Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Canon and Influence

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Canon and Influence

The Wisdom of Solomon was included in the Septuagint, the Greek Bible of Hellenistic Judaism, but not in the Hebrew canon fixed by the rabbis. This divergence determined its later fate. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, following the Greek and Latin tradition, receive it as deuterocanonical, fully part of Scripture, whereas Judaism and, at the Reformation, the Protestant churches placed it among the Apocrypha, valued but not canonical.

The book was well known in early Christianity: its portrait of personified Wisdom contributed to Christian reflection on Christ as the Wisdom and Word of God, and its language about the righteous sufferer and about immortality left marks on the New Testament and on later theology. Its influence on the doctrine of the soul's immortality, and on the fusion of biblical faith with Greek philosophical categories, was considerable.

Modern scholarship values it both as a high point of Hellenistic Jewish literature and as an important witness to the ways Second Temple Judaism engaged the wider intellectual world, and it continues to be read liturgically in the Catholic and Orthodox churches and studied across the traditions as part of the biblical Apocrypha.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.