Torah as Wisdom in Jewish Antiquity

Although the genre of wisdom literature is well precedented in the ancient Near East, it is generally viewed as a category separate from law (torah). In the Hellenistic period, however, at the same time that Torah was beginning to emerge as an increasingly fixed idea, Jewish writers began to try to demonstrate that Wisdom and Torah are one and the same. The apocryphal book of Ben Sira dates to about 180 BCE and is thought by some to be a more traditionally pious response to the book of Ecclesiastes, which may have been written as late as 200 BCE. Ben Sira presents Wisdom’s self-praise, including that it “is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us as an inheritance” (Ben Sira 24:23), echoing Deuteronomy 33:4.

Scholars tend to date the pseudepigraphic wisdom poem of Baruch to the mid-second century BCE, shortly after the Maccabean revolt. Baruch, the scribe of the biblical prophet Jeremiah, assumes an exilic perspective and conflates the “commandments of life” with “wisdom.” He posits that Israel is languishing in the Babylonian exile because they have “forsaken the fountain of wisdom,” a variation on biblical claims that Israel’s exile is the result of their abandonment of the commandments.

Centuries later, in Genesis Rabbah, the rabbis echo the trope of Wisdom preexisting creation that appears in the Hellenistic-era book of Proverbs (see Proverbs 8:22–26). This midrash again imagines that Wisdom and Torah are one and the same and served as God’s blueprint for creation.