Chapter XII.
The Wisdom of Solomon.
Somewhat more than a century after Jesus Ben Sira’s work, came an answer to his prayer, not from above but from beneath, in the so-called “Psalter of Solomon.” This is no wisdom book, and need not detain us. It is mainly a hash—one may say a mess—made up out of the Psalms; and though some of the allusions, apparently to Pompey and others, may possess value in other connexions, the work need only be mentioned here as an indication of the fate which Solomon met at the hands of Jahvism. The name of the Wisest of his race on this vulgar production is like the doggerel on Shakespeare’s tomb, and the fling at England’s greatest poet written on the tomb of his daughter,—“Wise to salvation was good Mistriss Hall,” etc.
Before passing, it may be remarked that the obvious allusions to Christ in this Psalter seem clearly spurious, and for one I cannot regard as other than a late interpolation verse 24 of Psalter-Psalm xvii.: “Behold, O God, and raise up unto them their king, the Son of David, in the time which thou, O God, knowest, that he may reign over Israel thy servant.” There is nothing in the literature of the time before or after that would warrant the concession to this ranting Salvationist (B. C. 70–60) of an idea which would then have been original. The verse has the accent of a Second Adventist a century later. The title “Son of David” occurs even in the New Testament but sixteen times.
The Psalter is in spirit thoroughly Jahvist, narrow, hard, without one ray of Solomonic wisdom or wit. It may fairly be regarded as the sepulchre of the wise man whose name it bears (though not in its text). Jahvism has here triumphed over the whole cult of Wisdom.
But Solomon is not to rest there. He is again evoked, though not yet in his ancient secular greatness, by the next work that claims our attention.
This last of the Wisdom Books bears the heading “Wisdom of Solomon” (Sophia Solomontos) and gives unmistakable identifications of the King, though herein also the name “Solomon” appears only in the title. Perhaps the writer may have wished to avoid exciting the ridicule or resentment of the Solomonists by plainly connecting the name of their founder with a retractation of all the secularism and the heresies anciently associated with him. The aristocratic Sadducees, who believed not in immortality, derived their name from Solomon’s famous chaplain, Zadok.
This “Wisdom of Solomon” probably appeared not far from the first year of our era. It is written in almost classical Greek, is full of striking and poetic interpretations and spiritualisations of Jewish legends, and transfused with a piety at once warm and mystical. Solomon is summoned much in the way that the “Wandering Jew,” Ahasuerus, is called up in Shelley’s “Prometheus,” yet not quite allegorically, to testify concerning the Past, and concerning the mysteries of the invisible world. He has left behind his secularist Proverbs and his worldly wisdom; but though he now rises as a prophet of otherworldliness, not a word is uttered inconsistent with his having been a saint from the beginning, albeit “chastised” and “proved.” In fact he gives his spiritual autobiography, which is that of a Son of God wise and “undefiled” from childhood. His burden is to warn the kings and judges of the world of the blessedness that awaits the righteous,—the misery that awaits the unrighteous,—beyond the grave.
The work impresses me as having been written by one who had long been an enthusiastic Solomonist, but who had been spiritually revolutionised by attaining the new belief of immortality. It does not appear as if the apparition of Solomon was to this writer a simple imagination. Solomon seems to be alive, or rather as if never dead. “For thou (God) hast power of life and death: thou leadest to the gates of Hades, and bringest up again.” “The giving heed unto her (Wisdom’s) laws is the assurance of incorruption; and incorruption maketh us near unto God: therefore the desire of Wisdom bringeth to a Kingdom.”