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Art. VI.—Was the Book of Wisdom written in Hebrew?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Extract
That the Proverbs of Ben-Sira were written in some kind of Hebrew has never been seriously questioned, and the number of sources in which clues to the original have been preserved would be sufficient to silence any doubts that might be raised. It would be natural to suppose that the Book of Wisdom, which bears so close a relation to those Proverbs, which enlarges on so much that Ben-Sira suggests, and endeavours to be deep where he is shallow, appealed to the same public, and was composed in the same language. But although this theory would receive a primâ facie plausibility from the Hebraisms with which the pseudo-Solomon's style abounds, his affectation of Greek eloquence, noticed by very early critics, his allusions to Greek customs, and his reminiscences of Greek authors, have seemed to put it out of court; and the best editors of this century only mention this theory to reject it. In the last century, however, it was supported by some eminent names; and early in this found an advocate in Bretschneider, the author of three dissertations on the Book of Wisdom, who had an adherent in Engelbreth.
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- Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1890
References
page 264 note 1 The hypothesis that the Syriac version was made from the Chaldee was started by J. M. Faber, ‘Prolusiones de Libro Sapientiae Ornoldi, 1776.’ This pamphlet I have not seen; it is discussed by Eichhorn, , ‘Einleitung in die Apocryph-Schriften,’ p. 199Google Scholar. It may be presumed that Eichhorn quotes the best of Faber's arguments; he says that he quotes nearly all of them. These are all liable to the same objection as Bretschneider's (v. supra). I find only one of my own observations anticipated in that list, and this one which I have not given in § 3.
page 266 note 1 In Buber's edition for 
the words 
are substituted. This makes the coincidence less striking, but does not seriously affect the argument. It will be assumed throughout that these Midrashim contain old materials, at whatever period they may have been drawn up.
page 297 note 1 c. xvii. introduces the account of the appropriateness of the punishment of the Egyptians with a quotation from Ps. lxvi. 3. It is remarkable that R. Jochanan introduced the same observation with the same quotation ; Psikta, ed. Buber, p. 81a. In the same work there is a passage curiously like Wisdom xiv. 15, ‘on the day when the first-born of one of them died, he drew a picture of him in the midst of his house.’ Hence ⋯ώρῳ φ⋯νθει probably stands for .