Wisdom, Immortality and Providence

The book falls into three broad movements. The first (chapters 1-5) contrasts the destinies of the righteous and the wicked and introduces a theme new to the biblical wisdom tradition: the immortality of the soul. Where earlier Hebrew wisdom had little to say of any meaningful life beyond death, Wisdom teaches that "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God," that God created human beings for incorruption, and that death entered the world through the devil's envy, a decisive step in the development of Jewish and later Christian belief in the afterlife.

The central section (chapters 6-9) is a great hymn to Wisdom herself, personified as a radiant female figure, "a breath of the power of God" and "a spotless mirror of the working of God," who was present at creation and who enters holy souls to make them friends of God; Solomon is presented praying for her as the supreme gift. The final section (chapters 10-19) rereads the history of Israel, especially the Exodus, as the work of Wisdom guiding and delivering the righteous, and mounts a sustained polemic against idolatry, ridiculing the worship of images and of nature and tracing the origins of false religion.