The Wisdom of Solomon* is an exhortatory discourse written in Greek by a learned and thoroughly hellenized Jew of Alexandria, after that city’s conquest by Rome in 30 BCE, when the earlier optimism of the Alexandrian Jewish community for a growing rapprochement with the Greeks and for social and cultural acceptance by them, had been replaced by a mounting sense of disillusionment and disappointment. The new Jewish mood was reflected in III Maccabees (ca. 24/23 BCE), where the conception of the Jewish