A Greek Book of Wisdom from Alexandria

The Wisdom of Solomon (also called the Book of Wisdom) is a Jewish writing composed in Greek, most probably at Alexandria in Egypt, in the late first century BCE or early first century CE. Although it is cast in the voice of King Solomon, the archetype of wisdom, as an address to the rulers of the earth, scholars are virtually unanimous that this attribution is a literary device (pseudepigraphy) and that the real author was an anonymous Hellenistic Jew writing centuries after Solomon's time.

The book belongs to the tradition of Jewish wisdom literature, alongside Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, but it is unmistakably a product of the encounter between that tradition and Greek philosophy: its vocabulary and thought draw on Platonic and Stoic ideas, which it presses into the service of Israel's faith. Written for a Greek-speaking Jewish community under pressure from a surrounding pagan culture, it aims both to strengthen Jews in their ancestral faith and to commend that faith, and its God, against idolatry and unbelief. It is one of the finest literary achievements of Hellenistic Judaism.