Wisdom of Solomon 17: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter describes the long night of darkness that came on unrighteous men who supposed they held the holy nation in their power. Shut in under their own roofs, they are terrified by sounds, by shapes that appear to them, and by a fire that lights itself; their magic arts are useless, and farmer, shepherd and field worker alike are bound with one chain of darkness. Between the scenes the writer states what fear is, a giving up of the help that reason offers, and speaks of wickedness condemned by its own inner witness. The chapter closes by setting the clear light over the whole world against the heavy night spread over them alone.

Claim by Claim

1. 17:1
   • God's judgments are great.
   • God's judgments cannot be expressed or interpreted.
   • Because of this, undisciplined souls went astray.
2. 17:2
   • Lawless men supposed that they held the holy nation in their power.
   • Those men were shut up beneath their own roofs.
   • Those men were prisoners of darkness.
   • Those men were bound with the fetters of a long night.
   • Those men lay exiled from the eternal providence.
3. 17:3
   • They supposed that they were hidden in their secret sins.
   • They were scattered from one another under a dark curtain of forgetfulness.
   • They were struck with terrible awe.
   • They were troubled by apparitions.
4. 17:4
   • The recess that held them did not keep them free from fear.
   • Terrifying sounds rang around them.
   • Dismal phantoms appeared to them.
   • Those phantoms had gloomy, unsmiling faces.
5. 17:5
   • No power of fire was able to give them light.
   • Not even the brightest flames of the stars were able to illuminate that gloomy night.
6. 17:6
   • Only a self-kindled fire appeared to them.
   • That fire was full of dread.
   • They were terrified.
   • They judged the things they saw to be worse than the sight they could not see.
7. 17:7
   • The illusions of their magic arts were brought to nothing.
   • Their boasted wisdom was rebuked with disgrace.
8. 17:8
   • They had promised to drive terrors and disorders away from a sick soul.
   • They themselves were sick with fear.
   • Their fear was laughable.
9. 17:9
   • Even if nothing terrifying frightened them, they were still scared.
   • They were scared by vermin passing by.
   • They were scared by the hissing of serpents.
10. 17:10
    • They died of fear.
    • They refused to look at the air.
    • The air could not be escaped on any side.
11. 17:11
    • Wickedness is a cowardly thing.
    • Wickedness is condemned by its own witness within.
    • Wickedness, pressed hard by conscience, always forecasts the worst.
12. 17:12
    • Fear is nothing else but a surrender of the helps that reason offers.
13. 17:13
    • The expectation from within, being weaker, reckons the ignorance to be greater than the cause that brings the torment.
14. 17:14
    • They slept the same sleep through that night.
    • That night was in truth a powerless one.
    • That night came upon them out of the innermost recesses of a powerless Hades.
15. 17:15
    • They were at times harassed by monstrous apparitions.
    • They were at times paralysed, their soul failing them.
    • A sudden and unlooked-for fear came upon them.
16. 17:16
    • Whoever sank down there was held fast.
    • He was shut up in a prison that had no iron bars.
17. 17:17
    • Whether a man was a farmer, or a shepherd, or a labourer toiling in the wilderness, he was overtaken.
    • He endured that necessity which could not be escaped.
    • They were all bound with one chain of darkness.
18. 17:18
    • There might be a whistling wind.
    • There might be a melodious sound of birds among the spreading branches.
    • There might be a measured fall of water running violently.
19. 17:19
    • There might be a harsh crashing of stones hurled down.
    • There might be the unseen running of bounding animals.
    • There might be the voice of the most savage wild beasts roaring.
    • There might be an echo rebounding from the hollows of the mountains.
    • These things made them faint with terror.
20. 17:20
    • The whole world was lit with clear light.
    • The rest of the world was occupied with its works without hindrance.
21. 17:21
    • Over those men alone a heavy night was spread.
    • That night was an image of the darkness that was to receive them afterward.
    • They were to themselves more burdensome than the darkness was.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

17:1

"Your judgments" is addressed directly to God; the chapter opens in the middle of a long address that has been running for several chapters. The KJV's "unnurtured" and the rendering's "untaught" translate a Greek word for someone who has never been disciplined or trained, closer to "undisciplined" than to "uneducated."

17:2

This chapter retells, without ever naming Egypt, the ninth plague of Exodus 10:21-23: three days of darkness over Egypt while the Israelites had light where they lived. The "unrighteous men" are the Egyptians, the "holy nation" is enslaved Israel. The Wisdom of Solomon was written in Greek, probably in Alexandria, and its closing chapters work through the Exodus story episode by episode without using names. "Providence" translates pronoia, a term from Greek philosophy for the forethought and ordering care by which the world is governed; to be "exiled" from it is to be cut off from that ordering, not carried off to another country.

17:3

The "dark veil of forgetfulness" pictures a curtain drawn between them, so that each was cut off from the others and from memory itself. "Apparitions" in the KJV means shapes seen that were not there; the word covers ghosts and hallucinations alike.

17:4

The "corner" is the innermost recess at the back of a house, the place a person retreats to in order to hide. The point is that the deepest hiding place in the building gave no protection.

17:5

Exodus 10:21 calls this a darkness "which may be felt." What is described is not nightfall but a darkness that lamplight and starlight could not cut, so that fire went on burning without giving light.

17:6

A fire "kindled of itself" is one nobody lit, appearing on its own out of the dark. The last clause turns on a contrast: the little they could make out frightened them less than the far greater dark they could not see into.

17:7

"Art magick" is simply the old word order for "magic arts." Egypt's magicians are recurring figures in Exodus: in the first contests with Moses they duplicate his signs, then fall behind, and finally cannot stand before him at all.

17:8

Professional magicians advertised charms and spells that would drive nightmares, hauntings and terrors out of a troubled mind. The sting of the verse is that the specialists in curing fear were the ones lying helpless with it.

17:9

The Greek word is for small creeping things, vermin and crawling creatures, rather than large animals: ordinary household pests, heard and not seen.

17:10

The KJV's "denying that they saw the air" is obscure. The Greek means they refused even to look at the air around them, since the darkness was in the air itself and there was no direction in which to turn away from it.

17:11

"Timorous" in 1611 English means cowardly, easily frightened. "Conscience" translates syneidesis, literally a knowing-together-with-oneself, the inward witness that knows what a person has done; this is one of the earliest surviving passages where the word carries something close to its modern sense. "Forecasteth grievous things" means it keeps predicting disaster.

17:12

"Succours" in 1611 English means relief troops, or aid sent to someone under attack, and the Greek behind "betraying" is the word for handing a position over to the enemy. The image is military: fear surrenders the reinforcements that reason was sending.

17:13

The Greek of this verse is damaged, and no two translations agree on how to construe it. The general sense is that when a person's inner resources run low, not knowing what is causing the torment feels worse than the cause itself would.

17:14

"The bottoms" means the innermost recesses. "Hell" here is the Greek Hades, the underworld where all the dead were thought to go; the word does not by itself mean a place of punishment. The manuscripts differ on one word: the KJV read it as "inevitable," while the reading followed in the rendering is "powerless," so the night is either one nobody could escape or one with no real power in it.

17:16

"Straitly kept" is old English for held tightly or closely. "Strait" means narrow, and has nothing to do with "straight."

17:17

"Husbandman" in 1611 English means a farmer, someone who works the soil. The third figure is a laborer whose work took him out into open or wild country, away from any building. The three trades between them cover everyone who worked outdoors, so the point is that the darkness caught people wherever their work had taken them, with no shelter anywhere.

17:19

To "swoon" is to faint, to pass out.

17:20

Exodus 10:23 says the Egyptians could not see one another or rise from their places for three days, "but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings." That is the contrast drawn here: everyone else going about the day's work in ordinary daylight.

17:21

"Image" here means a likeness or preview: the night was a foretaste of a darkness still ahead of them. The last clause plays on weight; the heavy night lay on them, but their own fear pressed down harder than the night did.