04_Biblica_Collins_Layout 1 01/04/14 11:47 Pagina 81 81 COLOSSIANS 1,17 “HOLD TOGETHER”: A CO-OPTED TERM 6. Conclusions for Wis 1,7 and Sir 43,26 Now we are in a position to see how Wis 1,7 uses sune,cw: “Be- cause the Spirit of the Lord has filled the world, and that which holds all things together [to. sunecon ta. panta] knows what is said”. There , , it is most likely that “the Spirit of the Lord” is “that which holds all things together”, both because of the parallelism between the two lines of the verse, and because the neuter noun pneu/ma is the nearest an- tecedent for the neuter substantival participle, to. sunecon. , Some suggest that Wisdom here reflects “Stoic” vocabulary and thought 39, but this is an overstatement. Lange is more measured when she says that the author’s “expressions and ways of thought were strongly tinged with the prevailing syncretism of different sys- tems of Greek philosophy”; she also notes, “Many of the Stoic ideas which critics find in his work are commonplaces of all religious or philosophical thought, and, like the idea of divine providence, occur in the Old Testament as well as in Plato and the Stoics” 40. The fact that Wisdom has an Alexandrian provenance, and its widely-acknowledged strategy of adapting Hebrew faith to a Hellenis- tic setting, enhance the credibility of this proposal about why Wisdom uses these terms. The point is that the God of whom the “better” philosophers spoke, who made the world and holds it together, is knowable through the wisdom imparted by Israel’s scriptures. This appropriation of Hellenistic terms probably also explains the Greek of Sir 43,26b, “by his word all things hold together [su,gkeitai ta. panta]”. First, I have established that sugkei/mai can be treated , as the equivalent of the passive or intransitive uses of suni,sthmi. Second, the Greek version of Ben Sira comes from Alexandria, and adapts the Hebrew of the translator’s grandfather to that setting. In fact, a Hebrew text is extant for this passage, and is generally taken to represent the original: $alm xlcy wn[ml Because of him the messenger succeeds !wcr l[py wyrbdbw and by his words he works his will 39 E.g., D. WINSTON, The Wisdom of Solomon (AB; New York 1979); J.A.F. GREGG, The Wisdom of Solomon (CBSC; Cambridge 1909). 40 S. LANGE, “The Wisdom of Solomon and Plato”, JBL 55 (1936) 293- 302, at 293, 295.