In the counsel of God David the righteous was succeeded by Solomon the wise; for both characters had to be combined in the true king of Israel. The kingdom already set up had now to be consolidated, administered, and maintained. While the demands upon what the Bible calls righteousness were greater than before, righteousness itself could subsist and prevail only by growing to a higher type, and so increasing in subtle complexity of power. The time was past when rude impulses could suffice: without the constant enlightenment of wisdom the efforts of righteousness would be narrow in purpose and poor in result. Nor was the highest sanction wanting to the advance, for both characters were already embraced in the faith in God Himself. As the righteous Lord loved righteousness, so human wisdom came to be regarded as His requirement and His gift, as soon as His own wisdom in the creation of the material world and in the ordering of the ways of men received distinct homage.

Though Israel stood virtually alone in its emphatic exaltation of wisdom as a divine virtue, other nations knew how to admire it for its beauty or prize it for its uses. After a while their own progress led them to perceive that wisdom has no independent existence, but lives by knowledge; and that knowledge must become an object of conscious and sedulous pursuit if wisdom is to attain maturity.