A king speaks in the Wisdom of Solomon. God chose him, he says, to rule God's people and to build a temple, and when he prayed for wisdom it was given to him. Ancient readers heard Solomon in that voice, though the name appears nowhere in the text. In fact a Jew whose name is lost wrote the book in Greek, most likely in Alexandria, centuries after Solomon. Scholars place it between the late first century BCE and the early first century CE; one of them, David Winston, ties it to the reign of the emperor Caligula, 37 to 41 CE. This page calls the author Pseudo-Solomon, after the voice the book gives him. Nothing is known of him beyond what the book's nineteen chapters show.
Those chapters show a Jew at home in Greek learning. He calls God's care for the world pronoia, the philosophers' word for providence, and says, in Platonic language, that God made the world from formless matter. When the king lists what Wisdom teaches, the list is self-control, prudence, justice and courage, the four virtues Plato set out. One verse says the perishable body weighs down the soul, language that the notes of the New American Bible trace to Plato. His portrait of Wisdom borrows imagery used for Isis, the Egyptian goddess, while later chapters attack Egypt's worship of animals. Scholars think he wrote for Jews tempted to leave their Jewishness behind for the Greek culture around them.
The book's central claim is that justice is immortal. Earlier Hebrew wisdom had looked for reward in this life; Ben Sira, writing in Jerusalem more than a century before, held that the dead no longer praise God. Pseudo-Solomon answers that God made human beings for incorruption, and that death entered the world through the devil's envy. He lets the other side state its case first. In chapter 2, men who think life is short and the mind a spark that goes out decide to enjoy what is here: they crown themselves with roses before the roses wither and set a trap for the just man whose life rebukes theirs. The answer follows: the souls of the just are in God's hand, and those who seemed to die are at peace. A life is measured by its justice, not its length, so a good person who dies young has lost nothing that counts.
The book also turns outward. It opens by telling the judges of the earth to love justice, and in chapter 6 addresses kings directly, warning that the powerful will face the harshest judgment. Chapters 10 to 19 retell Genesis and Exodus without naming a single person: Wisdom guides the righteous from the first man onward, and Egypt is punished through the very things by which it sinned. Yet the same chapters say God loves everything that exists and would never have made anything he hated, and they judge the thinkers who took fire, wind and stars for gods as less to blame than those who worship idols.
The disguise did not hold for long. The Muratorian fragment, an early Christian list of scripture, said friends of Solomon wrote the book in his honour; some early writers proposed the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria instead, though scholars now reject the idea. Jerome, translating the Bible into Latin around 400, noted that the Hebrews did not have the book and that its style was Greek. Most scholars think Paul and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews knew it, and how far Paul's account of idolatry in Romans depends on its chapters on idols is still debated. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles hold it as scripture, Protestant ones place it among the Apocrypha, and the Hebrew Bible does not include it.