his good, lest cowardice or deceit ruin his good nature, as a philosophical take on the translation tradition—one that might have been appreciable as well to Stoic and Platonic allegorizers of Homeric and Hesiodic myth. The “malice of worthlessness” stands in parallel to the “wavering of desire,” which “mines a mind without evil.” Given that the argument in view here is meant to explain why the just are allowed to die young, the point appears to be that these are afflictions specific to life in the flesh: by dying, the just man escapes the sins he might have committed otherwise. This is Wisdom’s argument; whether we find it compelling or not is up to us. 4.13 τελειωθεὶς ἐν ὀλίγῳ ἐπλήρωσεν χρόνους μακρούς· 4.14 ἀρεστὴ γὰρ ἦν κυρίῳ ἡ ψυχὴ αὐτοῦ, διὰ τοῦτο ἔσπευσεν ἐκ μέσου πονηρίας· The young, short life of the just man killed by the impious is equivalent to having “filled long years.” It is specifically his “soul” that is pleasing to the Lord, and “because of this he hurried from the middle of evil.” Quite literally, he was too good for this world. οἱ δὲ λαοὶ ἰδόντες καὶ μὴ νοήσαντες μηδὲ θέντες ἐπὶ διανοίᾳ τὸ τοιοῦτο, 4.15 ὅτι χάρις καὶ ἔλεος ἐν τοῖς ἐκλεκτοῖς αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐπισκοπὴ ἐν τοῖς ὁσίοις αὐτοῦ. The truth of the just man’s death—that he has in fact been translated to heavenly life—is simply incredible to the “peoples” (λαοὶ). Here, we gain a new way of thinking about the crowd of the “impious” that we have not yet seen: the peoples, that is, the gentile nations. Logically, then, the just man is the stand-in representative for the people of Israel. Why can the peoples not understand such things? “Because grace and mercy are among his elect and oversight among his holy ones.” The special vision of the real truth of things requires divine grace, but this is reserved for God’s “elect” and “holy ones,” the people of Israel—again, not on the grounds of being a special ethnicity but because of their hospitality to Sophia, as the book will go on to clarify. 4.16 κατακρινεῖ δὲ δίκαιος καμὼν τοὺς ζῶντας ἀσεβεῖς καὶ νεότης τελεσθεῖσα ταχέως πολυετὲς γῆρας ἀδίκου· The notion that the righteous who have died young may judge the impious living has a sort of parallel in Herodotus’s report of Solon’s reply to Croesus, that he judges no man blest until he saw that he died well. The point here in any event is that though the impious live long, rich lives in the eyes of the world—the exact thing, by the way, that the biblical book of Proverbs says isn’t supposed to happen—the righteous will nevertheless stand in judgment over them. 4.17 ὄψονται γὰρ τελευτὴν σοφοῦ καὶ οὐ νοήσουσιν τί ἐβουλεύσατο περὶ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς τί ἠσφαλίσατο αὐτὸν ὁ κύριος. Wisdom lays the point on thick: the impious, the peoples, simply cannot understand the meaning of the true meaning of the death of the just. They’re just too dense. 4.18 ὄψονται καὶ ἐξουθενήσουσιν· αὐτοὺς δὲ ὁ κύριος ἐκγελάσεται, The image of the Lord “laughing at” the impious for their misunderstanding immediately recalls the Lord laughing in Psalm 2 at the nations assembled against the Lord and against his anointed. It is hard to miss that the just man bears some similarities to messianic figures in other Jewish texts, though here he is not explicitly depicted as a messiah. That said, the royal conceit of the author’s narrative persona might imply that it’s a messiah he has in mind. 4.19 καὶ ἔσονται μετὰ τοῦτο εἰς πτῶμα ἄτιμον καὶ εἰς ὕβριν ἐν νεκροῖς δι’ αἰῶνος, ὅτι ῥήξει αὐτοὺς ἀφώνους πρηνεῖς καὶ σαλεύσει αὐτοὺς ἐκ θεμελίων, καὶ ἕως ἐσχάτου χερσωθήσονται καὶ ἔσονται ἐν ὀδύνῃ, καὶ ἡ μνήμη αὐτῶν ἀπολεῖται. 4.20 ἐλεύσονται ἐν συλλογισμῷ ἁμαρτημάτων αὐτῶν δειλοί, καὶ ἐλέγξει αὐτοὺς ἐξ ἐναντίας τὰ ἀνομήματα αὐτῶν. The final judgment is detailed at length. Importantly, the impious will be, “after this” (the death of the just man), “for a dishonorable fall and for an outrage among the death through the age.” It is tempting to translate δι’ αἰῶνος indefinitely, but the periodic rejuvenations of the kosmos that Wisdom has insisted on would perhaps seem to suggest that the aeon of the punishment of the wicked might not be eternal, though no explicit restoration of them is described. Wisdom also very clearly, as we’ll see later, affirms metempsychosis, which might imply that the wicked, though they will be destroyed in this life, will enjoy some future opportunity to try again.
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