Wisdom of Solomon

Paraclausithyron (literally: weeping before the door) was a motif commonly employed in classical Greek and Latin poetry. Its development is connected with the tradition of the κωµος in which intoxicated men departed from the symposium and went to call upon a potential lover.  Within this theme, the man often arrives at the door only to find that he has been locked out. Pining away with lust, the locked-out lover tries every possible way to persuade his beloved, her guard, or even her door, to allow him entrance. He begs, reasons, weeps, sings, warns, curses, feigns suicide resolves to sleep by the door, and may even resort to violence. Even when the potential lover is eager to open her door, something or someone usually forbids it, as we shall see. Within this motif, the poet can merely refer to or hint at the idea of an excluded lover, or the poet can utilise a more developed form of the motif where he builds an autonomous, dramatic work around the event of the locked-out lover.

Courtney J. P. Friesen explores shifting boundaries of ancient religions by way of the reception of a popular tragedy, Euripides’ Bacchae . As a play staging political crises provoked by the arrival of the “foreign” god Dionysus and his ecstatic cult, audiences and readers found resonances with their own cultural moments. This dramatic deity became emblematic of exuberant and liberating spirituality and, at the same time, a symbol of imperial conquest. Thus, readings of the Bacchae frequently foreground conflicts between religious autonomy and political authority, and between ethnic diversity and social cohesion. This cross-disciplinary study traces appropriations and evocations of this drama ranging from the fifth century BCE through Byzantium not only among “pagans” but also Jews and Christians. Writers variously articulated their religious visions over against Dionysus, often while paradoxically adopting the god’s language and symbols. Consequently, imitation and emulation are at times indistinguishable from polemics and subversion.

Leiner had hidden in the folds of his text a great secret. Said simply, Leiner was the lineage heir and inheritor of the ancient Wisdom of Solomon. According to Leiner's hidden code, the covert teachings of the Wisdom of Solomon had been transmitted personally from master to student, down through the generations, until they reached him. But it was more than that. The very core of my being shuddered with some mixture of fear and joy when I realized that Leiner wanted to transmit these same teachings to me. – Marc Gafni

This paper will reflect theologically on the theme of creation in the Wisdom of Solomon.  As the book’s structure falls roughly into three main sections (chaps. 1-6, 7-10, 11-19), we will divide our study accordingly into three major emphases on God-the-Creator: God’s design in creation; God’s wisdom in creation; and God’s providence in creation.

Noting the debates around whether ‘wisdom’ constitutes a genre, this chapter instead studies the multiple smaller genres of which wisdom literature consists. Texts use (and sometimes intentionally misuse) genres to communicate with readers, providing them with conventions for interpretation and expectations about content. Surveying Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Ben Sira, and Wisdom of Solomon, the paper discerns four clusters of genres, grouped according to their communicative purpose. Some genres intend to instruct their users (sayings, instructions, diatribe, protreptic, and didactic narratives); others engage in reasoning (reflections and wisdom dialogues). These genres are not unexpected in wisdom literature, but the next are more familiar from other biblical corpora: some genres offer praise (either to wisdom, people of God), and others enunciate complaints (laments and legal complaints). These multiple genres combine and interact in complex ways within the wisdom book.

Приложени текст бави се анализом рада митр. Амфилохија (Радовића) и вл. Атанасија (Јевтића) на пољу превођења и тумачења девтероканонских књига и следствено томе анализом доприноса ових аутора теологији старозаветног канона. Рад у фокусу има предговоре, коментаре и друге текстове ових аутора који су објављивани уз појединачне преводе девтероканонских књига до њиховог коначног обједињења у издању Светог Писма из 2010. године као и након тог периода.

Was Paul's view of evil based on Adam's fall or a mere reflex of Christology? Tyler A. Stewart argues that, in Galatians, Paul's thoughts about where evil comes from and why it continues are not based on Adam's fall as the background story, but rather the rebellion of angels. Edited PhD Dissertation published with Mohr Siebeck (WUNT 2).

The title  suggests an approach that covers historical and exegetic segments, with preponderance in the sapiential books of the Old Testament. To talk about the concept of „wisdom” in „sapiential books” signifies approaching the subject that gave the name to this sort of literature.

In Rom 4:18, Paul cites the “promise” to Abraham in LXX Gen 15:5, “so shall your seed be” (οὕτως ἔσται τὸ σπέρμα σου) in relation to what it means to “become the father of many nations” from Gen 17:5. Modern scholars have traditionally understood the relationship Paul sees between these two texts quantitatively, as promising a multitude of descendants made up of Jews and Gentiles. Conversely, some early Jewish interpreters of Gen 15:5 (and related texts such as Gen 22:17; 26:4) such as Philo, Sirach, and the author(s) of the Apocalypse of Abraham understood the promise qualitatively, as speaking not only of multiplication but of transformation into the likeness of the stars and assumption of their power. Reading Paul’s use of Gen 15:5 in light of this qualitative interpretation places him within the context of already well-established deification or angelomorphic traditions in early Judaism that see the destiny of Abraham’s seed as replacing the stars as the divine or angelic inheritors of the nations. This tradition may provide a more fitting explanation of the relationship Paul sees between Gen 17:5 and 15:5 in the wider context of the argument of Rom 4. This reading could illuminate the relationship between a complex nexus of ideas that Paul sees implicit in the one promise to Abraham in Gen 15:5. The promise of becoming as the stars of heaven would encompass the inheritance of the cosmos, becoming a father of many nations, and the resurrection from the dead.

In this master thesis, I investigate how Philo of Alexandria (ca. 15 BCE - 45 CE), as a Jewish philosopher, interpreted the Jewish figure of Wisdom (a personification that Proverbs 8 describes as having been present with God when he created the world) in the Platonic/Pythagorean philosophical context in which Philo operates. To this end, I examined the personification of Wisdom in the Hebrew wisdom literature (Proverbs, Job, Baruch & Ben Sira). Then, I searched through Plato's dialogues for similar ways of conceptualizing the world order and its relation to the divine. In my third chapter, I review the tradition of the early Academy and of neo-Pythagoreanism, which forms the hermeneutical paradigm for Philo's understanding of Plato. Then, I turn to the Greek translations of the Jewish wisdom literature, and to Aristobulus and Wisdom of Solomon, to look for attempts to relate Wisdom to Greek philosophy before Philo. Finally, I discuss a select number of passages in which Philo speaks about wisdom.

A brief overview of Adventism's relationship with the Apocrypha, spanning from the year 1842 until 1918. It updates the conclusions of the last previous study conducted by Ron Graybill and utilizes previously undiscovered documents and even writings by Ellen White to propose that Adventism's entanglement with the Apocryphal corpus is far reaching and vastly understudied in its importance for the study of Early Adventism and Ellen White.

This unpublished paper explores the relationship among natural science, natural theology, and Old Testament wisdom literature. My main contention here is that Israel’s wisdom literature inculcates a stance of radical openness to the potentialities of the created world, a stance that abets a healthy development of both natural theology and natural science. Finally, regarding natural science, it will not be my claim that Israel’s wisdom literature should be accorded total responsibility for the rise of that grand and sometimes inglorious enterprise; merely that OT wisdom literature is congruent with attitudes toward created existence which value that existence and find it worthy of the detailed
observation and analysis which are responsible for the rise of natural science. OT wisdom literature is thus one of the several sources of western science. Moreover, I shall claim that Israelite wisdom literature inculcates values that are congruent with a chastened, humble natural science, one not given to the abuse of the created world, because it knows that creation is the work of God.

Jewish culture played a significant role in the development of literacy among the Georgians. Curiously enough, this is even true for the Christianization of the country, which provided the background for the emergence of autochthonous literature in about the fourth cen
tury ce. The reason for this was that the alleged “apostle” of the Georgians, an Aramaic- speaking female captive from Cappadocia named Nino, sought support from the Jewish community of Mtskheta, the first capital of Georgia, “because of the Hebrew language” she could communicate in there— as legend has it, the Jewish community had settled in Eastern Georgia some centuries before that, probably coming from Iran or Mesopotamia.1
Nevertheless, there are no indications that Jewish literary products were taken over directly into Georgian in the early centuries, in direct translations from Hebrew sources. Instead, we may claim with certainty that in the first millennium of our era, Jewish text materials, biblical or others, all entered Georgia via Greek or other languages, especially Armenian and Syriac, as intermediaries, and over a long period of time. This is manifest, first of all, in the fact that for the bulk of Old Testament texts, the Old Georgian tradition possesses several redactions (up to four according to present- day knowledge) that can be shown to reflect different Vorlagen, different schools, different places (within and outside Georgia), and different times. As a matter of fact, it is at least as difficult to establish a critical text of “the” Old Testament in Georgian as it is to establish “the” Septuagint text.2
The same situation also exists for textual traditions from the Second Temple period that have been adopted by Georgians. Such sources are not numerous though. What we have, is some (but not all) of the apocryphal texts that found their way into the Greek Old Testament, a few other Biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and a comparatively late version of Flavius Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities. The present chapter is meant to give a rough survey of these texts, focusing on some peculiarities in the Georgian tradition that deserve attention cross- linguistically.

Diese Einleitung in die Weishaiet Salomos / Sapientia Salomos harrt seit einiger Zeit der Veröffentlichung. Sie ist zitierbar nach Paragraphen (die unverändert bleiben werden). Neue Sekundärliteratur wird im Laufe der Zeit hinzugefügt werden; es werden auch Formulierungen verbessert werden.

Über Kommentierungen bin ich dankbar.

Scholars since Dibelius have commonly characterized the Lucan Jesus as a “martyr,” an innocent man whose unjust death is exemplary but not atoning or salvific. This article first compares the Lucan passion narrative with selected Jewish texts that feature martyrdom or noble death, then considers parallels to the noble death of Socrates, the persecuted righteous person in Wisdom 2–3, and the violent death of the prophets. The study concludes that the Third Gospel’s portrayal of Jesus’ death shares more affinities with the violent deaths of the prophets and the persecution of the righteous than with Jewish martyrdoms or the death of Socrates.

Even after Paula Fredriksen’s seminal 2006 article, the etic category of “monotheism,” barring a few exceptions, seems to have largely evaded ‘mandatory retirement’ in contemporary scholarship on early Judaism and Christian origins. Strained to acknowledge the need for nuance based on more contemporary historical critical evaluations of the evidence, interpreters have commonly provided qualifications to the term "monotheism." Scholars frequently employ these qualifications, such as "ancient/early Jewish monotheism," attempting to indicate a particular kind of "monotheism" that is other than a flat rejection of the existence of other gods, similar to the conversations in classics concerning "pagan monotheism." In this paper, I propose probing the limits of "monotheism" and directly challenging its appropriateness as an etic category in our discipline by examining three textual examples from Philo of Alexandria, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Apostle Paul, all of which provide us with conflicting early Jewish postures toward the gods in the context of ancient Mediterranean "paganism." These conflicting postures range from characterizing the pagan gods as virtuous and never destined to undergo correction (Philo, Spec. Laws 1.13–19), an ignoring or downplaying of potentially hostile heavenly forces in light of received platonic notions of the afterlife (Wis 3:7–9), and as far as imagining the gods of the nations as deserving of judgment and death (1 Cor 15:24–28; cf. Ps 82). Though each of these postures seem mutually exclusive, all not only assume the reality and existence of the other gods, but their articulations of their own respective visions of the Jewish faith are contingent on the realia of the god-infested everyday life in the ancient Mediterranean.

“But through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his party experience it.” Thus reads the customary English translation, largely unchanged since the earliest English translations, of Wisdom of Solomon 2:24. As modern translators have apparently not questioned the devil’s place in this verse, so too have modern scholars and commentators taken for granted the devil in the diabolos. On the surface this seems reasonable enough. The Greek diabolos was used in the LXX as a translation of the Hebrew satan, the adversary or seducer of Job and Zechariah. Of course, in some Second Temple Jewish traditions and then in Christian literature this satan became Satan and the diabolos became the devil, an angel, evil and fallen, in some fashion opposed to the will of God. Diabolos had become such a commonplace term, especially in early Christian literature, to signify the devil, that the thought of it representing something other than this fallen angel has seemingly been disregarded. The problem with taking the diabolos for granted in Wisd is that translators or scholars then read into the text a notion absent, and even contrary to, the rest of the text’s ideology. The devil simply does not fit into this author’s worldview. So, how to explain the diabolos? I argue that this term and this verse with it have been mistranslated and misunderstood, beginning with the early Greek church fathers, precisely because theologians and scholars both had a preconceived notion that the diabolos could only be the devil. I propose an alternative reading of this verse which does not stretch the limits of the Greek term, but actually makes the verse as a whole accord better with proper Greek syntax. The diabolos of Wisd 2:24 is not an evil, fallen angel, nor is it even the Hebrew satan. The diabolos here refers specifically to the type of adversary of the text immediately preceding this passage, the persecutor of the righteous man. Through detailed philological and textual analyses, I will attempt to show how this translation of diabolos makes more sense, both in respect to the Greek and to the overall ideology of the author. The devil has no place in this author’s thought, and by reevaluating this passage with a more critical eye, we may better understand this author's unique world of thought and the overall purpose of his text.

W przedstawionej pracy, wykorzystaniem terminologii G. Genette’a, postawiona zostaje hipoteza badawcza dotycząca hipertekstualnej zależności Listu do Rzymian od Księgi Mądrości. W myśl hipotezy św. Paweł dokonuje transpozycji Pseudo-Salomonowego pisma w swoim liście. Celem rozprawy była weryfikacja postawionej hipotezy badawczej.
Pierwszy rozdział pracy został poświęcony omówieniu zagadnień metodologicznych. Najpierw przybliżono temat intertekstualizmu w badaniach literaturoznawczych i biblijnych, co nie zostało do tej pory szerzej opracowane na polu polskojęzycznej biblistyki. Następnie – wobec dostrzeżonych braków istniejących teorii w zastosowaniu ich do badania tekstu Biblii – opisano w pracy własne podejście, które stanowi istotny i oryginalny wkład pracy w rozwój badań biblijnych. Teologiczny model intertekstualnej interpretacji Listu do Rzymian i Księgi Mądrości, który został opisany, kładzie nacisk na teologiczny charakter tekstu Pisma Świętego w toku naukowej analizy tekstu. W odniesieniu do modelu lektury intertekstualnej M. Riffaterre’a oraz konieczności włączenia w nią interpretantu, zaproponowano, by jako interpretant przyjąć osobę Chrystusa-Słowa w ujęciu teologicznym (osobowo) oraz obiektywizującym (tekstowym).
Drugi rozdział rozprawy poświęcony został po pierwsze – uzasadnieniu badań hipertekstualnych nad Listem do Rzymian i Księgą Mądrości, po drugie – weryfikacji możliwości i prawdopodobieństwa istnienia suponowanej w hipotezie badawczej zależności między tymi tekstami. Pierwsze z zadań badawczych zostało zrealizowane dzięki odniesieniu do elementów egzegezy patrystycznej oraz przez zestawienie badań intertekstualnych z podejściem kanonicznym w egzegezie Pisma Świętego. Ustosunkowano się również do zarzutu dotyczącego zawężania spektrum badań intertekstualnych przez rysowanie sztywnych granic zamkniętego korpusu tekstów – kanonu – jako takiego. Przedstawione uzasadnienie wykazało, że badania nad wzajemną relacją Listu do Rzymian i Księgi Mądrości z wykorzystaniem opisanego przez nas modelu interpretacji opartego o osobę Chrystusa-Interpretanta jest prawomocne oraz że intertekstualizm ma wiele wspólnego z podejściem kanonicznym w interpretacji tekstu biblijnego.
Drugie z zadań zostało zrealizowane za pomocą analizy różnych aspektów obydwu tekstów w świetle czterech spośród kryteriów weryfikacji echa intertekstualnego zaproponowanych przez R.B. Haysa, które zastosowano w ujęciu szerszym niż ewaluacja partykularnego przypadku nawiązania fragmentu jednego tekstu do innego. Przeprowadzono weryfikację w kluczu kryterium dostępności przez analizę czasu spisania Listu do Rzymian oraz Księgi Mądrości, jak również przez zbadanie „kanoniczności” Księgi Mądrości w pierwszych wiekach chrześcijaństwa. Następnie zweryfikowano prawdopodobieństwo zależności między omawianymi tekstami w oparciu o praktykę pisarską i interpretacyjną Pawła, co można odnieść do kryterium historycznego prawdopodobieństwa. Wreszcie opracowano w sposób szczegółowy stan badań nad zależnością Listu do Rzymian od Księgi Mądrości począwszy od końca XVIII w., kiedy to pojawiają się pierwsze prace suponujące istnienie relacji i zależności między pismami, aż do czasów obecnych. Stanowiło to weryfikację w kluczu kryteriów historii interpretacji oraz powracania zdefiniowanych przez R.B. Haysa. Następnie w jednym z ostatnich paragrafów drugiego rozdziału wskazano na kluczowe połączenie interpretacyjne w postaci istnienia odniesień do Mdr 13-14 we fragmencie Rz 1,18-32.
Pomyślna weryfikacja możliwości istnienia zależności tekstu Listu do Rzymian od Księgi Mądrości w świetle wszystkich czterech kryteriów oraz wskazanie na kluczowe połączenie interpretacyjne między tekstami sprawiły, że postawiona hipoteza badawcza została ugruntowana. Umożliwiło to podjęcie dalszej pracy badawczej w trzecim rozdziale dysertacji, która polegała na analizie hipertekstualnych zależności 2. rozdziału Listu do Rzymian od Księgi Mądrości. Wskazano na sześć zaobserwowanych potencjalnych zależności hipertekstualnych. Następnie przeprowadzono szczegółową weryfikację każdej ze wskazanych zależności.
Po weryfikacji opracowano ostatni etap pracy, który polegał na analizie sposobu i celu dokonania hipertekstualnych transformacji elementów Księgi Mądrości w 2. rozdziale Listu do Rzymian oraz na ich interpretacji w świetle Chrystusa-Słowa jako interpretanta. Opis sposobu Pawłowego przepracowania Księgi Mądrości, w którym z powodzeniem zostały wykorzystane niektóre spośród kategorii transformacji wskazanych przez G. Genette’a w jego pracy metodologicznej, dowiódł, że w przypadku analizowanego fragmentu Listu do Rzymian postawionej w pracy hipoteza badawcza zostaje potwierdzona. Z kolei analiza celu transformacji oraz ich interpretacja w kluczu osoby Chrystusa jako interpretanta doprowadziła do stwierdzenia, że nadrzędną funkcją Pawłowego przepracowania tekstu Księgi Mądrości w 2. rozdziale Listu do Rzymian jest wskazanie na możliwość usprawiedliwienia nie tylko Żydów, ale wszystkich ludzi. Wniosek ten stanowi potwierdzenie wysuwanej już wcześniej przez niektórych badaczy tezy o tym, że radykalna zmiana, z jaką mamy do czynienia w Liście do Rzymian względem tekstu Pseudo-Salomona ma swoje źródło w fakcie, że Paweł pisze post Christum.

Paideia is a fundamental concept in the Wisdom of Solomon; in its various manifestations, it appears to function as a unifying factor in a text for which early scholarship claimed multiple authorship and which all modern experts agree can be somehow divided into three parts based either on genre, foci, or perspective. Paideia, even more than the ever present Sophia, strings these sections together into a coherent whole and reveals an integral aspect of this Hellenistic author’s worldview. Paideia leads to an immortal life in the presence of the divine (6:17-19; 7:14). A rejection of paideia leads to the soul going astray (17:1), impiety, and ultimately the death of the soul (1:16-2:24). The author, in the third section of the text, makes divine paideia the tool in his pseudo-historical, universal drama. Those who learn from the deity’s paideia are the righteous; those who do not are doomed to ungodliness. This paideia is part of God’s testing of humanity, the divine agon, and can even include somatic death (3:1-6). It is all of these various nuances which I hope to explore in this paper, to see both how they function on their own, but also how they work together in the author’s overall program and how they compare to similar discussions taking place in the cultural milieu.

This article analyzes the discourses held by two Jewish Alexandrian authors from the beginning of the first century CE, Philo and the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, on the polytheist cults of their time. It examines whether these writers think about the development of religions in historical terms, how they classify the different cults and establish a hierarchy between them, as well as other issues such as their reflection about images, their use of evhemerist theories, the way they articulate polytheism and atheism, their criticism of mystery cults, and their rejection of divination. The discourses of Philo and of the author of Wisdom are not disconnected from the socio-religious realities of their time, but they are mainly polemical and inspired by the biblical criticism of idolatry.

In this paper, I exegete Psalm 21 from the Greek Septuagint. The first part consists of a fresh translation of Psalm 21 LXX, along with an attempt to outline an identifiable literary structure. The second part walks through the Psalm, section by section, comparing and contrasting themes presented within it, with a special focus on the way the structure and language illumines the main point of the psalm. The third part briefly surveys the citations, allusions, and echoes of this Psalm by scriptural authors in the New Testament era, thereby anchoring the main point of the Greek version of this Psalm within early Christian tradition.

The double use of the word with the καθαρ root in the text of Wis 7:22-28 may set the interpretative direction for the discussion of the whole pericope. The exegesis of the pericope in the key of purity shows the following possibility of understanding the text: the moral aspect of purity of Wisdom can be imparted by it to pure people. A contradiction (paradox) in the text which concerns the subject of purity is observed: purity is, on the one hand, a condition, on the other, an effect of Wisdom's imparting action. A look at the further context of pericope Wis 7:22-28 (in particular Wis 9 and Wis 10) can lead to a probable solution to this potential contradiction: it lies in the idea of being elected by God, which anticipates human action.

This essay takes aim at the view that the Israelite wisdom tradition has certain necessary and sufficient conventions, what one would call core elements. Determining what belongs to this category is subjective, but this cannot be avoided. The boundaries between genres and modes of literature are blurry, but that is to be expected. Instead of fixating on this problem, this essay offers a more healthy approach that is in line with current genre theory and ancient Near Eastern evidence.

The Book of Wisdom is considered a coherent text characterised by genre syncretism. This article aims to examine the praise of wisdom in the Book of Wisdom for its persuasive functions. The encomium was used in the analysis as a typical genre of epideictic rhetoric. The text of the praise was analysed from the perspective of the features distinguishing this genre and determining its underlying structure. The analysis led to the conclusion that the author used the possibilities of the genre to teach the recipients what wisdom they should seek and to encourage them to take actions to achieve it. The encomium in the Book of Wisdom was subordinated to advisory rhetoric and is an essential element in the work's structure.

In light of campaign and voting anomalies leading up to 2020's general elections, the United States citizenry is at a crossroads. It must either double-down on its self-deluding traditions of gamesmanship or it must pursue redemption by turning to the Almighty and recommitting itself to the timeless values announced in the Preamble to the United States Constitution. 

Americans sing patriotic songs of freedom, comparing themselves favorably to underdeveloped nations, perpetuating a false sense of pride -- ignoring even the age old wisdom that pride itself is always ungodly, intolerable, and has doomed all nations that cultivated self-glorification. Americans cannot even be trusted to forego obvious election fraud, yet they criticize foreign countries for the practice of rigging elections.

In their self-conceit, Americans insist that they live in the freest country in the World, though they happen to have the highest incarceration rate of any country - outranking lawless, impoverished nations like El Salvador, Turkmenistan, and Palau - proving to be the most hellish and malicious country toward its own citizens.

Likewise, Americans assert that they are oriented toward truth, but their court systems are plagued by perjury, bribes, blackmail, and false criminal convictions. Although American lawyers are infamously dishonest, Americans still pretend to believe that the outcomes of court cases somehow correspond with truth - despite the obvious fact that American judges are selected exclusively from the ranks of careerist lawyers.

Further, Americans claim to be God-loving, but they introduce and hook their children on narcotics, pornography, alcohol, emulation, partisanship, and materialism - subjecting them to various addictions and making them victims of abuse and neglect sufficient to ensure a high number of maladaptive adults are flagged for their misconduct, dragged through lengthy, resource consuming court procedures, and shipped away to prisons for profit. This law-enforcement industrial complex is crueler toward children than any system in recorded history, yet Americans diminish the faith of the World by claiming that God prefers these various modes of wickedness. It is an industry that thrives upon depriving people of resources so that they can be exploited for profit and so they can never reach self-actualization. 

Americans say they are committed to human equality, by which they mean that women are permitted to abort record numbers of fetuses to keep pace with the documented historical cruelty of infernal ages and the wicked men who imbued them. For Americans, equality between men and women entails that the latter can emulate all known folly of the former in efforts to capture materialistic goods, enjoy luxury, and impose tyranny like men have in darker times. This is why you see single and divorced mothers taking advantage of government procedures (family courts) that exploit the economic resources of biological fathers, resulting in more children being separated and alienated from their fathers than ever before in human history. The incentive for women is the experience of material comforts that unjust men enjoyed in past centuries. Indeed, the laws permitting a woman to "choose" are based upon the notion that women can create a life and destroy it with impunity if it does not bring an instant or ultimate promise of economic prosperity.   

Moreover, Americans sanctimoniously announce their commitment to human liberty, by which they actually mean that pre-adolescent children can have chemical and surgical treatments to pursue a life full of sensual pursuits. Meanwhile, American children face high rates of molestation and sexual abuse, a fact that is masked by the patronizing talk of gender identity. These same abuses are ignored as politicians condemn the human rights records of other countries and flatter Americans that they are somehow treating themselves and each other humanely by encouraging toddlers to despise their bodies for failing to promise a life full of sexual ecstasy.

Because their traditions, attitudes, practices, and rituals have advanced little since the 17th Century, Americans despise ancient truths that account for the advances of the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment periods. The most salient example is how the United States is the only country that continues to maintain the blasphemous doctrine of racial categories. That is, Americans judge each other on the basis of skin color, imputing negative traits falsely to those who are darker or lighter, while assuming themselves to be superiorly endowed and better natured. Americans know deep down inside that such doctrines are unscientific, blasphemous, and otherwise make no sense, yet most embrace them because partisans have converted the doctrines into political weaponry that is efficacious when invoked.  A so-called "white" can more easily gain and/or retain powers, privileges, or materials, whether earned or unearned, if race is tacitly invoked at critical moments within institutions that were designed to account for such doctrines. By contrast, a so-called "black" can more easily gain and/or retain powers, privileges, or materials by reifying notions of otherness or essential deficiencies, feigned or imagined, at critical moments in the presence of those same institutions. In reality, the only cure for the internalization of racialism, "whiteness" or "blackness" or any other "color-ness" or "racial-ness", is the practice of just conduct toward all objects in creation - without exception.

Americans declare that they have an independent press, yet their mainstream media are politically selective in their stories -- censoring, discrediting, defaming, banning, and blocking expressions of truth provided by courageously truthful citizens. Meanwhile, dishonest citizens are incentivized to bring false allegations against their fellow countrymen with impunity - riding the currents of cynicism and bearing false witness for profit - encouraged by the prospect of extorting public figures, celebrities, and wealth - and also encouraged by the boost of self-esteem Americans feel when they tear down other humans to prove to themselves that they are superior beings -- dopamine derived from perverseness. By these modes, the press impedes the spread of wisdom and faith, while by the same modes, the press suppresses fair criticism directed at dishonest people, who flatter it, cater to it, facilitate it, and emulate the various practices of general deceit that the mainstream press relies upon. 

Americans claim to have an independent judiciary, but judges are selected for their partisan views and retained for their partisan loyalties, facing violations like gang shorties if they pronounce policies approaching or revealing actual wisdom. Indeed, America's most esteemed Supreme Court justice, Oliver W. Holmes, completely denounced justice, asserting that his job was to officiate over games of rhetoric that Americans call "court proceedings." 

In sum, Americans permit their leaders to mistreat them, starve them, rob them of their families, their livelihoods, their freedoms, their properties, their modes of worship. All that is written here is quite obvious to objective observers, but Americans lack the courage to acknowledge truths that would disturb their self-deluding pride. Instead, they will seek to discredit truthful citizens - focusing on the imperfections of messengers instead of examining and embracing the truths revealed - thereby avoiding any honest assessment of facts that are obvious to independent observers.

People of faith easily comprehend the Human Moral Sense, which "is the one thing that lifts Man above the beasts that perish and makes him heir to immortality." Faithful people pursue the objects of justice, truth, and devotion - things that the Preamble calls "Blessings of Liberty." With two million people in jails, racialist strife dividing citizens, urban violence at record levels, and two mass incarcerators inhabiting the White House - with no explanation as to how they represented anything that could have possibly motivated a record-number of voters in some of the most distressed cities in the United States, nobody really believes that those two have displayed virtue in their political careers. But because Americans lack the courage to confront their own false self-narratives, and because Americans are "deathly afraid of" their political leaders, Americans will pretend to believe that their 2020 election was legitimate.   

If Americans would only turn toward God and away from the false narratives and prideful self-images that beggar them to self-destruction, the United States could begin to pursue its stated ambition of becoming the greatest civilization in the history of the World. Until then the lyrics: "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free..." will continue to ring hollow and false.

While the Hebrew word משכיל has multiple meanings, many of the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that it designates a specific sage and wisdom teacher. This is indicated by diverse rule, wisdom, and liturgical texts that associate the figure with various tasks and portray him as a first-person speaker. Previous studies include insightful analyses of the Maskil as a leader in the sectarian movement. This paper aims at providing a complementary approach and exploring the wider intellectual context of this character beyond those Jews who produced, used, and collected the Qumran corpus. The following questions will be asked: How is the Maskil’s role imagined in the texts from Qumran? How does the figure embody wisdom, i. e., what kinds of exercises does he undertake to attain, perform, and/or retain his wisdom? What does his portrayal look like in comparison with other ancient data on sages? Following a survey of the Qumran corpus, the Maskil accounts are compared with descriptions of Jewish sages in selected sources that originate from the Hellenistic and early Roman era, including Qoheleth, Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, and Philo of Alexandria’s texts. Finally, the evidence for the Maskil is contextualized in relation to the Greek phenomenon of philosophy, which involved the performance of spiritual exercises in the Graeco-Roman period. It will be argued that the Maskil materials are part of the ancient Mediterranean discussion on the search for wisdom and the ideal sage to be emulated.

Wisdom and Ben Sira are books whose status as biblical books was discussed in patristic and rabbinic times. Nevertheless, they were used by the Church Fathers as well as the rabbis. This paper discusses some patristic and rabbinic texts using Wisdom and Ben Sira to elucidate the status and authority of these two books.

This note considers the implications of the textual variant ‘θανατος’ in Wisd. 14:13–14. Whether ‘death’ serves as the explicit subject of v. 14 or as a given idea associated with ‘idols’, it makes the parallels between 14:10–14 and chs 1–2 even more conspicuous and thereby underlines a pattern of thinking about creation and corruption that continues throughout Wisdom. Whereas in chs 1–2 death entered by the hands of humanity and through the envy of the Devil, in 14:10–14 death entered by handmade idols and through the conceit of evil people. The inclusion of the textual variant shows not only solidarity of thought but also clarity and expansion.

The double use of the word with the καθαρ root in the text of Wis 7:22-28 may set the interpretative direction for the discussion of the whole pericope. The exegesis of the pericope in the key of purity shows the following possibility of understanding the text: the moral aspect of purity of Wisdom can be imparted by it to pure people. A contradiction (paradox) in the text which concerns the subject of purity is observed: purity is, on the one hand, a condition, on the other, an effect of Wisdom's imparting action. A look at the further context of pericope Wis 7:22-28 (in particular Wis 9 and Wis 10) can lead to a probable solution to this potential contradiction: it lies in the idea of being elected by God, which anticipates human action.

This essay offers a postcolonial reading of the Wisdom of Solomon in order to explore the processes of self-identification and self-validation within Alexandrian Diaspora Judaism. It focuses on the various ways that ‘us’ and ‘them’ are constructed, especially the way that each group is related to power. It concludes that the Wisdom of Solomon promotes a paradigm in which the universality and binary opposition that characterize empire are paradoxically transferred from a horizontal to a vertical plane, and that this shows both the usefulness and limits of a postcolonial reading for Wisdom.