Friday, September 30, 4-5 pm, 150 Pugh Hall
Ken Silverman of Classics discussing
ἅγιον πνεῦμα παιδείας : The Wisdom of Solomon, and Education in Hellenistic Alexandria and Palestine
The Wisdom of Solomon is a late-Hellenistic addition to the proverbial and poetic literature attributed to king Solomon. My paper will focus on how this book interacts with Hellenistic philosophy, and how it responds to Hellenistic systems of education with an alternate form of paideia: one whose first principle is belief in God, rather than methods for testing ideas or learning rhetorical techniques. Previous studies on Wisdom have identified its “philosophical orientation” as a Jewish adaptation of Middle Platonism (Winston 34). I hope to further this discussion by examining how Wisdom’s author believes this perspective arises from belief in God and an understanding of scripture. Furthermore, I will explore how this theory of knowledge might have informed education systems among Hellenistic Jews, and how it relates to the politics and conflicts surrounding Hellenized institutions in Jewish populations between the Maccabean revolt and the beginning of Roman rule in Egypt. I will here follow the work of Robert Doran, who has speculated on the kind of “curricula” that would have been taught in a Jewish gymnasium before the Maccabean revolt (Doran 94-115) .
A reading of Wisdom in this context helps make sense of the argument of the whole book: from its preamble, which warns the reader against deceptive reasoning, to its conclusion, an Exodus narrative with a quasi-scientific explanation of the miracles in those events. Solomon’s intimate relationship with a personified Sophia represents the inner-workings of how divine inspiration directs the reasoning faculties, so as to make such an explanation of miracles possible. Similarities between Wisdom and passages in the epistles of the New Testament demonstrate how important this text was for the intellectual basis of early Christianity, and it could therefore provide a key for tracing how Wisdom’s approach to paideia influenced education systems during the spread of Christianity into late Antiquity. The more immediate purpose of my paper, however, is to try to read Wisdom within the context of gymnasium-centered education systems in Hellenistic Palestine and Alexandria, and the reactions to these educational institutions among literate Jews.
– Collins, John Joseph; Sterling, Gregory E., eds. Hellenism in the Land of Israel. Notre Dame: 2001.
– Doran, Robert. “The High Cost of Good Education.” Chapter Four, pp. 94-115.
– Hengel, Martin. (trans. John Bowden). Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. Wipf and Stock Publishers: 1974.
– Winston, David. The Wisdom of Solomon: a New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Doubleday & Company, Inc.: 1979.