Art. VI.— Was the Book of Wisdom written in Hebrew

That the Proverbs of Ben-Sira were written in some kind of Hebrew has never been seriously questioned, and the number of sources in which clues to the original have been preserved would be sufficient to silence any doubts that might be raised. It would be natural to suppose that the Book of Wisdom, which bears so close a relation to those Proverbs, which enlarges on so much that Ben-Sira suggests, and endeavours to be deep where he is shallow, appealed to the same public, and was composed in the same language. But although this theory would receive a primâ facie plausibility from the Hebraisms with which the pseudo-Solomon's style abounds, his affectation of Greek eloquence, noticed by very early critics, his allusions to Greek customs, and his reminiscences of Greek authors, have seemed to put it out of court; and the best editors of this century only mention this theory to reject it. In the last century, however, it was supported by some eminent names; and early in this found an advocate in Bretschneider, the author of three dissertations on the Book of Wisdom, who had an adherent in Engelbreth

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