Apocryphal Wisdom, 8-12

In chapter 7, "Solomon" told us that he was not born wise but gained wisdom by subjecting himself to the law.  In 8 he declares that he has sought wisdom since his youth, and whatever goals one has in life, wisdom is the source of success, whether it be gaining wealth or gaining knowledge.  This knowledge includes what would become the  province of the sciences, e.g. the seasons.

Above all, it is wisdom that can make us immortal.  The Judaic view of the afterlife is complex, much like the Greek view.  For both peoples, the common belief was in an afterlife that was virtually no existence at all.  At some point, some Greeks and some Jews began to argue for some form of immortality for particularly good or important people, and this belief began to be more generalized among Greek Orphics and Pythagoreans and among Jewish Pharisees.  Several books of the Apocrypha, both Wisdom and II Maccabees, appear to take immortality for granted.

Chapter 9 reveals the vanity of any human aspiration not grounded in wisdom: "Grow man to what perfection he will, if he lacks the wisdom that comes from thee, he is nothing."   "Solomon" proceeds to retell the marvelous story of the chosen people as a memorial of  the power of Wisdom.

Wisdom worked with the Creator at the point of Creation. In this sense Wisdom is not unrelated to John's account of the Logos, that begins his Gospel.  Wisdom (Chapter 10) has guided man in the ways of truth from the beginning, but Cain rebelled against Wisdom, and, when man was paying the price for Cain's sin, it was Wisdom that guided one man on his wooden raft to give us a second life.

This story eerily anticipates the Golden Legend that tells how the wood from the tree of life was used to build Noah's ark, became a treasure of Solomon, and finally was the substance of the Cross.  Wisdom has never abandoned man, and she steered the virtuous Lot, when he lived among the accursed Sodomites and guided Moses [11] as he led his people through the desert away from their enemies who had abandoned both wisdom and humanity.   The Israelites, in the course of their Exodus from Egypt, also suffered, but only that their errors might be corrected by their loving Father.

[12] When the Israelites entered the land promised to them, they came upon a people so bereft of Wisdom's influence that they killed their own children.  This seems to me quite significant.  The account in the Pentateuch holds the Edomites and other Canaanites guilty mostly for resisting a hostile invasion.

The Canaanites, as everyone probably knows, are actually inland Phoenicians and closely related, along with other West Semitic speakers, to the Jews.  The Phoenicians and their colonial offspring in Carthage not only practiced human sacrifice, but the most acceptable offerings in a crisis were their own children.

Solomon also accuses them of witchcraft, eating human flesh, and partaking if blood feasts.  Presumably the feast of blood, human flesh and entrails--they are referred to as splanchnophagon--are ritual acts of consuming guts, flesh and blood of human beings.  One might conceivably invent some story that these feasts are merely symbolic, but in this grim context that includes the murder of their own children, cannibalism seems a lesser evil, though not, of course, to ELCA Lutherans, United Church of Christ free-thinkers, or most Methodists and a good many Presbyterians today.

While the Phoenicians abandoned the practice of human sacrifice, the Carthaginians did not.  So in this version of Jewish history the special position of the Jews is not simply an irrational choice made by a capricious deity but it is their moral superiority in not killing their own children.

The historical truth, as the Scriptures tell us, is a little less clear-cut.  To be sure, Jewish religious leaders and prophets opposed such abominations, but we are told the story of Jephthah's sacrifice of his own daughter and the even more terrifying story of David's attempt to conciliate the Gibeonites and end a plague:

  These Gibeonites were not, in fact, Israelites but a remnant of Amorites, who had tricked Joshuah into making a covenant with them.  In his zeal to subdue the Holy Land for the children of Israel, Saul had allegedly killed a number of Gibeonites, but we are given no details that would enable us to conclude that his action was justified or unjustified.  When David asked the Gibeonites what they required as an atonement for the death of their kinsmen, they replied that they would take no blood money but only this: 

Let seven men of his sons be delivered unto us, and we will hang them up unto the Lord in Gibeah of Saul, whom the Lord did choose. And the king said, I will give them”

Although David spared the son of his friend Jonathan, he did take

the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, whom she bare unto Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth; and the five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she brought up for Adriel the son of Barzillai the Meholathite: And he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before the Lord.  [II Sam 21]

One might multiply instances.  Nonetheless, it is very true that the main thrust of Judaism was opposed to both idolatry and human sacrifice.

"Solomon" concludes the chapter by praising the Creator as the only true source of justice, who does not punish the innocent.  Again, this is something of a refinement, since collective punishment and inherited guilt were two givens in early Judaism.  God loves all that he has created and this must include the Canaanites among other hostile peoples, whom He prefers to chasten slowly so that they may repent and live.