15-19.
On a reperusal of this Book, I rather believe that these latter chapters never formed part of any other work, but were composed as a sort of long explanatory Postscript, with particular bearing on certain existing circumstances, to which this part of the Jewish history was especially applicable.

Nay, I begin to find the silence of Philo and Josephus less inexplicable, and to imagine that I discover the solution of this problem in the very title of the Book.

No one expects to find any but works of authenticity enumerated in these writers; but to this a work, calling itself the Wisdom of Solomon, both being a fiction and never meant to pass for anything else, could make no pretensions.

To have approximated it to the Holy Books of the nation would have injured the dignity of the Jewish Canon, and brought suspicion on the genuine works of Solomon, while it would have exposed to a charge of forgery a composition which was in itself only an innocent dramatic monologue.

N.
B.This hypothesis possesses all the advantages, and involves none of the absurdity of that which would attribute the 'Ecclesiasticus' to the infamous Jason, the High Priest.