The Book of Wisdom: The Complete Text, with a Commentary for Readers Meeting It for the First Time

It is about the length of the Gospel of Mark. It contains the most influential description of divine Wisdom ever written — language the New Testament appears to borrow. It contains a scene in which wicked men plot against a righteous man in words so close to the Passion that early Christians assumed it was prophecy. And it contains a sentence about God's love for creation that is among the most beautiful in scripture.

Whether it is in your Bible depends on which Bible you own.

The Wisdom of Solomon was written in Greek, in Alexandria, in the century before Christ. It was part of the scriptures the earliest Christians used, and it stayed in Christian Bibles for fifteen hundred years. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles keep it. Most Protestant Bibles no longer print it at all.

This edition gives you the complete text — all nineteen chapters, nothing omitted, in the King James translation — with a commentary written on the assumption that you have never read a word of it and have no particular training.

Each chapter is printed in full and then discussed: what is happening, what the difficult phrases mean, where the argument is going, and one verse worth carrying away.

You will also find a short orientation covering the questions everyone asks. Who wrote it, since it was plainly not Solomon. Why it is in some Bibles and not others, explained without arguing that one side is right. What the author was arguing against. And the passage that reads like the crucifixion, written a century before it happened.

Inside is a writer who is furious about idolatry and very funny about it. One of the earliest clear statements in Jewish literature that the righteous dead are safe. A sustained argument that creation itself takes sides. And a definition of old age — that it is wisdom rather than years — worth the price of the book on its own.

Some of it is hard to like. Two chapters defend things a modern reader will find difficult, and the commentary says so plainly rather than smoothing them over.

For anyone curious about the Apocrypha, for Catholic and Orthodox readers who own this book and have never read it, and for Protestant readers who have never been given the chance.