Adultery and the Wisdom of Solomon
I received a question in a Facebook group I administrate that was a very heartfelt question. It was a very personal matter, so we as the Admins thought it best to respond. To protect this person’s anonymity (the group has several 1000 members), I am going to slighty redact the question and post it with this person’s pictures of her Day by Day Scripture Calendar. My answer will be in the comments:
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Help. I need some guidance as I am a child of adultery. I feel like I will never be accepted by God. Bible in a Year Day 304 The Wisdom of Solomon Chapter Three and Four says
This:
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My response is this:
First
of all, let’s put this passage into perspective in a couple of ways.
The Wisdom of Solomon was written in Greek by someone who had for
various reasons left the Holy Land and was living in Alexandria, Egypt.
There was a large Jewish community there
that was living in partial cultural exile-many had fled after Antiochus
IV Epiphanes had taken over Jerusalem during the period of the
Maccabean revolt. Alexandria became an intellectual hub for many
different groups, not just Jews. In fact, there were so Jews living in
Alexandria in the first century BC that they actually took up a quarter
of the city.
In
a very short time, Alexandria went from a little fishing village to one
of the biggest cities in the world in the span of about 50 years after
Alexander the Great turned it into a major city. It was a town of
toleration and learning, so many Jews flocked there to escape problems
in the Holy Land over the years. But the problem was that many of the
Jews were losing their identity as God’s chosen due to cultural
assimilation. Hence the book of Wisdom of Solomon is written in Greek.
Probably very few Jews in Alexandria could even read Hebrew, much less
speak it.
As
such, one of the themes of the Wisdom of Solomon is this is idea of
“Divine Wisdom”-an attribute of God that the writers of this time period
personify like we would personify, for example, Lady Liberty or the
blindfolded lady with the scales that personifies Justice in American
Courthouse art. Alexandria was a city of learning that was world
renowned for it’s lighthouse (one of the 7 wonders of the Ancient World)
as well as the great Library of Alexandria. Learning and wisdom was
held in high esteem in Alexandria.
But, with exposure to all these new ideas from other cultures and religions, the Jewish population was gradually losing its identity as Jews. People were losing faith in the God of Abraham. They were not keeping God’s law. They were worshiping other Greek and Roman gods. So, the theme is that while man made wisdom and learning has its place, Divine Wisdom is still the center of Jewish being because it is eternal. Wisdom calls the Chosen back to true worship and identity as the People of God. So, keep that in mind.
My second point is to remind you that as Catholics, we have a 4 fold way of reading and interpreting Scripture. It’s referred to as the 4 Senses of Scripture. You might consider them as four lenses through which we look at Scripture and interpret it. These four senses are: literal, allegorical, moral (sometimes referred to as the tropological), and the anagogical. I won’t bore you with minutiae definitions, but I think it Is important in this case to show you other ways of interpreting this scripture other than the literal sense.
By literal, I don’t mean literalism. The literal sense is simply what does the text actually say and not say? It asks questions like: Who are the characters? Who is the audience? What’s the plot line? This is important because we have to know what the text actually says. We can only get that through the literal sense. But, Bible interpretation does not stop with the literal words on the paper.
In
this instance, from your query, I am willing to guess you are only
looking at the literal sense of this text because on the surface, this
text is using the language of children conceived in sin, etc. But is
that really what the text is primarily about? Is it nothing more than a
blanket renunciation of children born out of wedlock?
Going back to the context of to whom it was written, we can look to the allegorical and moral interpretations (senses) of this text. The text is written to remind people of the eternal Wisdom of God. So, in light of the revelation of Jesus Christ’s incarnation, passion, death, and Resurrection, if God is unchanging, what do we make of this text? Is the imagery of the illegitimate child conceived because of the sin of the parents all there is to this text? Of course not!
The writer is speaking to a people losing their faith and identity to other cultures and philosophies. They are in danger of intellectually and spiritually losing their place as God’s Chosen. They are bringing up new generations that are even farther removed from knowing God’s Divine Wisdom. They are in essence at risk of becoming the illegitimate spiritual children of Abraham by adopting the sin of believing all these various man-made wisdoms. That’s the allegory that the writer here is using: the image of an illegitimate child conceived in sin as the allegory for a Chosen people losing their way by engaging in the sin of idolatry and unbelief.
If this book was simply a Divine condemnation of children conceived in the sin of their parents, then God is an unjust god. That’s just condemning people for acts that they had not control over or say in the matter. Only an insane and tyrannical judge would condemn people for a crime they could not possibly have committed because they did not exist at the time of the adultery. So, if God’s Wisdom is eternal and perfect, then logically, God’s Justice, which is premised on His eternal Wisdom because perfect judges have perfect wisdom in how to adjudicate cases.
Thus, the moral sense of this Scripture passage is not a condemnation of actual biological children conceived in sin. The moral of the story is to remind the People of God to adopt the true Divine Wisdom and follow God and God’s laws and not all the various weird ideas and religions that surround them in Alexandria’s “anything goes” intellectual society. The People of God entered into a Covenant with God at Mount Sinai. The Bible often refers to this like a marriage. Again and again, the Israelites strayed from this allegorical marriage covenant, but God was always faithful, and in His Wisdom, could have filed for covenantal divorce but did not. Again and again He calls His people back to the purity of the covenantal relationship.
So, to answer your question, we know by virtue of Christ’s life, death, and Resurrection, that you are beloved by God. Every human being is made in God’s image. God is author of all life. You would not exist if God had not willed you into existence. Therefore, every human being is loved by God because God loves all that He created and called it good. While the circumstances through which you were conceived may have themselves been outside of God’s Will, God in His infinite Wisdom can use any act, no matter how wrong or sinful, to bring about good. Don’t ever forget that.
Ever.
-The Archer
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