Introduction to Sept 2021 special issue of Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha: The Wisdom of Solomon

Abstract

At the 2017 Annual Meeting of the SBL, as the steering committee of the Wisdom and Apocalypticism Section met to plan its programming for the next few years, it became clear that many of the committee members shared an interest in the Wisdom of Solomon. Yet, despite the obvious relevance of that book to the intersection of wisdom and apocalyptic literature, we realized that our section had not devoted a session to the Wisdom of Solomon in the past two decades. To be sure, there had been a number of individual papers focusing on the Wisdom of Solomon, but we resolved then and there that a sustained examination of this book by our section was long overdue. Over the next 3 years, the Wisdom and Apocalypticism Section hosted three sessions focusing on the Wisdom of Solomon, with a view to eventually publishing some of the papers: “The Wisdom of Solomon at the Crossroads of Wisdom, Apocalypticism, and Philosophy” (2018 AM, Denver); “Knowledge and the Cosmos in the Wisdom of Solomon” (2019 AM, San Diego); and simply “The Wisdom of Solomon” (2020 AM, online). The sustained attention to this book paid off; shortly after the 2020 virtual meeting, Matthias Henze invited us to co-edit two special issues of JSP in 2021 on the Wisdom of Solomon. The co-editors are Jason Zurawski, current co-chair (with Emma Wasserman) of the Wisdom and Apocalypticism section, and Karina Martin Hogan, its former chair/co-chair (with Matthew Goff) from 2010–2015. We are extremely grateful to Matthias Henze for this opportunity to publish some of the finest examples of recent critical scholarship on the Wisdom of Solomon (hereafter, Wis), four pieces in the current issue and four in the December 2021 issue.