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The Book of Wisdom is one of the seven wisdom books comprising the Septuagint. The others are Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs (Song of Solomon), Job, and Sirach. The Book of Wisdom, or the Wisdom of Solomon is included in the canon of Deuterocanonical books by the Roman Catholic Church while most Protestants consider it part of the Apocrypha.
It includes an exhortation to justice, a speech contrasting the wicked versus the just, and an exhortation to wisdom. Solomon’s speech addresses wisdom, wealth, power and prayer. The historical narrative includes references to false worship, past and future plagues, and a concluding doxology.
While there is general agreement by scholars that the book was most likely composed in Alexandria, Egypt, there is some controversy as to the authorship and the intended audience. Some attribute it to Hebrew authorship, intended for the rulers of the earth, urging them to love righteousness and seek wisdom. Others hold that the book was written by an Egyptian scribe named Amenemope as a book of instruction for his son.
Athanasius, the 20th bishop of Alexandria, wrote that the Book of Wisdom along with three other deuterocanonical books, while not being part of the Canon, “were appointed by the Fathers to be read” Whatever the book’s origins, the supreme value of wisdom is underscored throughout. Consider the following quote from the Book of Wisdom: “For from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen.” Now also consider the way C.S. Lewis addressed the value of “analogy” as he wrote about the limitations of a circumscribed language of the realm. I quote Lewis:
“If the richer system is to be represented in the poorer at all, this can only be by giving each element in the poorer system more than one meaning. The transposition of the richer into the poorer must, so to speak, be algebraical, not arithmetical. If you are to translate from a language which has a large vocabulary, into a language that has a small vocabulary, then you must be allowed to use several words in more than one sense. If you are to write a language with twenty two vowel sounds in an alphabet with only five vowel characters then you must be allowed to give each of those five characters more than one value. If you are making a piano version of a piece originally scored for an orchestra, then the same piano notes which represent flutes in one passage must also represent violins in another.
“As the examples show we are all quite familiar with this kind of transposition or adaptation from a richer to a poorer medium. The most familiar example of all is the art of drawing. The problem here is to represent a three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper. The solution is perspective, and perspective means that we must give more than one value to a two-dimensional shape. Thus in a drawing of a cube we use an acute angle to represent what is a right angle in the real world. But elsewhere an acute angle on the paper may represent what was already an acute angle in the real world: for example, the point of a spear on the gable of a house. The very same shape which you must draw to give the illusion of a straight road receding from the spectator is also the shape you draw for a dunces’ cap. As with the lines, so with the shading. Your brightest light in the picture is, in literal fact, only plain white paper: and this must do for the sun, or a lake in evening light, or snow, or human flesh.
“It is clear that in each case what is happening in the lower medium can be understood only if we know the higher medium. The instance where this knowledge is most commonly lacking is the musical one. The piano version means one thing to the musician who knows the original orchestral score and another thing to the man who hears it simply as a piano piece. But the second man would be at an even greater disadvantage if he had never heard any instrument but a piano and even doubted the existence of other instruments. Even more, we understand pictures only because we know and inhabit the three-dimensional world.
“If we can imagine a creature who perceived only two dimensions and yet could somehow be aware of the lines as he crawled over them on the paper, we shall easily see how impossible it would be for him to understand. At first he might be prepared to accept on authority our assurance that there was a world in three dimensions. But when we pointed to the lines on the paper and tried to explain, say, that “This is a road,” would he not say that the shape which we were asking him to accept as a revelation of our mysterious other world was the very same shape which, on our own showing, elsewhere meant nothing but a triangle. And soon, I think, he would say, “You keep on telling me of this other world and its unimaginable shapes which you call solid. But isn’t it very suspicious that all the shapes which you offer me as images or reflections of the solid ones turn out on inspection to be simply the old two-dimensional shapes of my own world as I have always known it? Is it not obvious that your vaunted other world, so far from being the archetype, is a dream which borrows all its elements from this one?”
Now, in light of the C.S. Lewis treatment on analogy, prayerfully consider the Jesusonian Parables and just how the direct teachings of Jesus, and his wisdom, have gracefully transcended time, space, and the paucity of human language. When, rather than promising more holy books or additional layers of ecclesiastical authority, he promised a Spirit Helper, the Spirit of Truth that would guide us into all truth, he knew what he was doing.