The Slavery of Death

by Richard Beck

We should note that Wisdom, as a deuterocanonical book, informs the imaginations of the Orthodox and Catholic traditions but is relatively unknown to many Protestants. And what we find in Wisdom, returning to Genesis 3, is less a description of a “fall from moral perfection” than a story about the etiology of death. To be sure, human disobedience is a part of this story. But the main impulse of the story, given how the Orthodox follow the framing given in texts like those in Wisdom, is less about how the world became infected by sin than how it became infected by death. And looking at the Genesis 3 narrative, we see that the root cause of death isn’t sin, as the devil/serpent actually predates sin. It’s the “envy of the devil” that introduces sin and death into the world.