This essay offers a postcolonial reading of the Wisdom of Solomon in order to explore the processes of self-identification and self-validation within Alexandrian Diaspora Judaism. It focuses on the various ways that “us” and “them” are constructed, especially the way that each group is related to power. It concludes that the Wisdom of Solomon promotes a paradigm in which the universality and binary opposition that characterize empire are paradoxically transferred from a horizontal to a vertical plane, and that this shows both the usefulness and limits of a postcolonial reading for Wisdom.
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