At this point the poem returns to the theme of verses 15-21: people cannot attain wisdom on their own. This subsection (verses 29-37), like verses 15-21, begins with questions the answer to which is “No one.” As in the previous passage, Good News Translation restructures the questions as statements, which conveniently happens to be the way verse 31 is literally expressed in the Greek. The idea of Wisdom dwelling among the clouds in the sky is found also in Sir 24.4-5; compare also Pro 30.4. Good News Translation renders the first occurrence of the pronoun her as “Wisdom,” and many translators will need to do this. The restructuring by Good News Translation is good, but a bit out of focus. It is not that no one has ever gone up in order to get Wisdom and bring her down, but that no one has ever succeeded—no one has gone up, gotten her, or brought her down. So translators may express the verse as follows:

• No one has ever been able to go up into heaven and bring Wisdom down to earth.

Heaven can sometimes refer simply to the sky, and at other times to the place where God lives. There was no difference between the two places for the ancient writer, so only one word was used. Translators who have to make a distinction may go in either direction here. “Sky” would fit in with imagery of clouds, while “the place where God lives” would be consistent with the idea that Wisdom lives with God. Our model above lessens the difficulty by translating down from the clouds as “down to earth.”

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on The Shorter Books of the Deuterocanon. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2006. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.