Some date back to the time of David and Solomon and their royal scribes (tenth century BC). Some are as recent as the second century BC. A formal characteristic of both the Hebrew and Greek wisdom books is that they are composed in verse. A further typical peculiarity of wisdom literature is its predilection for the alphabetic pattern: in Wisdom books there is a notable tendency to articulate the message in twenty-two verses or strophes each beginning with one of the twenty-two characters of the