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    Septuagint: Wisdom of Solomon
    Septuagint: Wisdom of Solomon
    Septuagint: Wisdom of Solomon
    Ebook108 pages2 hours

    Septuagint: Wisdom of Solomon

    By Scriptural Research Institute

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    The final version of the Septuagint was published in 132 BC, which included the Wisdom of Solomon, a book of wisdom credited to King Solomon, circa 950 BC. This book was never copied by the Masoretes, and no fragments of it have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, indicating it was not used much in Judea, if at all. A Syriac version of it is included in the Peshitta, the Syrian Orthodox Bible, which the Syrian Orthodox Church has always claimed was transcribed from the Aramaic text that the Jews translated into Hebrew, however, most modern scholars believe the Peshitta was a Syriac translation of the Septuagint.

    As a result, Wisdom of Solomon is a text that cannot be proven to have existed earlier than 132 BC, when it appeared in the Septuagint, and some scholars have concluded it was written in Greek at the Library of Alexandria. Wherever it was written, it is a very un-Jewish Israelite text, which contradicts, and occasionally even attacks the Torah. These contradictions are often interpreted as indicators that the writer was not particularly knowledgeable regarding the Torah, suggesting a Hellenized Jew, and therefore, it is generally assumed the book was written shortly before its inclusion in the Septuagint. All of these assumptions are, of course, based on the underlying assumption that Judaism was already standardized before the Greek Era. The books of Maccabees tell a very story.

    Given the complex religious history of the Second Temple Era, and the fact that none of the Israelites in Elephantine appear to have even heard of Moses in the 5th-century BC, the Wisdom of Solomon does not seem out of place or anachronistic at all, and dismissing it based on contradictions with the Torah seems completely invalid. The Wisdom of Solomon itself appears to have been redacted before the Greek translation, as the first half is about the spirit of wisdom, Sophia in Greek, who is credited with actually doing most of what God (or Yahweh in the Masoretic Text) was credited with doing in the Torah, however, this changes abruptly to crediting the Lord in chapter 11, and Sophia disappears entirely from the rest of the book. Chapter 11 was also the beginning of what scholars call the ‘history’ section of the book, which generally retold the history found in the Torah up until the exodus from Egypt, however, with some differences. One significant difference was the identification of the Lord as the Sun in chapter 16.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScriptural Research Institute
    Release dateJun 14, 2020
    ISBN9781989852309
    Septuagint: Wisdom of Solomon

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      Book preview

      Septuagint - Scriptural Research Institute

      Septuagint: Wisdom of Solomon

      Septuagint, Volume 32

      SCRIPTURAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE

      Published by Digital Ink Productions, 2022

      Copyright

      While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

      Septuagint: Wisdom of Solomon

      Digital edition. June 22, 2022

      Copyright © 2022 Scriptural Research Institute

      ISBN: 978-1-989852-30-9

      The Septuagint was translated into Greek at the Library of Alexandria between 250 and 132 BC.

      This English translation was created by the Scriptural Research Institute in 2020 through 2022, primarily from the Codex Vaticanus, although the Codex Alexandrinus was also used for reference.

      The image used for the cover is the mosaic Sun God Helios with quadriga in Czigler Wing Dome of the Széchenyi Bath, in Budapest, created by Zsigmond Vajda and Miksa Róth in 1913.

      Note: The notes for this book include multiple ancient scripts. For your convenience, the Quivira font from Alexander Lange, and the Noto fonts from Google are embedded in the ebook. If your reader does not support embedded fonts, you will need to install Unicode fonts that cover the ranges for Akkadian Cuneiform, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Imperial Aramaic, Phoenician, Samaritan, and Ugaritic on your reader manually, or you may see blank areas, question marks, or squares where the scripts are used.

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Copyright

      Forward

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Available Digitally

      Available in Print

      Forward

      In the mid-3rd century BC, King Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt ordered a translation of the ancient Israelite scriptures for the Library of Alexandria. This translation later became known as the Septuagint, based on the description of the translation by seventy translators in the Letter of Aristeas. The original version, published circa 250 BC, only included the Torah, or in Greek terms, the Pentateuch. The Torah is the five books traditionally credited to Moses, circa 1500 BC: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. According to Jewish tradition, the original Torah was lost when the Babylonians destroyed the Temple of Solomon, and it was then rewritten by Ezra the Scribe from memory during the Second Temple period.

      It is generally accepted that there were several versions of the ancient Israelite scriptures before the translation of the Septuagint, and that it was translated from an Aramaic copy, something which the Hasmonean High-Priest/Kings objected to. The final version of the Septuagint was published in 132 BC, which included the Wisdom of Solomon, a book of wisdom credited to King Solomon, circa 950 BC. This book was never copied by the Masoretes, and no fragments of it have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, indicating it was not used much in Judea, if at all. A Syriac version of it is included in the Peshitta, the Syrian Orthodox Bible, which the Syrian Orthodox Church has always claimed was transcribed from the Aramaic text that the Jews translated into Hebrew, however, most modern scholars believe the Peshitta was a Syriac translation of the Septuagint.

      As a result, Wisdom of Solomon is a text that cannot be proven to have existed earlier than 132 BC, when it appeared in the Septuagint, and some scholars have concluded it was written in Greek at the Library of Alexandria. Wherever it was written, it is a very heretical Israelite text, which contradicts, and occasionally even attacks the Torah. These contradictions are often interpreted as indicators that the writer was not particularly knowledgeable regarding the Torah, suggesting a Hellenized Jew, and therefore, it is generally assumed the book was written shortly before its inclusion in the Septuagint. All of these assumptions are, of course, based on the underlying assumption that Judaism was already standardized before the Greek Era. The books of Maccabees tell a very story.

      2nd Maccabees claims to be an abridged version of Jason of Cyrene’s now lost five-volume version of Maccabees written during the Maccabean Revolt of 165 through 140 BC. Jason’s work appears to have not been focused on the Maccabean Revolt itself, but told the history of Greek Judea up until the time of the Maccabean Revolt, which began in 165 BC. When Judas the Hammer was recognized as the high priest of Jerusalem by King Antiochus in 164 BC, he is recorded in 1st Maccabees as tearing down the altar in the Second Temple, which had been profaned, and building a new one. Clearly, whichever god had been worshiped in the temple in the years immediately before 164 BC was not Judas’ god. In 2nd Maccabees, the god’s name is translated into Greek as Dionysus (ΔΙΟΝΥΣΊΩΝ), which Greek records from the era record as being the Greek name of the Judean god Sabaoth (Σαβαώθ). Sabaoth was also recorded as being the Judean version of the Roman god Bacchus, and the Phrygian god Sabazios (Σαβάζιος), both of which were regarded as the local versions of Dionysus by the Greeks. It is worth noting that while the Greeks considered the Phrygian god Sabazios the local equivalent of Dionysus, the Phrygians considered Sabazios the equivalent of Zeus, the ruler of the Greek pantheon.

      The governor of Jerusalem between 168 and 164 BC was recorded as being Philippon the Phrygian in 2nd Maccabees, who considered Sabaoth to be the equivalent of the Phrygian Sabazios and Greek Zeus, meaning that the god that Judas was purging the temple of, was a Sabaoth-Sabazios-Dionysus-Zeus composite god, which no doubt seemed very alien to the Judahites not living in Jerusalem. The Maccabean revolt was not led by urban Judeans, but rural Judeans, as recorded in 1st and 2nd Maccabees, and specifically by the Levite family of Jason, meaning it was a religious revolution, intended to restore the god the rural Judeans of the era were worshiping. This god was recorded as Yahw (𐡉𐡄𐡅) in Aramaic, and Yhwh (𐤉𐤄𐤅𐤄) in Phoenician, the two scripts commonly used in Judea at the time. The Greeks translated the name as Iaô (Ιαω), and the Romans translated it as Iaw, both derived from the more common Aramaic version of the name, which was used from Mesopotamia to Egypt.

      The popularity of Yahw among the Israelites of the Persian era is well established archaeologically, by his being one of the main Judean gods worshiped at the Israelite temple in Elephantine (modern Aswan). He is mentioned, along with his wife Anat, in the 5th-century BC Elephantine papyri, some of the oldest surviving Israelite texts. The Elephantine papyri date to a span of approximately 100 years, between roughly 520 and 420 BC, and include texts in many languages which were rediscovered in the 1800s and 1900s near Aswan, where an ancient Persian fortress once stood guarding the southern frontier of Egypt against a Kushite invasion. While the Elephantine papyri include many texts in many languages, including hieratic and demotic Egyptian as well as Aramaic and Greek, the Aramaic texts are the most extraordinary, as they reveal a group of Israelites who seemed to have been practicing a form of archaic Judaism, and yet knew nothing of the Torah. Arthur Cowley, the Head of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, described what the texts relieved in 1923:

      "So far as we learn from these texts Moses might never have existed, there might have been no bondage in Egypt, no exodus, no monarchy, no prophets. There is no mention of other tribes and no claim to any heritage in the land of Judah. Among the numerous names of colonists, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, David, so common in later times, never occur (nor in Nehemiah), nor any other name

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