Anakalypsis / Unveiling the Word
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⚙ Annotations & References ▾
Historic voices 2 ▾
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1× 9 City of God 6× 13-15
Manuscript witnesses 2 ▾
Codex Sinaiticus Aleph c. AD 330-360 Codex Vaticanus B c. AD 300-325
What is Wisdom 9 about?

Rising to formal prayer, the ninth chapter has Solomon ask the God of his fathers for the wisdom that sits beside His throne, confessing that even a man honored among the people is feeble and short-lived without her. He owns that the corruptible body weighs down the soul, and that no one can learn God's counsel unless God sends wisdom from above. Recalling that wisdom has guided and saved men from the beginning, he pleads for her to be sent to labor with him and to teach him what pleases the Lord. Closing the book's central section, the prayer states plainly that true understanding is not achieved but given.

Historical backdrop

The book comes from Alexandria, the Greek city on the Nile that Alexander founded and the Ptolemies made the intellectual capital of the age. There the largest community of the dispersion lived in Greek, read its Scriptures in the Greek of the Septuagint, and argued philosophy beside the great library, all under the constant pull of a cultured paganism. Wisdom is written into that pressure, in the elegant Greek of a Jew who would not trade the God of his fathers for the wisdom of the Greeks.

The Church Fathers on Wisdom 9
Deuterocanon (Catholic & Orthodox) · Accepted as canonical Scripture by the Catholic and Orthodox traditions and included in the original 1611 KJV (between the Old and New Testaments). Not in the Protestant 66-book canon. Read with the same care you bring to other Scripture, conscious that Protestants and Catholics weigh its authority differently.

Wisdom 9

Wisdom Chapter 9
9
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What is Wisdom 9 about?

Rising to formal prayer, the ninth chapter has Solomon ask the God of his fathers for the wisdom that sits beside His throne, confessing that even a man honored among the people is feeble and short-lived without her. He owns that the corruptible body weighs down the soul, and that no one can learn God's counsel unless God sends wisdom from above. Recalling that wisdom has guided and saved men from the beginning, he pleads for her to be sent to labor with him and to teach him what pleases the Lord. Closing the book's central section, the prayer states plainly that true understanding is not achieved but given.