Scripture offers readers not a prescriptive printout but a recital behind our experience, invites a transformative engagement between text and life. The main insight available from Wisdom of Solomon is that Wisdom, intimate of God and structuring element of all creation, saves her friends into Life, not without their collaboration; the alternative is Death. Processes of transposition and transformation are the hermeneutical key to the book, both as authored and as read. The book's few central claims shift from genre to genre and from section to section for fresh and illustrative presentation. Transformation is also the challenge offered to readers: reappropriate the heritage afresh and thus survive. The envisioned transposition implies not simply change but growth out of a profound fidelity to something valued. What is at stake in the book is the “mother of transformations”: the journey from life through death, either to Life or to nothingness (Death), but also the survival of the Jewish community in Alexandria in the first century C.E.
