Separating the Devil from the Diabolos: A Fresh Reading of Wisdom of Solomon 2.24

The typical English translation of Wisdom of Solomon 2.24 reads: ‘But through the devil's envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it’ (nrsv). Most scholarship on the passage has taken for granted the devil's place in this text and has understood this verse as one of the first references to the devil as the serpent of the Genesis 3 narrative. Unfortunately, this has given the devil a place in a text where he does not belong. Through philological and textual analyses, this article seeks to give a reading of Wis. 2.24 that is both more congruent to the Greek text and more consistent with the overall worldview of the author. This reading will help to foster greater understanding of such fundamental aspects of this text's ideology as theodicy, soteriology, and its overall conceptions of life and death.