Wisdom and Apocalypticism in the Wisdom of Solomon

If Emerson was correct that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” then the mind of the Wisdom of Solomon's author may be considered both supple and expansive, since an ongoing theme of scholarship on the book has been the effort to reconcile in one way or another its real or seeming inconsistencies. The field has tacitly agreed to categorize the Wisdom of Solomon as a wisdom book, which in some ways seems obvious, not least because of the broad hint offered by its Greek title. Nevertheless, an undercurrent of unease with the common classification has also emerged. In one widely respected collection of essays on Second Temple period texts, the author of the chapter on the Wisdom of Solomon states bluntly that “there is no type of literature in the Bible into which Wisdom as a whole fits,” although the book is, for want of a better location, discussed in the collection's section on wisdom literature. Another scholar does not shrink from saying that it “is clearly a wisdom book,” although he also notes that by “focusing on only one or another aspect of the book, one could make a case for a variety of literary genres.” A third simply comments that the text is “elusive.”