Perspectives on Israelite Wisdom: Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar 9780567663160, 9780567663191, 9780567663177

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LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/ OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES

618 Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge

Founding Editors David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn

Editorial Board Alan Cooper, John Goldingay, Robert P. Gordon, Norman K. Gottwald, James E. Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers, Carolyn J. Sharp, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, James W. Watts

PERSPECTIVES ON ISRAELITE WISDOM

Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar

Edited by

John Jarick

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © John Jarick and Contributors, 2016 John Jarick has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oxford Old Testament Seminar. Perspectives on Israelite wisdom : proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar / edited by John Jarick. pages cm ISBN 978-0-567-66316-0 (hardback) 1. Wisdom literature–Criticism, interpretation, etc.–Congresses. 2. Bible. Old Testament– Criticism, interpretation, etc.–Congresses. I. Jarick, John, editor. BS1505.52.O94 2015 223’.06–dc23 2015018732 ISBN: HB: 978-0-56766-316-0 PB: 978-0-56768-452-3 ePDF: 978-0-56766-317-7 Series: The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies Typeset by Forthcoming Publications Ltd (www.forthpub.com) To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Preface List of Contributors Abbreviations

ix xi xiii

INTRODUCTION John Jarick

xvii

Part I ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF ISRAELITE WISDOM THE PLACE AND LIMITS OF WISDOM REVISITED Stuart Weeks

3

ETHICS IN THE WISDOM LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT John Barton

24

‘MOTHER IN ISRAEL’: WOMEN AND WISDOM Jenni Williams

38

ORALITY AND THE SAGE: A WORD (PROVERB) TO THE WISE SUFFICES Aulikki Nahkola

56

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BEGINNINGS OF ‘WISDOM LITERATURE’, AND ITS TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY END? Will Kynes 83 Part II THE WISDOM CORPUS OF THE HEBREW BIBLE LITERARY AND LINGUISTIC MATTERS IN THE BOOK OF PROVERBS Gary A. Rendsburg 1

111

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‘THE FEAR OF THE LORD IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM’: CALENDARS, DIVINATION AND STORIES OF TERROR James E. Patrick

148

ONE OR TWO THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT THE UNIVERSE: THE COSMOLOGY OF THE DIVINE SPEECHES IN JOB David J.A. Clines

172

THE CANONICAL TAMING OF JOB (JOB 42.1-6) Terje Stordalen

187

THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF ECCLESIASTES John Jarick

208

IS PATRISTIC EXEGESIS GOOD FOR BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP? JEROME AND GREGORY OF NYSSA ON QOHELET Jennie Grillo

232

AT PLAY IN POTENTIAL SPACE: READING KING QOHELET’S BUILDING EXPERIMENT WITH PSYCHOANALYTIC SPATIAL THEORY Mette Bundvad

254

Part III OTHER TEXTS IN RELATION TO WISDOM ‘I WILL INCLINE MY EAR TO A PROVERB; I WILL SOLVE MY RIDDLE TO THE MUSIC OF THE HARP’ (PSALM 49.4): THE WISDOM TRADITION AND THE PSALMS Susan Gillingham 277 THE SONG OF SONGS: A WISDOM BOOK Edmée Kingsmill SLG

310

WISDOM AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN John Day

336

THE ABSENCE OF WISDOM IN THE WILDERNESS Philip Y. Yoo

353

JEREMIAH, CREATION AND WISDOM Katharine J. Dell

375

1

Contents

HANDEL’S NABAL Deborah W. Rooke

vii

391

BEN SIRA’S TABLE MANNERS AND THE SOCIAL SETTING OF HIS BOOK James K. Aitken

418

BEN SIRA ON FRIENDSHIP: NOTES ON INTERTEXTUALITY AND METHOD James E. Harding

439

Index of References Index of Authors

463 487

1

PREFACE This volume consists of twenty essays which were originally delivered as papers to the Oxford Old Testament Seminar between October 2011 and June 2014, and which have all subsequently been revised and often expanded. The essays examine the wisdom traditions of the Old Testament from a variety of angles, looking at signi¿cant general issues and at speci¿c wisdom writings, as well as a range of texts in conversation with wisdom perspectives. In the tradition of the well-received previous volumes of Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar—King and Messiah in Israel and the Ancient Near East (1998), In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (2004), Temple and Worship in Biblical Israel (2005), and Prophecy and Prophets in Ancient Israel (2010)—this new volume of Perspectives on Israelite Wisdom again brings the scholarship of the Oxford Seminar, here focused on the rich lode of Old Testament wisdom traditions, to a wide readership. Each of the previous series of papers were convened and edited by John Day, who now enjoys a well-deserved retirement from such labours, and I was honoured to take up the baton for this ¿fth series of papers. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Seminar for allowing me to convene the ‘Wisdom series’ over the three academic years in which these papers have been staged in tandem with the regular Seminar programme, and I am grateful to all the contributors—many from within Oxford but also others from further a¿eld who travelled to address the Seminar—for their splendid work on a range of intriguing topics. I also wish to thank the Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies for agreeing to publish the volume, the various staff at Bloomsbury who have been involved with its production, and in particular Duncan Burns for his excellent work as production editor. On many occasions over the years in which these papers were delivered to the Oxford Seminar, my eye would be caught by the inscription above the Victorian-era drinking fountain (near the eastern end of Magdalen Bridge) that stood to the side of my walk to and from work. The inscription is in Latin, like so many Oxford inscriptions, and it reads: Lympha gradit, ruit hora, sagax bibe, carpe fugacem—that is,

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‘The water drips, the hours go by; be warned, drink, catch them ere they Ày’. It always brought to my mind the analogous advice from the Israelite sage Qohelet: ‘It is ¿tting to eat and drink and ¿nd enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of the life God gives us, for this is our lot’ (Eccl. 5.18). It has indeed been enjoyable to toil with colleagues on this project, and I now commend to the reader these collected perspectives on Israelite wisdom that the Oxford Old Testament Seminar has produced. John Jarick Oxford, October 2014

1

CONTRIBUTORS James K. Aitken, Lecturer in Hebrew, Old Testament and Second Temple Studies, University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. John Barton, Emeritus Oriel & Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, University of Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Mette Bundvad, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Biblical Exegesis, University of Copenhagen. David J.A. Clines, Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies, University of Shef¿eld. John Day, Emeritus Professor of Old Testament Studies, University of Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow & Tutor of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Katharine J. Dell, Reader in Old Testament Literature and Theology, University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Susan Gillingham, Professor of Hebrew Bible, University of Oxford, and Fellow & Tutor in Theology, Worcester College, Oxford. Jennie Grillo, Assistant Professor of Old Testament, Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. James E. Harding, Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.

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John Jarick, Departmental Lecturer in Old Testament Studies, University of Oxford. Edmée Kingsmill SLG, Member of the Community of the Sisters of the Love of God, Fairacres, Oxford. Will Kynes, Assistant Professor of Theology, Whitworth University, Spokane, Washington. Aulikki Nahkola, Principal Lecturer in Old Testament, Newbold College of Higher Education, Bracknell. James E. Patrick, Doctoral student in the Faculty of Theology & Religion, University of Oxford. Deborah W. Rooke, Research Fellow in Bible and Music, Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture, and Associate Lecturer in Old Testament Hermeneutics, Regent’s Park College, Oxford. Gary A. Rendsburg, Blanche & Irving Laurie Professor of Jewish History at Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Terje Stordalen, Professor of Theology (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies), University of Oslo. Stuart Weeks, Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew, University of Durham. Jenni Williams, Tutor in Old Testament, Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Philip Y. Yoo, Doctoral student in the Faculty of Theology & Religion, University of Oxford.

1

ABBREVIATIONS AB ABD ACW AfOB AnBib ANE ANET

ARM ASTI ATD AYBRL BASOR BCE

BETL BDB

BHS Bib BibInt BibOr BJS BK BKAT BN BZ BZABR BZAW CAD

CBET

Anchor Bible The Anchor Bible Dictionary (ed. D.N. Freedman; 6 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1992) Ancient Christian Writers Archiv für Orientforschung, Beiheft Analecta biblica Ancient Near East Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ed. J.B. Pritchard; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 3rd edn with Supplement, 1969) Archives royales de Mari Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute Das Alte Testament Deutsch Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Before the Common Era Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium ‘Brown–Driver–Briggs’, i.e. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (ed. F. Brown, S.R. Driver and C.A. Briggs; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907) Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (ed. K. Elliger and W. Rudolph; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelstiftung, 1977) Biblica Biblical Interpretation Biblica et orientalia Brown Judaic Studies Biblisher Kommentar Biblisher Kommentar: Altes Testament Biblische Notizen Biblische Zeitschrift Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für altorientalische und biblische Rechtsgeschichte Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft ‘Chicago Assyrian Dictionary’, i.e. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (21 vols.; Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1956–2010) Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology

xiv CBM CBQ CBQMS CBR CCSL CE

CFThL CIS COS CRINT CSCO D DCH DJD DNWSI DSD E ET

EvT FAT FCB FOTL FRLANT GKC

HACL HALOT

HALOTSE

HB HBS HKAT HSM HThKAT HUCA ICC IEJ Int 1

Perspectives on Israelite Wisdom Classical and Byzantine Monographs Catholic Biblical Quarterly Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Monograph Series Currents in Biblical Research Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina Common Era Clark’s Foreign Theological Library Corpus inscriptionum Semiticarum The Context of Scripture (ed. W.W. Hallo and K.L. Younger; 3 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1997–2002) Compendia rerum iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium Deuteronomist source The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (ed. D.J.A. Clines; 8 vols.; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix Press, 1993–2011) Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Dictionary of the North-West Semitic Inscriptions (ed. J. Hoftijzer and K. Jongeling; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1995) Dead Sea Discoveries Elohist source English translation Evangelische Theologie Forschungen zum Alten Testament Feminist Companion to the Bible The Forms of Old Testament Literature Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments ‘Gesenius–Kautzsch–Cowley’, i.e. Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar (ed. E. Kautzsch, revised and trans. A.E. Cowley; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910) History, Archaeology, and Culture of the Levant Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (ed. L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, J.J. Stamm et al., trans. and ed. M.E.J. Richardson; 5 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000) Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament: Study Edition (ed. L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, J.J. Stamm et al., trans. and ed. M.E.J. Richardson; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2002) Hebrew Bible Herders biblische Studien Handkommentar zum Alten Testament Harvard Semitic Monographs Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament Hebrew Union College Annual International Critical Commentary Israel Exploration Journal Interpretation

Abbreviations J JAAR JAJ JAOS JAOSSup JB

JBL JBTh JE JPSTC JJS JSJ JSJSup JSOT JSOTSup JSPSup JSS JTS KAT KJV

KTU

L LCL LHBOTS LSJ

LXX MT NAB NABRE

NCB NEB NETS

NICOT NIV NJB NJPS NRSV

OBO OBT 1

Yahwist source Journal of the American Academy of Religion Journal of Ancient Judaism Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of the American Oriental Society, Supplement Series Jerusalem Bible Journal of Biblical Literature Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie Yahwist–Elohist combined source Jewish Publication Society Torah Commentary Journal of Jewish Studies Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Periods Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Periods, Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, Supplement Series Journal of Semitic Studies Journal of Theological Studies Kommentar zum Alten Testament Kings James Version Die keilalphabetischer Texte aus Ugarit (ed. M. Dietrich et al.; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2nd edn 1976), ET The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit (ed. M. Dietrich et al.; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2nd edn 1995) Leningrad Codex Loeb Classical Library Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies ‘Liddell–Scott–Jones’, i.e. A Greek–English Lexicon (ed. H.G. Liddell, R. Scott and H.S. Jones; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 9th edn 1968) Septuagint Masoretic Text New American Bible New American Bible, Revised Edition New Century Bible New English Bible New English Translation of the Septuagint New International Commentary on the Old Testament New International Version New Jerusalem Bible New Jewish Publication Society translation New Revised Standard Version Orbis biblicus et orientalis Overtures to Biblical Theology

xv

xvi OED OG OL OTG OTL OTM OTS OTT P PIBA RB REB RSV RV

SAA SAUT SBL SBLDS SBLMS SBLSCS SBS SBT SHR SJOT SJT ST STDJ TB TDOT

TEV

TLZ TOTC TRu TTFL TynBul UTB VT VTSup WBC WMANT WO WTJ ZABR ZAW ZB, AT 1

Perspectives on Israelite Wisdom The Oxford English Dictionary Old Greek version Old Latin version Old Testament Guides Old Testament Library Oxford Theological Monographs Oudtestamentische Studiën Old Testament Theology Priestly source Proceedings of the Irish Biblical Association Revue biblique Revised English Version Revised Standard Version Revised Version State Archives of Assyria Studien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Society of Biblical Literature Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series Society of Biblical Literature Septuagint and Cognate Studies Stuttgarter Bibelstudien Studies in Biblical Theology Studies in the History of Religions Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Scottish Journal of Theology Studia Theologica Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah Theologische Bücherei Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (ed. G.J. Botterweck and H. Ringreen; trans. J.T. Willis et al.; 15 vols.; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974–2006) Today’s English Version (= Good News Bible) Theologische Literaturzeitung Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries Theologische Rundschau Theological Translation Fund Library Tyndale Bulletin Uni-Taschenbücher Vetus Testamentum Vetus Testamentum, Supplements Word Biblical Commentary Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Die Welt des Orients Westminster Theological Journal Zeitschrift für altorientalische und biblische Rechtsgeschichte Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zürcher Bibelkommentare, Altes Testament

INTRODUCTION John Jarick

The wisdom traditions of the Old Testament are examined from a variety of angles in this collection of studies. The ‘place and limits’ of wisdom, the slipperiness of the concept of ‘wisdom literature’, the transmission of advice for living, classical approaches to interpretive questions, and cutting-edge modern perspectives on a number of Old Testament books are all to be found here. The collection begins with ¿ve essays on particular issues in the study of Israelite wisdom, the ¿rst being an assessment by Stuart Weeks of the ‘place and limits’ of wisdom, made ¿fty years after Walther Zimmerli’s famous article on that topic. Weeks contends that there are important lessons to be learned from what Zimmerli got right—his attention to the distinctive concerns of wisdom—and from what he got wrong—his surrendering of wisdom to the narrative of salvation history and his description of wisdom theology as a creation theology. The principal problem that Zimmerli was trying to address—the fundamental differences in outlook and belief between wisdom and historical literature— can now be explored from the perspective of more recent scholarship. Weeks notes that although the wisdom books are undoubtedly dif¿cult and idiosyncratic, they offer to theologians a direct engagement with signi¿cant theological and moral issues, some of which can be traced back in related foreign texts to the earliest human literature that we possess, and they do so using a universalistic and functionally monotheistic type of discourse that makes it straightforward to consider them alongside more modern theologies. The issue of ethics in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament is then considered by John Barton. Scholars have debated whether wisdom represents a ‘class’ ethic, and how far wisdom literature in ancient Israel was religious: the ethics to be found in that literature may not have been universal in ancient Israel, and although wisdom ethics may always have been theological in a loose sense, it was probably only in a late period

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that it came to be aligned with the distinctives of Israelite belief. Wisdom did not operate with the notion of ethics as a set of divine decrees, but rather saw moral obligation as deriving from an order immanent in the world. Indeed the wisdom literature shows signs of thinking along lines not far removed from virtue ethics, in its emphasis on training and instruction, in its concern with what ‘works’ in human conduct, and in its presentation of a moral vision. There is a rich vein of ethical thinking in Old Testament wisdom literature, and there is much there that Aristotle could have assented to, had he known it. In an investigation of ‘women and wisdom’, Jenni Williams notes that the Old Testament portrays women as well as men as being capable of the active wisdom which seeks to make life comprehensible and manageable, but there are particular constraints regarding how and where women exercise wisdom. Williams considers wisdom in the household— investigating the cases of Manoah’s wife in Judges 13, Rahab in Joshua 2, and Abigail in 1 Samuel 25—and wisdom in the public place— scrutinizing the stories of the ‘wise women’ of Tekoa and Abel in 2 Samuel 14 and 20 and the portrayal of Deborah in Judges 4–5—before turning to the book of Proverbs. The latter book appears to understand the wisdom of women as key to an ordered life, and yet the extent to which women can take Wisdom as a model is heavily circumscribed by the orientation of the imagery deployed in the book. In particular, Proverbs 1–9 indicates that women must be wise, but, by the nature of its address to a son, it does not offer a perspective on how a woman exercises her wisdom or what a mother’s teaching entails. In a study of ‘orality and the sage’, Aulikki Nahkola aims to go some way to remedying the neglect that the book of Proverbs has suffered in orality studies, by bringing to bear on it some of the bene¿ts derived from paremiology, the interdisciplinary branch of scholarship dedicated to studying proverbs as proverbs—that is, as originally oral sayings that represent a universal and well-documented genre. After a brief introduction to the discipline of paremiology, Nahkola discusses two issues in some detail: the much-debated problem of contradictory proverbs—on which is brought to bear the paremiological perspective that apparent contradictions in oral sayings illuminate the complexities and uncertainties of the life of the people purveying the sayings—and the possibility of using proverbs to understand the worldview of their users—for which paremiological methods are applied to investigate positive and negative views of speech in the book of Proverbs. Studies of this nature can bring new insights into the culture and values of the people in Old Testament times. 1

Introduction

xix

The classi¿cation of a group of biblical texts as ‘Wisdom Literature’ began in nineteenth-century scholarship, Will Kynes discovers, and was generally assumed throughout the twentieth century. But the de¿nition of ‘Wisdom Literature’ is so vague that it invites interpreters to import their own modern presuppositions into the texts to ¿ll it out, and accordingly much interpretation of ‘wisdom traditions’ stands on shaky foundations. Kynes contends that a better approach would be to treat ‘wisdom’ in the Hebrew Bible as a concept, similar to ‘holiness’ or ‘righteousness’, instead of a genre. Thus, instead of starting with an ill-de¿ned and extrinsically imposed corpus of ‘Wisdom Literature’ for the de¿nition of the idea and then extending the search across the canon, this would involve beginning with the concepts now associated with ‘wisdom’ as they appear across the canon, and even throughout the ancient Near East, and then investigating how they contribute both to the so-called Wisdom Literature and to other texts as well. This approach would facilitate a reintegration of Wisdom with the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Notwithstanding that questioning of a ‘wisdom corpus’ per se, the collection of studies brought together here ¿nds it useful to group together a number of studies focused on issues in particular books customarily associated with wisdom traditions. There are two such papers on the book of Proverbs, the ¿rst by Gary Rendsburg, examining literary and linguistic matters in the book. Rendsburg notes that the language of Proverbs departs from standard Biblical Hebrew in manifest ways, and that these differences suggest that a northern Israelite literary composition was transferred to the southern realm of Judah. Certain features may also suggest that the book—in whole or in part—emanates from the early monarchy. Particular linguistic issues investigated in this study are alliteration (especially instances involving rare words), wordplay or double meaning, negation, and repetition with variation. Speci¿c instances are also scrutinized of Janus parallelism (in Prov. 31.21-22), double polysemy (31.19), bilingual wordplay (31.26-27), visual wordplay (1.10), an Arabism (30.31), and Egyptian inÀuence (22.19-20); and the wordplay to be seen in ‘the words of King Lemuel’ (31.1-9) is also examined. An Appendix to the paper lists lexical and grammatical features of northern Hebrew identi¿able in the book of Proverbs as a whole. The expression ‘the fear of the LORD’ is found in two major literary contexts within the Hebrew Bible, namely the Wisdom literature and the Deuteronomistic literature, which have been thought to represent two independent understandings of the expression. However, James Patrick argues in his essay that the book of Proverbs implicitly presupposes a

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familiarity with the Deuteronomic revelation of ‘the LORD’ in the Exodus and at Mount Horeb, an argument he makes on the basis of three different lines of reasoning, all centred on the use of the key phrase: ¿rstly, the structural composition of Proverbs 1–24, in which ‘the fear of the LORD’ appears at key points in the composition; secondly, the interpretation of the literary ¿gure of Woman Wisdom, in which reference to the Torah itself can be discerned; and thirdly, the signi¿cance of foundational stories as an interpretive framework for the term ‘fear’. Proverbs and Deuteronomy are shown to be closely connected in their ‘fear of the LORD’. Two essays on the book of Job then follow, the ¿rst by David Clines on the divine speeches in the book (Job 38–41). Clines notes that when Yahweh responds to Job’s complaints that the world is not governed in justice, the deity entirely ignores that issue of justice and con¿nes himself to painting a picture of the universe as it is; humans are almost completely absent from these divine speeches, as are moral questions in general. Clines shows how the poet of Job, with the lightest of touches and with never-failing artistic imagination, gives us an unparalleled tour of the natural world. Thus readers of the book are deÀected from Job’s complaint, and their attention is drawn to how the universe is designed and managed and how its animal inhabitants live and are provided for. The poet thus implies that in the divine scale of values, justice is not of capital consequence. What matters to God in the world he has created is not whether its humans are treated according to their deserts, but the matter of the maintenance of the vast and complex enterprise, so much larger than the humans who form a mere fragment of it. Job’s response to the divine speeches, in Job 42.1-6, is the subject of the essay by Terje Stordalen, who observes that readers throughout the centuries have recognized the importance of this passage. Indeed, more often than not these six verses have been seen as the one passage that de¿nes the reading of the entire book. The text is, however, loaded with textual, philological, and rhetorical dif¿culties, which Stordalen explores. His investigation reveals how ‘standard’ interpretation applies a reading pro¿le across these dif¿culties, a pro¿le that consistently renders Job to be on the ‘tame’ end of the interpretive spectrum available in the Hebrew text. This reÀects a canonical dynamic that extends from the Septuagint through to exegetes of the twenty-¿rst century. Stordalen asserts that biblical scholarship needs to recognize the effect of this canonical dynamic and to reÀect more self-consciously upon the professional and critical implications of its presence in scholarship. 1

Introduction

xxi

The book of Ecclesiastes receives three treatments, the ¿rst being my own contribution to this collection, in which I put forward the idea that Ecclesiastes can be seen as having been structured along the lines of an ancient Greek public speech. After an epigraph or superscription (Eccl. 1.1) and a statement of the work’s thesis or proposition (1.2), the book adheres to the four classic parts of a speech: ¿rstly a prooemion or exordium (1.3-11) introducing the subject-matter with a highly evocative poem; secondly a diegesis or narration (1.12–2.26) setting out the experiences and deductions of the speaker; thirdly the pistis or argumentation (3.1–11.8), the main body of the work, itemising the manifold evidence for the deductions made; and fourthly the epilogue or peroration (11.9– 12.7) directly addressing young people and applying the lessons of the foregoing argumentation. The thesis or proposition (12.8) is repeated at the end of the speech, and this is followed in the ‘published’ document by a hypograph or subscription (12.9-14) providing some editorial words of evaluation and caution for the reader. Attention to the work of Jerome (who completed a commentary on Ecclesiastes in 389 CE) and Gregory of Nyssa (who preached eight homilies on the book around 380 CE) repays the interest of Hebrew Bible scholars, Jennie Grillo af¿rms, on account of worthwhile exegesis: they offer creative and strange readings of the text which are nevertheless usable, if only as provocations to see an emphasis we might otherwise have missed. The comparative models that they bring to bear on the text are good to think with, and although those models come from the Christian tradition, they need not necessarily be used to construct a Christian reading. Moreover, Grillo points out, these early Christian voices can in fact correct a great deal of later Christian reading of Ecclesiastes which has tended to offer a largely negative assessment of the book; in quite surprising ways Jerome and Gregory are outside what has come to be the dominant Christian paradigm of reading Ecclesiastes. Interpreters struggle to see a relationship between the opening cosmological poem of Ecclesiastes (1.4-11) and the royal ¿ction that follows it (1.12–2.20). Mette Bundvad explores the ¿eld of spatial theory as a useful methodological perspective for the reading of the relationship between the two passages, and considers the character of the space established by the king in the royal ¿ction, using Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic work on potential space as a theoretical perspective. The royal ¿ction can thus be seen as a response to the introductory poem, and a central part of this response is spatial: the king builds a micro-world of houses and gardens, which, in contrast to the cosmos depicted in the poem, allows for human Àourishing. The building-works can therefore be

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understood as an integral part of Qohelet’s failed attempt to live meaningfully and reÀectively within the strictures of the divinely established cosmos. Attention then turns to other texts in relation to wisdom, the ¿rst such text being the book of Psalms, on which Susan Gillingham notes that scholarship has often posed the question of what the wisdom tradition tells us about the psalms, and has concluded either that there are no wisdom psalms, or that there are some such psalms, or that the entire Psalter has been shaped in its ¿nal stages as a wisdom book. After reviewing those contentions, Gillingham poses the question of what the psalms tell us about the wisdom tradition, in terms of three topics: wisdom as a particular mode of writing (a consideration of what might be learned from the psalms about wisdom as a type of literature); wisdom as a particular mode of thinking (whether the psalms tell us anything about wisdom as a distinctive intellectual tradition); and wisdom as a particular mode of living (a consideration of whether there is any evidence in the psalms to suggest that wisdom has been preserved and transmitted in particular specialist circles). This threefold assessment brings to light two contentious ‘wisdom issues’, namely that of wisdom expressed as cultic practice and that of the relationship between anthropocentric and theocentric wisdom. The spirit and language of the books designated ‘Wisdom Literature’, Edmée Kingsmill argues, can also be seen in the Song of Songs, an extraordinary work of a poetic genius. Under examination here is the metaphorical language of the Song (including its ascription or dedication to Solomon) and its links with the books of Proverbs (in terms of the ‘strange woman’ imagery and usages of ‘wine’, ‘milk’ and ‘honey’), Sirach (in terms of the language concerning wisdom in Sir. 24) and the Odes of Solomon (in terms of the usages of ‘breasts’ and ‘love’). Also explored are several indications that the author of the Song lived in an ascetic and cultural milieu, and attention is given to the richly symbolic creatures evoked in the adjuration ‘by the gazelles or by the hinds of the ¿eld’ (Song 2.7 and 3.5). Five aspects of the Garden of Eden story (Gen. 2–3) in connection with wisdom motifs are examined in John Day’s contribution. Firstly, the notion of the two special trees in the garden and the meaning of ‘the knowledge of good and evil’. Secondly, the redeployment of wisdom and the man in Eden in the variant account in Ezek. 28.12-19. Thirdly, the issue of whether the serpent was ‘wise’ or ‘crafty’. Fourthly, an investigation of ‘the tree of life’ in the book of Proverbs. And ¿fthly, a wider consideration of the relation of wisdom to the Garden of Eden story more generally. Overall, the story displays an apparently ambiguous attitude to 1

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wisdom: on the one hand, the narrative employs a number of words indicating indebtedness to the wisdom tradition, but on the other hand Adam and Eve are punished for eating of a tree which conveyed knowledge. The message seems to be that humans should seek wisdom not through human autonomy but rather in obedience to God. The words ‘wisdom’ and ‘wise’ occur in several narratives in the Pentateuch, not least in the story of Joseph (Gen. 41) and in the story of the construction of the tabernacle (Exod. 36), but after the tabernacle is built, neither word occurs again until the book of Deuteronomy. This raises the question, explored by Philip Yoo, of why there is a cessation of wisdom expressions when the laws are given in Leviticus and the Israelites travel through the wilderness in Numbers. It would seem that, given the paradigm that the vast majority of the wilderness generation did not survive the wilderness journey to the promised land due to their intransigence against Yahweh even after witnessing their deity’s spectacular acts, the protagonists in the narrative cannot be called ‘wise’ or be described as having ‘wisdom’. Nonetheless, Deuteronomy reshapes its inherited traditions and places a high value on the place of wisdom among the generation that is about to inherit Canaan. While not suggesting in any way that the book of Jeremiah is wisdom literature, Katharine Dell notes that certain characteristics of the wisdom genre can be found within its pages, as part of a rich tapestry of inÀuences upon the traditions represented in the book. Dell also addresses the elusive questions of who ‘the wise’ are that Jeremiah critiques so vociferously and why he does so. It becomes clear that creation themes and interaction with the wisdom worldview play an integral part in the book of Jeremiah. Indeed these appear to be key formative elements of Jeremiah’s message, inseparable from his integrated concerns, and accordingly they should not simply be lost sight of under layers of redactional theory and piecemeal treatment. Insofar as the wisdom element can be seen as a formative element of the thought of the prophet, that would suggest a position for wisdom as an early formative doctrine in Israelite thought as a whole. A fascinating piece of reception history then comes under investigation, as Deborah Rooke looks at the oratorio Nabal of 1764. Appearing ¿ve years after the death of George Frideric Handel, the work comprised words by Handel’s last librettist, Thomas Morell, set to existing Handelian music. A consideration of how and where the notion of wisdom appears in the biblical story of Nabal in 1 Samuel 25, followed by a consideration of the oratorio’s libretto in the light of that reading, reveals that, although Morell’s story-line adheres quite closely to that of the biblical version, there are subtle changes. In Morell’s retelling, David is

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a righteous king in need, and this is what should determine how Nabal responds to him; but Nabal is a churlish fool who incurs divine punishment, while his wife Abigail is the blessed embodiment of prudence. The moral of the story, in Morell’s terms, is that gratitude to God will be rewarded, but that ingratitude is de¿ance of God and will result in punishment—a suitably wise moral for the biblical tale. The collection comes to an end with two studies of the deuterocanonical work of Ben Sira. The ¿rst of these, by James Aitken, scrutinizes the two poems in Sirach 31 and 32 (chs. 34 and 35 in the Greek numbering) which discuss correct behaviour at symposia and provide a helpful balance of advice against gluttony followed by more speci¿c behavioural recommendations. These two poems on dining etiquette are representative and informative of the wider discussion of the problem over Ben Sira’s setting and historical context. It seems that he accepts symposia as the norm, and that he has a particular acquaintance with such dining. He is not opposed to the phenomenon, but wishes to guide his readers towards the proper behaviour of individuals and to castigate excessive habits. In this his efforts are similar to other presentations in Greek and Roman literature; no division should be made between Ben Sira and the classical world on this matter, since both use the feast as a model or framework for de¿ning good practice. In the ¿nal essay, James Harding deals with texts concerned with ‘friendship’ (especially Sir. 6.17; 7.21; 31[34].2, 15; and 37.1-6) in order to explore how Ben Sira relates to other texts with which its author and earliest translator may have independently come into contact. The question of intertextuality in Ben Sira cannot be reduced to identifying an inÀuence from particular biblical passages. What is required is a caseby-case analysis of the relationship between the manuscripts and versions of both Ben Sira and the works that now form the Hebrew Bible, and of the different patterns of inÀuence of Jewish and non-Jewish works on both the Hebrew of Ben Sira and its earliest translation. Concern to distinguish methodologically between Hebrew original and Greek translation then raises key questions about the book precisely as a Greek text, for which the translator’s intertextual world of reference may have differed from that of the Hebrew original. Such, then, are the papers gathered in this collection. While it may be too much to hope that every insight or assertion of the various scholars assembled in these pages will delight every reader, the participants in the Oxford Old Testament Seminar put these studies forward in a spirit of enthusiasm for the Israelite wisdom traditions, mindful not least of the 1

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ancient assertion that ‘Happy are those who ¿nd wisdom, and those who get understanding, for her income is better than silver, and her revenue better than gold… She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy’ (Prov. 3.13-14, 18). May readers ¿nd both enlightenment and enjoyment, and ¿nd much to instruct and intrigue them, in this volume’s perspectives on Israelite wisdom.

Part I

ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF ISRAELITE WISDOM

1

THE PLACE AND LIMITS OF WISDOM REVISITED Stuart Weeks

Although it might be unfair to cast the Law and the Prophets, by implication, in the role of the ugly sisters, it would be hard to deny that wisdom literature was for a long time the Cinderella of biblical studies. In his 1697 epilogue to the story of that unhappy girl, Charles Perrault drew the pragmatic moral that: It’s no doubt a very good thing, to have spirit, courage, breeding, good sense, and other such qualities, of which one receives a share from heaven. Although you may be beautiful for having them, however, they will be useless for your advancement if you don’t have godfathers or godmothers to assert them.1

And so it was, indeed, for wisdom literature, which, lacking any fairy godparent to get it to the ball, mostly languished in the kitchen for decades during the mid- to late twentieth century, despite its many acknowledged virtues. In a period that focused so much upon the big theological themes of salvation history and covenant, its ideas were marginalized both by the recognition that it showed little interest in those themes, and by the belief that the wisdom books expressed foreign ideas that were barely compatible with them, if at all.2 It is against this general background that we must view Walther Zimmerli’s famous essay on the ‘place and limits’ of wisdom, which is now celebrating ¿fty years since its original 1963 publication. An 1. ‘C’est sans doute un grand avantage / D’avoir de l’esprit, du courage, / De la naissance, du bon sens, / Et d’autres semblables talens / Qu’on reçoit du Ciel en partage; / Mais vous aurez beau les avoir, / Pour votre avancement ce seront choses vaines / Si vous n’avez, pour les faire valoir, / Ou des parrains, ou des marraines.’ The story was originally published in Perrault 1698. 2. These ideas ¿nd their clearest expression in the work of Horst Dietrich Preuß, published a few years after the article by Walther Zimmerli on which I shall be focusing here: see especially Preuß 1970; 1974: 171-77.

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Perspectives on Israelite Wisdom

English translation followed a year later in the Scottish Journal of Theology (Zimmerli 1964): this is not always very close to the German, is sometimes rather cryptic, and has to be used with caution, but it surely helped to bring Zimmerli’s opinions to a wider audience, as did the reprint of this version in James Crenshaw’s 1976 collection of important essays on wisdom (Crenshaw [ed.] 1976: 314-26). Subsequently, this study has been cited very widely, because although it was by no means an attempt to overturn existing paradigms, it did try to make of them something more positive, and although its actual conclusion picks up virtually nothing of importance said previously in the essay, we can ¿nd, earlier in the discussion, a genuine, if rather back-handed, attempt to recover wisdom for the mainstream. This was not something that even the high priest of salvation history, Gerhard von Rad, had attempted seriously in his inÀuential Theology of the Old Testament, published a few years before (von Rad 1957–60; 1962–65), and when von Rad subsequently turned his attention more speci¿cally to wisdom literature, his approach was essentially to portray wisdom as a quite separate tradition (von Rad 1970; 1972). There are some important lessons still to be learned both from what Zimmerli gets right and, I think, from what he gets wrong, so I want to begin by summarizing very brieÀy the argument that he advances, and then using that argument as a basis to explore, from the perspective of more recent scholarship, the principal problem that he is trying to address. Zimmerli starts with what is, in effect, a summary of the salvationhistorical position, emphasizing that the theological pronouncements of Old Testament faith arise from a fundamental historical encounter between God and Israel, which underpins both of the central sections of the canon, the Law and the Prophets. Wisdom’s lack of any connection to this divine history with Israel is itself simply ‘astonishing’, according to the English version, but made ‘all the more surprising’ in the original, speci¿cally by the fact that the account in 1 Kings 3 of Solomon’s endowment with wisdom by God offered an opportunity for such a link, which is spurned by both Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (Zimmerli 1963: 122; 1964: 147). That rejection demonstrates the very different ‘structure’ of a literature that speaks freely about people and kings, but not about Yahweh’s chosen people, their anointed king, or the Davidic dynasty with its own special promise. For Zimmerli, therefore, wisdom literature does not simply stand outside the salvation-historical paradigm, but is shaped by its own very different concerns. He elaborates these at some length, and in terms that have become familiar: Old Testament wisdom literature aligns itself ¿rmly to the horizons of creation, and its 1

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theology is creation theology.3 It is not without some inÀuence from Israelite thought, but operates within the constraints of belief in a comprehensive order, exempli¿ed by the Egyptian concept of ma!at. Its purpose, however, is not to serve that belief directly, but to further the human mastery of life, both through apprehension and de¿nition of the world, and through more practical advice about how to behave, based on such observations. Ultimately, although it talks about many other things in its quest for comprehension, including nature and the created world, wisdom literature is all about how humans should live, and everything else is subordinated to that purpose. Zimmerli puts the problem well, although he offers nothing very new either in his account of wisdom’s distinctiveness, or in his explanation of that distinctiveness. What makes this such an interesting essay is that he then proceeds, however, neither to reject the wisdom literature on the grounds that it is different, nor to downplay its difference. The mastery of the world that he has identi¿ed as central becomes instead the way in which wisdom literature must be joined to the rest of the biblical tradition, and Zimmerli points to the J account of creation as the place where such human mastery is permitted and legitimized. There God not only gives life and freedom to humans, but also shows them his creations, and permits them to name the animals, so that they themselves apprehend and impose order upon a part of creation. What Israelite wisdom does, therefore, is in response to a divine command, even if its own admonitions are less authoritative than the injunctions of biblical law, and this leads to a curious inner tension, between, on the one hand, a con¿dence that the wise know how to act and what will happen, which is gained from such authorization and from attunement to order in the world, and, on the other, a knowledge that reality is always subordinate to God’s will, which is derived from wisdom’s consciousness of creation. On this understanding, wisdom ideas ¿nd a place in the biblical narrative that is at once both more fundamental and less authoritative than that occupied by ideas of history and covenant: it is a place all the same, and Zimmerli’s achievement, beside establishing a characterization of wisdom thought as creation theology that has persisted to this day, is to offer a type of reconciliation that involves no signi¿cant movement away from the common interpretations either of historical or of wisdom literature. 3. Zimmerli (1963: 123) says ‘Die Weisheit des Alten Testamentes hält sich ganz entschlossen im Horizonte der Schöpfung’. The English version (Zimmerli 1964: 148) says something rather different again, which has been widely quoted: ‘Wisdom thinks resolutely within the framework of a theology of creation’.

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The second part of the essay, on the limit or boundary of wisdom, is disappointing in comparison. BrieÀy, Zimmerli sets against the development of an increasingly con¿dent and dogmatic wisdom, which he sees manifested in Proverbs 1–9, the portrayal in Ecclesiastes of a world that is more ¿xed and impervious to human apprehension. Qohelet serves as a sort of border guard, who prevents wisdom from going so far as to set constraints on the freedom of God. Faced with the impossibility of mastering a world that cannot be grasped, he demands that humans settle for those things—the ‘portion’—that God grants them freely, and do not try to comprehend divine action within their own plans. Zimmerli’s own conclusion, however, imposes a different type of limitation, and in a ¿nal paragraph marked more by gravity than by clarity—at times, it is close to meaningless in the English version—he suggests both that the creation theology of wisdom needs to expose itself to faith in a creator God who has freely committed himself, and that wisdom will ¿nd ful¿lment only by grasping the ‘portion’ of God’s historical encounter with Israel. Wisdom has a place in biblical thought, therefore, but should really surrender itself to the narrative of salvation history (and, judging by the terms he uses, also to the broader principles of Lutheran theology). The intellectual landscape of biblical theology has been transformed in the half-century since this essay was published; even within a decade, indeed, the centrality of salvation history had come under sustained attack, and there were calls for wisdom to be given a more prominent position in biblical theology—albeit calls based on a perception of wisdom’s humanism that owed much to Zimmerli and von Rad. Whilst the salvation-historical model sits licking its wounds today, wisdom literature is certainly out of the kitchen, and although it is dif¿cult to say how far the rush of studies on that literature over the last twenty years merely reÀects a wider phenomenon in publishing, it would also be dif¿cult to deny that wisdom is now wearing her party dress. Much of the recent scholarship on wisdom, however, has been concerned to build its own bridges and to recover some important understandings that had become displaced or underplayed: far from being embodiments of some foreign ideology, merely seeking a place in Jewish thought, the wisdom texts are now quite commonly portrayed as intrinsically Jewish themselves, steeped in the language and ideas of other biblical literature. In a climate that accepts or even welcomes theological diversity, there is no longer any signi¿cant pressure to align those texts with some unitary concept of biblical theology. Attempts to re-incorporate them, however, bring a new and arguably more urgent pressure to deal with the sort of 1

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problems that Zimmerli discussed, and they give continuing relevance to his work. To put the problem in a nutshell, the closer we make the relationships between wisdom and historical literature, the harder it becomes to explain what seem to be their fundamental differences in outlook and belief. If Proverbs actually had set its watch by Amenemope, then its lack of interest in covenant is not really surprising, merely inconvenient for the biblical theologian; if, on the other hand, it looked to Deuteronomy, then that absence looks more like a deliberate and calculated rejection.4 There is a tension between the resemblances and the differences to be found among our texts, and the more that we stress the resemblances, the greater that tension becomes. This problem can become obscured if we deal too loosely with the concepts involved, and Zimmerli’s perception of the dif¿culties has sometimes been attacked on questionable grounds. In his own revisiting of this article, for example, Jamie Grant tried to argue that covenant may not be the centre of attention, but that ‘the concept of covenant subtly inÀuences the didactic thrust of the Wisdom books’ (Grant 2003: 109). His key examples are Job, who ‘believes in a Covenant God who has bound himself to relationship in a particular way’, and Qohelet, whose disappointed expectation of order and justice in the world arises out of the ‘history of Israel’s dealings with Yahweh’ (Grant 2003: 109). I am not sure myself that either claim is true, but even if we allow them, Grant is simply sticking the label ‘covenant’ on to themes that are widely acknowledged to be important to the wisdom writers: God’s relationship with individuals, and divine justice. He is not the ¿rst to do so, and in one of the earliest studies to engage with Zimmerli, David Hubbard 4. It is principally the absence of key Deuteronomic ideas in Proverbs, in fact, that leads David Carr to propose that Deuteronomy is the later work: ‘I suggest that it is easier to see how one might move from the general parental teaching seen in Proverbs to heightened claims for a more ancient divine wisdom in Deuteronomy than it is to explain why someone would move from the divinely-revealed wisdom of Deuteronomy to the parental wisdom of Proverbs… The authors of the passages in Deuteronomy, authors who were schooled in and had memorized passages… reappropriated their language to make heightened claims for the Deuteronomic “Torah,” a teaching now claimed to be yet older (Mosaic) and more divine than the “teaching” of the father and mother celebrated in traditional wisdom literature…’ (Carr 2011: 419). Although I think he is wrong, and that his approach rests on a reductionist reading of Prov. 1–9, this is not the place in which to engage properly with Carr’s ideas. If any or all of Proverbs is indeed earlier than Deuteronomy, a possibility which cannot be denied in principle, then the problem shifts to the continued transmission of the book, and subsequent interpretation of it in ways that are clearly non-Deuteronomic (on which see Weeks 2007: 158-69).

8

Perspectives on Israelite Wisdom

declared that ‘there is a sense in which all biblical literature is covenant literature, because it is the literature of the covenant people’ (Hubbard 1966: 16, italics original). Of course, if all biblical themes have to be rooted in biblical ideas of covenant, then we may struggle both to explain the importance of some of those themes in the literature of other countries, and to ¿nd any real meaning in the term ‘covenant’, but Grant is anyway missing the point. What Zimmerli actually observes—quite rightly—is that biblical wisdom literature seems to ¿nd no place for the particular idea of covenant that we commonly associate with Deuteronomy and related materials: a covenant between Yahweh and a whole nation, that is not simply presumed in relationships, but formally drawn up and accepted. As it happens, the wisdom literature shows no particular interest in other types of covenant either, but if we did discover some previously overlooked reference to priestly covenants, say, or to the covenant with Noah, it would not change the point that biblical wisdom writers neither appeal directly to the Deuteronomic covenant as a motive for behaviour, nor apparently take account of that covenant in their expectation of outcomes. Grant may be on ¿rmer ground when he goes on to pick up Michael Fox’s point about the importance of ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’ for Qohelet and of other terms linked to covenant in Proverbs (Grant 2003: 109-10), but if we are indeed dealing here with the vocabulary of covenant without any explicit concept of covenant, then those words merely exemplify the problem at hand. We must be no less careful when it comes to the question of history. I have argued elsewhere myself that Proverbs 1–9 draws on ideas about ‘foreign women’ that it may have derived from historiographical texts, or at least from contemporary debates linked to such texts (Weeks 2007: 135-41), while Jennie Barbour has more recently made a case for Ecclesiastes to have been shaped around subtle references to key ¿gures and events in the history of Israel.5 If neither of those examples is deemed persuasive, then we can always point to the superscriptions in Proverbs, and the contexts which they imply, as evidence that the wisdom books are not wholly devoid of historical references (see, e.g., Schultz 1997: 300). Nobody, so far as I am aware, claims that they are. What they do lack, however, and Zimmerli is again surely right about this, is any clear interest in using Israelite history to understand God or the world, let alone any concern with a Deuteronomistic analysis of the past. The fate of individuals is never understood against the backdrop of 5. Barbour 2012. Particular passages, of course, have frequently been interpreted as historical references, and an earlier, rather different attempt to see the whole book in these terms was made in Kaiser 1823. 1

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divine action to assist or to punish Israel as a whole in wisdom literature, while people, indeed, are not considered collectively as ‘the people’. Once more, although there may be evidence to suggest an awareness of the historical books among the wisdom writers, this does not translate into any apparent incorporation of the ideas that underpin those books. If we simply extend the sense of ideas like covenant and history, then it becomes easy to ¿nd them in wisdom literature, but dif¿cult to attach any signi¿cance to the discovery—and that is a problem, of course, that has plagued the discussion of those ideas in other contexts. Indeed, what made their absence in wisdom seem so remarkable to Zimmerli and others was in part the fact that they had already been extended to most other biblical literature, whether or not that literature showed an explicit concern with them: it was to be another six years before Lothar Perlitt’s work compelled any widespread re-evaluation of the Deuteronomic covenant’s antiquity and centrality (Perlitt 1969). That is an issue which I shall touch on later; the important point for the moment is that, although the absence of such national and covenantal ideas might be less astonishing to us now, it is a real absence all the same. Zimmerli is right to pinpoint its signi¿cance, and we should not obscure it by trying to dilute the concepts or to read more than is there into wisdom literature’s sparse historical references. This is not, then, an area in which more recent research must lead us to discard Zimmerli’s observations, despite the criticisms sometimes levelled at them. His corresponding description of wisdom theology as a creation theology, on the other hand, seems deeply problematic even though it accords with many more modern claims to the same effect. For Zimmerli, there are two key aspects to this description. First, wisdom embraces a concept of world order, characterized in terms of the Egyptian ma!at, and secondly it is concerned with human apprehension and mastery of the world. That the latter should relate to creation is important for his argument: it gives him his link to Genesis and to the divine commissioning of humans. However, it is far from clear that anything Zimmerli says about wisdom gives it an intrinsic connection to creation, as such. In Egypt, ma!at is linked to the basic and pervasive order or equilibrium which enables there to be a world instead of chaos: the establishment of ma!at is necessarily, therefore, an aspect of creation, but ma!at is not itself creative, and the focus of Egyptian thought is upon the maintenance of ma!at. It is highly improbable, for many reasons, that Jewish wisdom literature inherited ma!at from Egypt; if it did, however, it was not inheriting some sort of creation theology, and it is problematic even to describe the concept as theological. The arguments for any other

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idea of world-order in the wisdom literature are extremely speculative, but they are usually set in terms of laws or mechanisms built into the world (Weeks 2010: 112-13), which are extremely dif¿cult to reconcile with statements in Proverbs about divine control, let alone with the ideas presented in Job and Ecclesiastes. As for human mastery of the world, this refers to little more than wisdom’s concern with the human ability to survive and prosper. To be sure, Zimmerli picks up Albrecht Alt’s idea (Alt 1951; 1976), linking onomastica to the account of Solomon’s wisdom in 2 Kgs 5.13 (ET 4.33) and to a supposed sort of encyclopaedic nature wisdom, but that idea is itself misguided, and has nothing to do, in any case, with the wisdom literature that we actually possess (Fox 1986; Weeks 1994: 111-13). The developments that Zimmerli proposes in the second half of his essay are loosely linked to both these ideas of creation and mastery, but involve a profound misreading of the texts. The wisdom that is made so prominent in Proverbs 1–9 may be personi¿ed, but her promises are of understanding and a proper fear of God, not of security and mastery through assimilation of an order within which God must act. Qohelet, in turn, may well emphasize the limits of human understanding, but he too looks to fear of God as the best hope for humans (7.18; 8.12-13), and the fact that what God gives may limit our achievement is an aspect of the more general limitations that he sees in the world, not a key to his theology, or something redemptive within that world. Although it has been picked up by many other writers who see ‘pessimistic’ wisdom reacting to constrain ‘optimistic’ wisdom, what Zimmerli presents, in fact, is not a real debate between wisdom writers, but a thinly disguised confrontation between a justi¿cation by works, in which we can save ourselves by acting in accordance with world order, and a justi¿cation by faith, in which God reaches out freely with his gift, and we, powerless to achieve security in any other way, must respond. Going beyond what Zimmerli himself asserts, though, it can hardly be denied that biblical wisdom literature has a strong interest in God as creator of the world, and I have suggested elsewhere that we can reasonably speak of a ‘creator’ theology in these texts (Weeks 2010: 119). The depiction of God as creator allowed the writers to treat him as a single, universal deity, which no doubt facilitated discussion of the issues that concerned them, and it also enabled them to present the sort of distinctions between God and humanity that are important in all the wisdom books, but perhaps especially in Job: his role as creator af¿rms God’s power, superiority, and freedom to do what he will with what is his. This interest in God as creator, however, does not self-evidently 1

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translate into any consistent wisdom concern with creation, which is evoked to prove various points about God or wisdom, but not as a direct concern in itself. If we loosen the concept of ‘creation’ enough to make ‘creation theology’ refer to any theological concern with the natural, non-human world, then we can apply it to some sections within the wisdom literature, but it hardly characterizes that literature as a whole. A further extension to include the human world would draw in most of the other biblical literature, unless we chose arbitrarily to exclude concerns with history or the cult, because, despite many assertions to the contrary, wisdom literature is not inherently more human-centred than that other literature. However much we shufÀe the categories, it is dif¿cult to de¿ne thematically any sort of wisdom ‘creation theology.’ The real point of Zimmerli’s argument, however, is that wisdom literature has an alternative to salvation history, which represents a quite different way of thinking about everything. At the time when he was writing, it was widely supposed that the wisdom literature arose within a professional class, which was distinct from the circles that produced other biblical literature, and more attuned to foreign than to Jewish ideas—an assumption that made it easy to imbue the writers with a quite different worldview. That understanding has not entirely disappeared, but the general movement in biblical studies has been away from such compartmentalization of the culture, and towards an understanding of all biblical texts as products of a single scribal class, comparable to the scribal classes of Egypt or Mesopotamia. That does not prevent us from recognizing diversity, but it does help us to understand the many things that our texts have in common, without being forced to posit a myriad of cross-inÀuences between distinct and rival groups. Correspondingly, however, it becomes much more dif¿cult to speak of completely separate worldviews co-existing within such a class. Zimmerli’s characterization of the wisdom writers endows them not merely with distinctive interests or ideas, but potentially with a quite different understanding of causation, for instance. Such cultural and intellectual fragmentation within the literate class of a small country or province should not be presumed lightly, and when we look at, say, the many expressions and ideas held in common by Proverbs 1–9 and Deuteronomy,6 it seems all the more dif¿cult to believe that their writers could share so much and yet see the world in irreconcilably different ways. If only for that reason, then, any appeal to a distinctive wisdom worldview should not be our ¿rst resort 6. See, for instance, Robert 1934–35; Buchanan 1965; Maier 1995: 72-79 (but also Weeks 2007: 103-104 on the idea expressed by these writers, that Proverbs is in some way deliberately interpreting Deuteronomy).

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when we try to understand the reluctance of wisdom literature to engage with historical or covenantal ideas, and Zimmerli’s attempt indicates some of the practical dif¿culties that may be involved if we do choose to go down that route. Having said that, however, we probably do need to address the problem at the level of ideas, even if we do not try to base those ideas in some distinctive worldview: this is not simply a literary, generic issue. Not all differences between texts are ideological in character, of course, and we can easily imagine that a modern writer of economics textbooks, say, could also write love poetry without a word in it about money. It is tempting to say, in the same vein, that the distinctive features of wisdom literature arise not from the beliefs of the authors, but from the genre and subject-matter of the wisdom books, and that had those authors been writing histories, they would have expressed the ideas that we ¿nd lacking. Our economist, however, can avoid mentioning money in his love poems because money (we may hope) is not central to his experience or expression of love. When a wisdom writer places divine–human relations or the human quest for survival at the heart of his concerns, but then says nothing at all about the historical or collective aspects of such concerns, that absence is surely not just a consequence of his subjectmatter, but also of his ideas: it would matter that the fate of individuals might be determined by the behaviour of the nation as a whole, and would surely inÀuence or constrain his expression of those ideas. Genre should not be ignored when we are dealing with any text, but, again, it does not really provide an adequate explanation. Even instructional literature, with its highly conventional father–son setting, is sometimes used as a vehicle for historical and political ideas in Egypt,7 and when that genre can be adapted, indeed, to create a strongly salvation-historical instruction by the writer of Psalm 78, then it does not seem reasonable to claim that the writers in Proverbs felt any less free to introduce historical ideas, even if they were not aiming to write a history. In short, then, Zimmerli was right to point out that biblical wisdom literature does not engage with the historical and covenantal ideas dominant in much other biblical literature, and this lack of engagement seems all the more marked as subsequent scholarship tends increasingly to emphasize the continuity in other respects between wisdom and the other books. Zimmerli does not make a strong case for the wisdom writers having possessed some fundamentally different worldview, however, and such a strong disconnection would in any case sit uneasily both with our perceptions of continuity and with the ways in which we 1

7. The instructions of Merikare and Amenemhet are the most notable examples.

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tend now to think about the scribal culture from which all the biblical literature emerged. We cannot just dispose of the problem in that way, therefore, any more than we can put the distinctiveness of wisdom literature in this respect solely down to issues of subject-matter and genre. So what is left? I think that there are, in fact, three principal factors at work, each of which involves the rejection of covenantal and salvation-historical ideas for a different reason. The ¿rst of these is that, although they are probably all Jewish in origin, the biblical wisdom books tend to present themselves as universal, and so to play down those aspects of their content which are speci¿cally Jewish. The second is that the wisdom writers recognized a fundamental incompatibility between Deuteronomic thought and their own strong concern to maintain the freedom of God, which led them to reject key aspects of that thought. The third, and last, is that scholars have not merely tended to overstate the centrality of historical and covenantal ideas—a tendency that is now generally acknowledged—but that they have tended too often to treat the constitutive elements of such ideas as a single phenomenon, with the presence or absence of any single element implying the presence or absence of the rest. This inclination has exaggerated the gulf between some of the wisdom literature and other texts by suggesting that they cannot share anything in common unless they share, in effect, everything in common. Of course, these three factors do not all have the same role to play in each of the biblical wisdom books, and they are not wholly separable, but I shall try to deal with them individually. I should not want to put too much emphasis on the ¿rst, although it is the simplest in some ways. What makes the wisdom books appear so universal is in large part their lack of speci¿c references to history and nation, and so to evoke that universalism as a reason for the absence is to risk begging the question. It is dif¿cult to ignore the fact, however, that Ecclesiastes in particular contains little that is speci¿cally Jewish, to the extent that even when Qohelet apparently evokes Deuteronomy in ch. 5, it is to make a point about the breaking of oaths that would have been comprehensible to any ancient reader—indeed, oath-breaking may have been one of the few offences that everyone in the Hellenistic period would have believed to provoke divine anger (see, e.g., Liebeschuetz 1979: 40-42; Mikalson 1983: 31-38). The book does not claim to be anything other than Jewish, but non-Jewish readers would have found in it nothing incomprehensible or inapplicable to their own lives.8 Qohelet 8. It has, of course, been suggested more than once that Ecclesiastes is a translation, potentially of a non-Jewish work, but that view has never enjoyed wide

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makes considerable use of anecdotes, furthermore, but in none of these do we ¿nd a name or place and even Qohelet’s God is never called ‘Yahweh’. In Job, on the other hand, the narrator shows no similar reluctance to use the divine name, and Jewish readers would surely have recognized many links with Jewish literature. The story is set abroad, however, possibly in the distant past, and that ¿ction is generally maintained: outside the narrative sections and introductions, ‘Yahweh’ only appears twice (12.9; 28.28), with the characters showing a preference in their speeches for epithets like ‘Shaddai’ or ‘Eloah’, which may have been regarded as archaic or less speci¿cally Jewish (cf. Exod. 6.3). We do not know whether the author was constrained to adopt this setting by existing stories about Job, but he has not obviously introduced any elements that make the work relevant to Jewish readers in particular, and even Job’s piety is described in ways that any ancient reader might have recognized. The foreignness of the setting may not have been introduced solely, then, to enhance its universality, but it contributes to the sense that this story could have happened in any country. Proverbs presents a more dif¿cult case, not least because it incorporates so many different materials, and although some of these are most probably supposed to be foreign, or are offered without speci¿cation as ‘words of the wise’ (22.17; 24.23), by no means all of Proverbs is so universal as Ecclesiastes, or so deliberately non-Jewish as Job. Indeed, the book includes allusions to Jewish practices, such as the offering of ¿rst fruits (cf. 3.9), many uses of the divine name, and some unambiguous references to the Jewish Law (e.g. 28.7, 9). Clearly, a desire to appear universal does not inÀuence all of the wisdom materials to the same extent, but it must not be neglected as a factor that may have shaped decisions about the subject-matter, and it is probably not unrelated either to the universalistic presentation of God in the books, or to an awareness of foreign materials addressing the same issues. The second factor, divine freedom, is more complicated, and has to be considered in the context of some broader issues. I have already touched on the issue of creation theology in connection with Zimmerli’s claims, and expressed my own doubts about the signi¿cance of creation as a theme. It is not uncommon, however, for scholars to speak of a creation theology in wisdom literature that is de¿ned not by theme so much as by method or epistemology. James Barr, in fact, talks of a ‘natural theology’ (1999: 476-78) and the wisdom writers are sometimes credited with an support, and is dif¿cult to sustain (Weeks 2012: 13-14). The fact that it is written in Hebrew, however, may be the most speci¿cally Jewish thing about it. 1

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‘empirical’ approach (see Weeks 2010: 114-16): although it is often just asserted more generally that the ideas of wisdom literature are derived from human experience and observation of the world, the inÀuence of later theological and philosophical categories is apparent in many attempts to deal with a literature that claims authority without direct appeal to revelation. It is surely impossible, however, to sustain such claims for Job and Ecclesiastes. The former revolves around the characters’ ignorance of the real situation in which they ¿nd themselves, and stresses the inability of humans to comprehend God. The latter has Qohelet act as an empiricist at the beginning of his account, but his attempts to ¿nd meaning or pro¿t in human life through experimentation are unsuccessful, and he goes on to express grave concerns about the false conclusions drawn by humans from their observation of a world that misleads them: indeed, that is arguably a major theme of the book, and Qohelet’s own conclusions Àow from reÀection upon such entirely dogmatic positions as the reality of divine judgment and the ¿nality of death (Weeks 2012: 104-31). Again, we have to deal with many different materials in Proverbs, most of which offer little information about the basis of their ideas. Chapters 1–9, though, are explicitly concerned with the need to acquire wisdom through instruction, in order to make proper choices in the world: discernment is a consequence of teaching, not of personal experience, and the father who offers the instruction in these chapters does not claim to be passing on his own experience of the world—indeed, he speaks in ch. 4 of the teaching that he received from his father, and calls repeatedly on his ¿ctive son not to observe or to imitate, but to accept such teaching. Indeed, it is probably the most important theme in Proverbs 1–9 that to rely on one’s own, uneducated experience is to court lethal danger, because without prior instruction, we cannot distinguish what is safe from what is lethal (Aletti 1977; Weeks 2007). It is interesting to compare the much earlier instruction of Ptahhotep, where the father describes what he is teaching to his son as a body of knowledge transmitted down the centuries, but taught originally to humans by the gods.9 Although ancient advice literature may contain admonitions 9. In the prologue to Ptahhotep on the Middle Kingdom Papyrus Prisse (5,3), the vizier asks the king: ‘Let him [the son] be told the speech of those who listen, the advice of the forebears, those who listened to the gods’. The reference to the gods is dropped in later New Kingdom versions of the instruction (for translations of which see, conveniently, Hagen 2012: 252-58), in favour of a reference to earlier viziers, but in all versions the king then talks of the ‘the speech of the past’ (Prisse 5,5), while the need to transmit the instruction across the generations is a key theme of the epilogue.

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explicitly rooted in the experience of individuals, it does not generally understand itself in those terms, but as a heritage that is to be passed on from each generation to the next, and learned as a preparation for life. When the writer of Prov. 24.30-34 tells us, therefore, that he received instruction from considering the overgrown ¿eld of the sluggard, we should not extrapolate from this parable some more general wisdom epistemology, or even an epistemology for Proverbs. Just as Qohelet maintains that the wicked will die and the God-fearing do well, despite the evidence of his own eyes (Eccl. 8.10-14), so the sentence literature of Proverbs is ¿lled with wholly aspirational claims (e.g. 10.24-25), and even with statements about divine likes and dislikes that cannot possibly be rooted in human observation (e.g. 11.1). It is important to understand, then, that despite its willingness to question beliefs and to embrace uncertainty, the difference between wisdom literature and literature that appeals explicitly to revelation is not that wisdom claims an alternative, human source of knowledge, but that it simply does not seek the authority of revelation for its assertions. Biblical literature does not work with a dichotomy between ‘revealed’ and ‘natural’ knowledge, so that, whatever it may imply to us, the absence of one does not require, for the wisdom writers, the presence of the other. To the extent that they seek to validate their contents at all, wisdom texts tend to do so by their claim to be the words of wise and successful men, and, as Roland Murphy has observed in another context, if we ask what was the basis of their wisdom, then we are asking a question that they never asked themselves (Murphy 1978: 41; cf. 1996: 116). That does not mean, however, that the writers were any less attached to their dogmatic positions, and we should probably understand, say, their shared perception of God as creator neither as an item of faith nor as a philosophical conclusion, open to debate, but as a ¿xed point in their thinking: they would no more doubt it than I would doubt the laws of thermodynamics, for the validity of which I rely wholly on the assertions of others, but belief in which I would not class alongside belief in ghosts or fairies. It does seem clear that for some or all of the wisdom writers (and probably for many of their contemporaries also), the freedom of God to act without human constraint was just such a ¿xed point, associated with the absolute power attributed to God in wisdom literature. There are, of course, many sayings in Proverbs that predict divine favour or disfavour, and Prov. 19.17 even speaks of charity as, metaphorically, a loan made to God that he will repay. Alongside these, however, sit other sayings that emphasize the ultimate power of God over human affairs, and, especially 1

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in the more discursive Proverbs 1–9, it is clear that humans are expected not simply to behave in speci¿c ways so that God will interfere on their behalf, but to align themselves to an understanding of the divine will that will enable them to make the right choices for themselves. Correspondingly, of course, there are no shades of grey in Proverbs, and one does not become just righteous enough to get rewarded, or moderately wise: humans are not haggling with God. In Ecclesiastes, furthermore, where behaviour is more of a balancing act, human lives are entirely subsumed within much greater schemes, and consequently unpredictable: the best one can do is to fear God and to trust that things will turn out well, if not necessarily in the way that one wants. If these books are cautious about any simple equation between human behaviour and divine response, however, it is Job that tackles the issue most explicitly, from the moment that the Satan’s challenge asks whether it is enough to be righteous solely in the expectation of reward, through to the divine speeches, when God rejects any idea that he might be bound by human expectations. It is also in Job that we ¿nd a curious statement, often disregarded, that brings into focus the attitudes of wisdom literature in this area. In chs. 40–41, God is talking about Leviathan, and asks a series of rhetorical questions to make the point that humans cannot capture this creature, tame it, sell it or harm it. Part of this asks: Would you put a reed through his nose and pierce his cheek with a ring? Is he going to ask you many favours or Àatter you with humility? Will he cut a covenant with you, for you to take him into service forever? Are you going to have fun with him like a bird, and put him on a leash for your girls? Will dealers haggle over him? Sell shares in him to merchants? (Job 40.26-29; ET 41.2-5)

The sequence as a whole is reminiscent of the questions thrown at Job when God ¿rst addresses him, and it becomes clear, in fact, that Leviathan is a surrogate for God himself here, when God subsequently demands to know how, if humans cannot challenge even this created beast, they can hope to stand against its creator, and how he himself could possibly be put in anybody’s debt, since everything under heaven belongs to him anyway (41.2-3; ET 41.10-11). The topic is not really the strength of Leviathan, therefore, but the strength of God, and the impossibility that humans might constrain him by force or by obligation. This makes the reference to covenant and servitude rather striking, especially since it steps beyond the wild animal imagery—it is hard to

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imagine Leviathan himself signing a contract—and it is tempting to suppose that there is a conscious swipe at covenantal ideas here. Even without the explicit reference, however, it is dif¿cult to imagine the God who makes these declarations in Job placing himself deliberately in a relationship with humans that commits him to reward them if they have met certain conditions—and this is a God, we should recall, who has felt no compunction about the destruction of his servant Job. If the writer of Job believed this to be the nature of God, he is unlikely to have found the covenantal ideas in Deuteronomy even remotely plausible, let alone acceptable. The same is surely true in Ecclesiastes, despite its more impersonal portrayal of God, and there are many statements in Proverbs that sit uncomfortably with the Deuteronomic presentation. Proverbs does not offer the clearest demonstrations of the two factors that I have discussed so far: it is the least universal of the wisdom books in its presentation, and it talks about the power of God without offering a consistent and coherent portrayal of God. It is with respect to Proverbs, however, and especially chs. 1–9, that we can most readily discuss the third factor, the way in which we tend to consolidate ideas of Law, history and covenant, because it is here that we ¿nd the strongest engagement with Deuteronomic ideas in biblical wisdom literature. I have touched already on the signi¿cance of instruction for Proverbs 1–9: it is a prerequisite to wisdom and to an understanding of the divine will. As has often been observed, however, the language associated with instruction in these chapters is strongly reminiscent of Deuteronomic language for the Jewish Law, and there are reasonable grounds to suppose that Proverbs 1–9 sees the Law as a route, via wisdom, for individuals to acquire a knowledge of the choices that they should make, even in situations that are not explicitly addressed by the Law. The Law becomes, we might say, a personal, and individually transformative insight into God’s will. If that is indeed the case in Proverbs, then we are dealing with something close to what is elsewhere usually characterized as ‘Torah piety’. I do not want to get involved here with the many potential questions about relative dating, or the extent to which Deuteronomy’s own use of instructional language contributes to its relationship with Proverbs. Proverbs 1–9 is not the only biblical text in which we ¿nd such a conception of the Law, expressed without reference to any explicit idea of a national covenant, and so the idea that wisdom literature might draw on such a presentation does not depend solely on the way in which we interpret Proverbs 1–9 and its allusions (cf. Levenson 1987: 564). Indeed, although we ¿nd references to an internalized, personal possession of 1

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Torah in some texts which are closely related to the biblical wisdom books, such as Psalm 37, it is probably not an idea that is to be regarded as exclusive to wisdom literature, and Psalm 40, for example, would not generally be classi¿ed as wisdom. Obviously, the idea is most prominent in the so-called Torah Psalms, and Kent Reynolds has recently explored it at some length in the context of Psalm 119, suggesting that the psalmist draws on wisdom locutions, but deliberately avoids any speci¿c alignment between wisdom and Law (Reynolds 2010). It would probably be a mistake, therefore, to see ‘Torah piety’ as a development rooted entirely within wisdom literature, and it may have been no less inÀuenced by Deuteronomy’s own presentation of Law as something to be learned by the individual. It is an idea, though, that sits very comfortably with the paradigms and language of advice literature. Job and Ecclesiastes do not embrace this approach, although the epilogue to the latter does commend keeping divine commandments.10 There are some possible echoes of Proverbs 1–9 in Job, however (Weeks 2007: 156), and it seems likely that, when both books were written, the Law could already be understood in a way that essentially disconnected it from ideas about a national covenant. That is not, perhaps, surprising, since the Deuteronomistic portrayal of that covenant was surely read in the post-exilic period as a record of failure, and the very concept of a ‘people’ needed re-alignment in an era when there was no longer a Jewish state. Accordingly, as post-exilic works (at least in the forms that we have them), the biblical wisdom books probably never stood out against some monochromatic background of covenantal and salvationhistorical ideas. In their concern both with individual piety and with a universal deity, they were arguably, in fact, more relevant to the circumstances of a scattered Judaism than Deuteronomy and its covenant could possibly have been, but the key points in this context are that the lack of covenantal and salvation-historical themes in the wisdom books is really not surprising in this period, and that some wisdom literature does seem to have engaged with, or perhaps even stimulated, attempts to understand the Law in a very different way. Taking all three factors together, I do not think that the distinctiveness which Zimmerli identi¿ed demands the sort of explanation that he offers. Wisdom literature is certainly different in some important respects from 10. That passage (12.13-14) itself raises some interesting questions about the extent to which the Qohelet of the monologue might have accepted such ideas as the need to fear and obey God, without having a place in his thought for the broader notion of a revealed Torah with which Deuteronomy associates them; see Weeks 2013.

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the historical and prophetic literature that has been so central to many modern readings of the Bible, not least because it operates with an idea of God that places a strong emphasis upon his universality and freedom from human constraint. It does not operate, however, with a view of the world or of divine action that is fundamentally different: mostly, it just thinks bigger, and it avoids historical or covenantal issues partly as a consequence of its own concerns, but partly because it may not have found everything that it wished to address so closely integrated with those issues as scholars have sometimes been inclined to suppose. I want to ¿nish very brieÀy, however, not by emphasizing the obvious point that certain biblical perspectives were given too much priority by scholars of a previous generation, nor by pointing out the less widely acknowledged fact that different theological ideas can co-exist without anyone much noticing—and it would be intriguing to see the old methods of biblical theology applied to the average hymnbook. The most interesting question that arises for me from Zimmerli’s work is, rather, why it is the wisdom literature and not the Deuteronomic literature that seems to have to ¿nd or justify its place. The wisdom books are undoubtedly dif¿cult and idiosyncratic, to the point of being enigmatic at times, but to theologians they offer a direct engagement with signi¿cant theological and moral issues, some of which can be traced back in related foreign texts to the earliest human literature that we possess, and they do so using a universalistic and functionally monotheistic type of discourse that makes it straightforward to consider them alongside more modern theologies. When theologians engage with wisdom literature, they are not left pondering the unspoken motives of characters in narrative, trying to extrapolate universal insights from the activities of an ancient national deity on behalf of or against his tiny ancient nation, or reading between the lines of texts that have more interest in centralizing sacri¿ce than in personal piety or the problem of evil. For the historian, on the other hand, biblical wisdom literature is the Jewish reÀex of something very ancient, even if it is dif¿cult for us to say whether the texts that we possess are merely late products of a longer tradition in Israel, or whether this type of composition only actually began quite late amongst Jewish writers. More signi¿cantly, perhaps, wisdom paradigms were to go on to become an important way of reading many earlier texts—offering, as Gerald Sheppard puts it, a ‘hermeneutical construct’ (Sheppard 1980)—and they provide a vehicle even for apocalyptic ideas in literature at Qumran. Proverbs, as we have seen, is implicated in the development of ideas about Law which might be considered foundational for rabbinic Judaism, and Ben Sira, under the inÀuence of Proverbs, was later to go even further by integrating ideas of 1

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election as well as Law into a framework that universalized both wisdom and God, an achievement that represents not the conÀuence of traditions, so much as the total re-interpretation of one by another. Deuteronomic and Deuteronomistic thought can claim a certain antiquity itself, to the extent that it embodies ideas that were doubtless common to many national religions, and it would be hard to overstate its impact on much of the biblical literature beyond Deuteronomy. Its lasting inÀuence is much less apparent, however, except insofar as it is mediated and transformed through other ideas. In the end, biblical traditions should not be in competition, and biblical theology should not have to crown a queen. Should a prince ever again come calling for his bride, however, wisdom surely has no less right to try on the slipper. Bibliography Aletti, J.N. 1977 Alt, A. 1951 1976 Barbour, J. 2012 Barr, J. 1999

‘Séduction et parole en Proverbes I–IX’, VT 27: 129-44. ‘Die Weisheit Salomos’, TLZ 76: cols. 139-44. ‘Solomonic Wisdom’, in Crenshaw (ed.) 1976: 102-12. The Story of Israel in the Book of Qohelet: Ecclesiastes as Cultural Memory (OTM; Oxford: Oxford University Press). The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (London: SCM).

Buchanan, G. 1965 ‘Midrashim prétannaïtes: à propos de Prov. I–IX’, RB 72: 227-39. Carr, D. 2011 The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press). Crenshaw, J.L. (ed.) 1976 Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom (The Library of Biblical Studies; New York: KTAV). Fox, M.V. 1986 ‘Egyptian Onomastica and Biblical Wisdom’, VT 36: 302-10. Grant, J. 2003 ‘Wisdom and Covenant: Revisiting Zimmerli’, European Journal of Theology 12: 103-13. Hagen, F. 2012 An Ancient Egyptian Literary Text in Context: The Instruction of Ptahhotep (Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta, 218; Leuven: Peeters). Hubbard, D.A. 1966 ‘The Wisdom Movement and Israel’s Covenant Faith’, TynBul 17: 3-33.

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Kaiser, G.P.C. 1823 Koheleth, das Collectivum der Davidischen Könige in Jerusalem: Ein historisches Lehrgedicht über den Umsturz des jüdischen Staates. Uebersetzt und mit historischen und philologisch-kritischen bemerkungen erläutert (Erlangen: Joh. Jacob Palm). Levenson, J.D. 1987 ‘The Sources of Torah: Psalm 119 and the Modes of Revelation in Second Temple Judaism’, in P.D. Hanson, S.D. McBride and P.D. Miller (eds.), Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press): 559-74. Liebeschuetz, J.H.W.G. 1979 Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Maier, C. 1995 Die Fremde Frau in Proverbien 1-9: Eine exegetische und soziale geschichtliche Studie (OBO, 144; Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Mikalson, J.D. 1983 Athenian Popular Religion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Murphy, R.E. 1978 ‘Wisdom – Theses and Hypotheses’, in J.G. Gammie, W.A. Brueggemann, W.L. Humphreys and J.M. Ward (eds.), Israelite Wisdom: Theological and Literary Essays in Honor of Samuel Terrien (Missoula: Scholars Press for Union Theological Seminary): 35-42. 1996 The Tree of Life: An Exploration of Biblical Wisdom Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2nd edn). Perlitt, L. 1969 Bundestheologie im Alten Testament (WMANT, 36; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). Perrault, C. (writing as P.P. Darmancour) 1698 Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Avec des moralitez (Paris: C. Barbin). Preuß, H.D. 1970 ‘Erwägungen zum theologischen Ort alttestamentlicher Weisheitsliteratur’, EvT 30: 393-417. 1974 ‘Alttestamentliche Weisheit in Christlicher Theologie’, in C. Brekelmans (ed.), Questions disputées d’Ancien Testament: Méthode et Théologie (BETL, 33; Leuven: Leuven University Press; Gembloux: J. Duculot): 165-81. Rad, G. von 1957–60 Theologie des alten Testaments (2 vols.; Munich: Kaiser Verlag). 1962–65 Old Testament Theology (trans. D.M.G. Stalker; Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd). 1970 Weisheit in Israel (Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). 1972 Wisdom in Israel (London: SCM Press).

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Reynolds, K.A. 2010 Torah As Teacher: The Exemplary Torah Student in Psalm 119 (VTSup, 137; Leiden: Brill). Robert, A. 1934–35 ‘Les Attaches littéraires bibliques de Prov. I–IX’, RB 43: 42-68, 172-204, 374-84; 44: 344-65, 502-25. Schultz, R.L. 1997 ‘Unity or Diversity in Wisdom Theology? A Canonical and Covenantal Perspective’, TynBul 48: 271-306. Sheppard, G.T. 1980 Wisdom as a Hermeneutical Construct: A Study in the Sapientializing of the Old Testament (BZAW, 151; Berlin: W. de Gruyter). Weeks, S. 1994 Early Israelite Wisdom (OTM; Oxford: Clarendon Press). 2007 Instruction and Imagery in Proverbs 1–9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 2010 An Introduction to the Study of Wisdom Literature (T&T Clark Approaches to Biblical Studies; London: T&T Clark International). 2012 Ecclesiastes and Scepticism (LHBOTS, 541; London: T&T Clark International). 2013 ‘ “Fear God and Keep his Commandments”: Could Qohelet Have Said This?’, in B.U. Schipper and D.A. Teeter (eds.), Wisdom and Torah: The Reception of ‘Torah’ in the Wisdom Literature of the Second Temple Period (JSJSup, 163; Leiden: Brill): 101-18. Zimmerli, W. 1963 ‘Ort und Grenze der Weisheit im Rahmen der alttestamentlichen Theologie’, in Les Sagesses du Proche-Orient Ancien. Colloque de Strasbourg 17–19 mai 1962 (Travaux du Centre d’Études Supérieures Spécialisé d’Histoire des Religions de Strasbourg; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France): 121-37. 1964 ‘The Place and Limit of the Wisdom in the Framework of the Old Testament Theology’, SJT 17: 146-58 (reprinted in Crenshaw [ed.] 1976: 314-26]).

ETHICS IN THE WISDOM LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT* John Barton

Biblical scholarship has concentrated on two major issues in thinking about the ethical ideas we ¿nd in wisdom. One is a sociological question: does wisdom represent a ‘class’ ethic? The other is theological: how far was wisdom literature in ancient Israel religious, and in particular did it start out as a religious phenomenon or did it become so over time? I will say something on scholarly discussion of both these issues, but then develop some thoughts of my own, particularly on the second. 1. Is the Ethics of Wisdom a Class Ethic? In the case of the wisdom literature, the aphorisms in Proverbs and Sirach often seem to concern rural life, and imply that the readers/hearers are peasant-farmers. But many scholars think that, though these collections may include some proverbs that did indeed originate in village life, as they now stand the wisdom books are meant for a ‘learned’ class, and possibly for scribes working at the royal court or attached to the Temple, very much as with the parallel literature from Egypt and Mesopotamia. This may suggest that the ethics of, say, Proverbs is a ‘class’ ethic, not intended to be of concern to the general population. Eric Heaton provided a thumbnail sketch of the ideal ‘new man’ of Solomon’s court that he saw Proverbs as representing: The man of Proverbs is a highly-motivated member of the lower middle classes… He identi¿es himself neither with the rich nor yet with the poor…and disapproves when men of different stations pretend to be what they are not… He knows that money is not the be-all and end-all of life and he wants to get his priorities right. What is more, he has his home and family to think about, even though he is ambitious to give them security… He is backed up by an extremely devoted and capable wife. Not * This study is based upon excerpts from my book, Ethics in Ancient Israel (Barton 2014), redeployed here by kind permission of Oxford University Press.

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only does she see to the meals and the children’s clothes, but works all hours to earn a bit more. A wife, he holds, makes a world of difference to a man in his position. He is one who sets great store by domestic peace and feels sorry for men with ‘a nagging wife and a brawling household’, where the sons are always contradicting their father and getting their mother upset… That is why he believes in being strict with his boys and knocking some sense into them… The man of Proverbs is an open, cheerful character, who speaks his mind and does everything in his power to promote neighbourliness in the community at large… The way to deal with enemies, he believes, is not by revenge but by the same sort of generosity a man ought to show to everybody in need. He would not want to deny that he has his principles, but he prefers to think of himself as a practical man, for whom getting results is all-important, even if sometimes it does mean compromise. There are occasions, for example, when a bribe works ‘like a charm’, and to turn a blind eye is the only sensible thing to do… Such realism is the secret of his success… What counts in the end is the ‘know-how’ which is born of experience and the rigorous use of a carefully-trained mind. (Heaton 1974: 124-26)

This does seem to capture something of the Àavour of the wisdom literature. Whether or not the collections were made for the sake of Heaton’s putative middle class, for example, his sketch does remind us that they come from a very male world: NRSV’s attempt to ‘degender’ Proverbs 1–9 by rendering ‘my son’ as ‘my child’, though I entirely understand and in many ways agree with the intention behind it, falsi¿es this aspect of the literature. Whether the intended addressee is a farmer or a courtier or a middle-ranking scribe, he is normally a man or a boy. The authority of mothers and the value of their teaching are af¿rmed, but the book of Proverbs is not written for wives and mothers and daughters, but for men, and especially, it seems, young men. There is an excellent discussion of the class issue in Brian W. Kovacs’s essay ‘Is There a Class-Ethic in Proverbs?’ in the 1974 publication Essays in Old Testament Ethics, written when Kovacs was still a graduate student at Vanderbilt Divinity School (Kovacs 1974). He makes some useful distinctions, for example, between a class ethic in the sense of an ethic applicable only to a certain in-group and thought to have nothing to say to outsiders (such as the ethics of a distinctive profession), and a class ethic in the sense of ethical teaching related to social standing, which seems to be closer to Heaton’s idea. The latter would seem to me appropriate also to Ben Sira, where there is certainly material about the scribe in particular, but the book as a whole seems to address any man of reasonably high social position. Of course Israelite society must have changed enormously between the time of Proverbs and Ben Sira (always assuming we can date Proverbs), but there are many common

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social assumptions, including the realism, sometimes bordering on moral cynicism, to which Heaton points—for example on the matter of bribes. Martin Hengel in Judaism and Hellenism (Hengel 1974) argued for a Hellenistic origin for much in Proverbs, bringing the two works much closer together. But the kind of social world presupposed is in any case much the same: a world of business and scribal activity, grand public dinners and a modest home life, families to bring up in sensible and worthy conduct, a life in which it makes sense neither to be too selfconsciously virtuous nor, of course, to let moral standards slip. It may be, however, that we should be more discriminating than this. Hans Heinrich Schmid argued that the intended addressees of Egyptian Instructions are not the same in all periods (Schmid 1966). In the Old Kingdom ‘wisdom’ was meant for the king, who had the divine task of implementing ma!at on earth, but already then royal of¿cials began to take over this role—hence the oldest Instruction, Ptahhotep, where the advice given is meant to enable of¿cials to live a life that accords with ma!at. In the Middle Kingdom, Schmid argues, when scribes could come from any social class, ethical instruction becomes much less classspeci¿c. Indeed, the Instruction of Sehetep-ib-Re is intended for the lower social classes. By the time of the New Kingdom a certain archaizing tendency has set in, with advice being self-consciously intended for scribes (e.g. Amenemopet): but these were now not royal ¿gures, but paid of¿cials, so that in practice the teaching is such as anyone can comply with. But given the uncertainty of dating Israelite wisdom literature, it is impossible to know which if any of these stages it should be correlated with; and in any case it may not have developed in the same way as its Egyptian counterpart. Adding up the individual aphorisms in Proverbs to make a composite picture of the ideal ‘wise man’ is thus hazardous. By the time of Ben Sira, though, we probably can draw a coherent picture. He and his intended audience are clearly members of an upper class, which calls the tune in the way society is ordered, as Walter Houston argued in his ‘The Scribe and his Class’ (Houston 2013). But in Proverbs things are far more nebulous. In both books, however, we are hardly dealing with advice for the ‘man in the street’: even traditional aphorisms have been given an extended meaning that makes them relevant to the lives of people who are no longer peasant-farmers. Ethical standards that apply to them are not, of course, necessarily restricted to them, but we do need to be cautious before assuming that the ethic of Proverbs was universal in ancient Israel. It may have had a much narrower focus than we tend to suppose. 1

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2. Was the Ethics of the Wisdom Literature Religious? The atmosphere that emerges from these discussions, especially perhaps from Heaton’s, is of a rather secular morality, perhaps even, as I hinted above, a rather cynical one. The question of the religious character of the wisdom literature has long been debated. Gerhard von Rad famously argued, in Wisdom in Israel, that there was never a time when wisdom thinking was divorced from religion—and not just religion, but quite speci¿cally what he called ‘Yahwism’ (von Rad 1972). William McKane, on the other hand (probably representing a more widespread attitude) thought that the wisdom teaching in Proverbs had begun secular and empirical, then come to be focused on generalization and the detection of moral patterns in the world, and ¿nally become religious in the sense that it started to look for intervention by Yahweh to enforce moral standards (McKane 1970). He classi¿ed all the sayings in Prov. 10.1–22.16 into A, B, and C categories on this basis. That there was a development of this kind he never, so far as I am aware, actually argues for: it is treated as blindingly obvious that wisdom would have developed in such a way, and no doubt this can be supported by the observation that overtly theological statements do become commoner in Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon, on any showing later works than Proverbs. McKane’s scheme does have an inherent plausibility if one thinks that in Israel (or perhaps in all societies) wisdom began as empirical observation on life, with a severely practical character, and ‘got religion’ as time went by. But a challenge to this way of thinking had come already in 1966, in Hans Heinrich Schmid’s Wesen und Geschichte der Weisheit (Schmid 1966). Egyptian parallels, as investigated by Schmid, may seem to make this progression look rather shaky, since he claims to be able to show that in Egypt it is the earliest Instructions that are the most religious, and later texts become more anthropocentric: this is illustrated by contrasting the early Ptahhotep with the much later Amenemopet and tracing a decline in religious content. I am not sure that the comparison is an entirely fair one: even a very early text such as Ptahhotep already represents a codi¿cation of aphorisms, which in themselves are probably older still, and like the sayings in Proverbs could, in principle at least, have been originally ‘secular’ in character. Whether there was anything one could describe without anachronism as ‘secular’ thought in the ancient Near East at all is, however, an important point, and I would be slightly doubtful about so describing even aphorisms that do not overtly mention God at all, in any ancient culture. The mixing of pure observation with religious thought can be seen, for

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example, in Hesiod’s Works and Days in Greece, possibly roughly contemporary with Amos and certainly older than the Israelite fusion of wisdom with Torah. I am inclined to think that wisdom ethics was always theological in a loose sense, but that it is only in a late period that it came to be aligned with the distinctives of Israelite belief: law, covenant, saving history—if, indeed, these features really are distinctive, which I do not think is obvious. And it is this idea of an ethic ‘theological in a loose sense’ that I want to say some more about. 3. Wisdom Ethics and Moral Order One of the besetting problems of twentieth-century discussion about wisdom and religion was the assumption that religion, in Israel, does indeed always and only mean what I have just called the ‘distinctives’ of Israelite belief: law, covenant, saving history. I do not think there can be much doubt that an interest in those issues came into the wisdom literature fairly late. There are hints, in the passage about personi¿ed wisdom in Prov. 8.22-31, that it may be linked to a distinctively Israelite religious approach, but this is far more obvious, of course, in Sirach 24, where wisdom is identi¿ed with Torah. Torah is also the true wisdom in Psalm 119, also surely quite late, and then on into Baruch and later literature. But the idea that only the Israelite distinctives count as ‘religious’ was a twentieth-century idea that has surely gone past its day. Already in von Rad there is an awareness that the ‘Yahwism’ that he saw as present even in the earliest wisdom is not a religious system based on Heilsgeschichte and covenant, but something much vaguer and more universal in character (von Rad 1972). And if we de¿ne religious wisdom as wisdom that deals, not with Moses and the law and the saving history in the manner of Ben Sira, but with moral patterns and regularities in a world created and run by God or the gods, then early wisdom probably should be called religious (just as should Works and Days). The twentieth-century approach to the religious beliefs of ancient Israel tended to concentrate exclusively on the distinctives, and this led to some palpably absurd conclusions, for example that the Old Testament is not about God as creator. In ethics it resulted in seeing Old Testament morality as almost the parade example of a so-called Divine Command Theory of ethics: textbooks on ethics, fed by mainstream Old Testament scholarship, often took the Old Testament as a foil against which to present other, less ‘theonomous’, ethical theories. I myself have written a number of pieces critical of this way of interpreting Old Testament ethics, and suggesting that other models do occur within the Old Testament (e.g. Barton 1979). This reduces the tension between the von 1

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Rad and the McKane positions in some measure, and again is deeply indebted to Schmid. I suggest that one might speak in the Old Testament but perhaps especially in the wisdom literature of a ‘moral order’, which is indeed theological in that God stands behind it, but not as the Divine Commander, to use Karl Barth’s phrase: rather as guarantor and perhaps creative source—I have never solved the question of just how to describe the relationship. Schmid argued that, as in many writings from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, so too in Israel there was a belief in a moral order somehow built in to the fabric of the world. In the ancient context this was on the whole a theological belief: the gods were the source of order, and indeed the order itself was often personi¿ed as a divine being, famously in Egypt as the goddess ma!at. (The ‘personi¿cation’ of Wisdom as a semi-divine being in Proverbs and Sirach may reÀect rather similar patterns of thought.) But ethical behaviour was primarily conformity to ‘order’ rather than obedience to God/the gods. This could have politically conservative consequences. One might expect radical ¿gures such as the Israelite prophets to have opposed this way of thinking, in the name of a God who somehow broke through existing order and demanded instant obedience. But one of the surprises in Old Testament study has been the realization that the prophet Isaiah, in particular, seems deeply imbued with ‘divine order’ thinking. This comes out, as I argued a long time ago, in the frequency of ‘talionic’ or ‘tit-for-tat’ divine punishments in the prophets, in which reward is appropriately adjusted to desert, the punishment ¿ts the crime (Barton 1979). The wisdom literature is full of this, and where we think we can catch the voice of popular moral thinking, in occasional places in narrative texts, a similar idea seems to be present. Even in the laws, which in the form in which they now appear are certainly presented as divine commands issued on Sinai (or later, according to Deuteronomy, on the plains of Moab), there is an interest in maintaining order: Eckart Otto in particular argues that early Israelite law was concerned with maintaining a balance in society that was felt to mirror cosmic order, rather than in executing exact retributive justice (Otto 1994). Morality is a matter of established convention, and in some places even a reference to God seems to be lacking, as when it is said simply that certain things ‘are not done’. Morality in the ancient as in the modern world could indeed at times be seen as a series of divine injunctions, grounded in nothing but the sovereign will of the deity. Writers on the Old Testament in the past often drew a strong contrast between the ‘natural law’ thinking of the environing cultures and the divine command basis of morality in Israel; thus M.J. O’Connell in 1960:

30

Perspectives on Israelite Wisdom When the laws claim to be of divine origin…this is not a transcendental claim based on an essential and timeless relation of human nature to God (as in the unwritten laws of Zeus in the Antigone, and in the Western tradition of natural law). It is an historical claim: the law is the will of the God of the covenant. (O’Connell 1960: 352)

But much more often, it seems to me, it reÀects an af¿rmation of an order in the world and a rejection of the chaotic, which in the moral life just as much as in cosmic reality is a constant threat to the peace and harmony of the world. The wisdom literature is full of a quest for this order in the world, morally just as much as cosmologically. Back in 1958, Hartmut Gese could already entitle his discussion of the moral quest of the wisdom writers in Israel as in Egypt ‘Die Weisheitslehre als Versuch einer Deutung der Welt als Ordnung’ (Gese 1958). He was prepared to describe this as (almost!) a quest for a ‘natural law’ in the world, contrasted with an alleged pure eudaemonism that would devalue the wisdom literature from a theological perspective, a quest found in Israel just as much as in Egypt: he argues that, as opposed to a eudaemonistic approach, the material in Proverbs about the success that comes to those who work hard, as contrasted with the way the lazy come to poverty, rests on ‘an order that inhabits the world’ (auf einer der Welt innewohnenden Ordnung). At a time when a Divine Command Theory of ethics was very much in the ascendant in biblical studies, Gese was able to see signs of something like a ‘natural law’ in the wisdom literature. This tendency has grown considerably since, and has perhaps found its best expositor in John Rogerson, who judiciously prefers to talk of ‘natural morality’ rather than ‘natural law’, since the latter term has too much baggage from subsequent philosophical traditions (Rogerson 2004). Douglas A. Knight points out that rejection of ‘natural law’ thinking as alien to Israel was often linked, as suggested above, to a tendency to downplay the importance of creation, as opposed to covenant, in the Old Testament— which is partly a legacy of the work of von Rad. On the contrary, he argues, many people in ancient Israel were obviously interested in creation themes, and are entirely likely to have linked them with ethics, just as happened in Egypt (Knight 1985). It is in Egypt that most scholars ¿nd analogies to any ‘natural morality’ thinking that may have occurred in Israel, in the shape of the goddess/cosmic principle ma!at, on which a standard authority is now Jan Assmann (Assmann 1995), though much very important work was done in the previous generation by Rudolf Anthes (Anthes 1952), and some think Assmann has not superseded him. Not only is ma!at an 1

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undergirding ethical principle, it is also a cosmic force that pervades all things and ensures that both the cosmos, which includes the rhythms of nature, and society (which includes also the individual), are properly ‘ordered’. Gese sums up ma!at as ‘Weltordnung’ and speaks of a ‘harmony of the universe’. This is the kind of idea that can be postulated for Old Testament wisdom literature from an early date, and it tends to suggest that this literature may well, as von Rad argues, have always been religious, yet not in the sense of exemplifying the distinctive principles of ‘Yahwism’. Perhaps the idea of order in wisdom is clearest in the sayings that draw parallels between the world of culture and of nature, in Proverbs 30. This implies that the world (whether one is to call it the ‘created world’ or not is unclear) runs according to shared patterns of activity, uniting human beings and animals: in both realms there is paradox as well as predictability. But there are actions or events which cause the world to tremble—see Prov. 30.21-23. This is evidence, if anything is, of a ‘cosmic’ dimension to human behaviour. Holger Delkurt argues that Israelite wisdom literature was ‘Yahwistic’ much earlier than our discussion so far has implied (Delkurt 1993). He stresses the unpredictability of the outcome of human conduct: ‘Man proposes, God disposes’ is a traditional English proverb, but what Delkurt argues for the wisdom literature of Israel is something very similar. There is no ‘act–consequence relationship’ of an automatic kind, only at most a tendency towards a congruence of acts and their outcomes. This also means that it is not correct to characterize the wisdom literature as eudaemonistic, focused on success—though I have already pointed out that eudaemonism is probably not the whole story even on a ‘moral order’ reading. On the contrary, the wisdom literature’s focus is on the good of society as a whole, and of the individual’s place within it. Delkurt is probably right to challenge an over-synthetic account of wisdom ethics as though there were a great theory of world order embedded in it, like the supposed ‘Great Chain of Being’ in the Middle Ages (cf. Lovejoy 1936). At the same time, given the ancient Near Eastern background, it is hard not to ¿nd signs of a moral order in the thinking of the sages, even if only as a set of background assumptions. The world in which they lived and operated was acquainted with the idea of a moral order in the world, and there is not much evidence that they actually challenged it or tried to overturn it, as though it were a competing system of thought to their own. To propose a rather middle-of-theroad conclusion: there are signs that some wisdom writers, especially the later ones, did not want a natural order to be seen as an alternative or

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rival to the Torah, and took steps to integrate the two—hence Sirach 24. But the very fact that the Torah was thus ‘cosmized’ (to use a term of Peter Berger’s [Berger 1969]) suggests strongly that their thoughts naturally worked with ideas of cosmic order—that such a way of thinking was not alien to them. Delkurt’s attempt to show that wisdom writings, and indeed the practical teaching activity that lies behind them, was interested in the distinctive God of Israel who differed saliently from the gods of other ancient Near Eastern cultures, seems to me an exaggeration. Wisdom really is different from the Torah, and does not operate with the notion of ethics as a set of divine decrees, but rather sees moral obligation as deriving from an order immanent in the world—an order which Yahweh at most guarantees by ensuring outcomes commensurate with actions, and even that may not require actual intervention by him. The mere fact that the name of Yahweh appears in Proverbs does not strike me as showing that all the supposedly normative features of ‘Yahwism’—Moses, law, covenant, Heilsgeschichte, obedience to divine commands—are thereby implied. What is actually said of Yahweh in Proverbs is much closer to what is said of ‘the god’ in Egyptian Instructions. 4. Wisdom and Virtue The wisdom literature is thus not about divine commands, but more often about order in the human world, as, indeed, in the physical world. But this is generally at the level of its background assumptions. What the literature is actually for is to provide instruction, musar, to those willing to learn from it. By reÀecting on its precepts one will become wise and so go on to live a life in accordance with good order. The presence of literature in the Old Testament that is concerned with how one becomes wise suggests that, alongside interest in Divine Command Theory and in moral order, Old Testament scholars might do well to pay some attention to the modern revival of the Aristotelian ethical tradition now usually described as ‘virtue ethics’ (cf. MacIntyre 1981; Kotva 1996; Meilaender 1984; Nussbaum 1986 and 1990). In speaking of virtue ethics, four elements are involved (as set out in my 1999 article, ‘Virtue in the Bible’ [Barton 1999]): 1. Virtue ethics is not so concerned with the resolution of moral dilemmas as with a commitment to a particular lifestyle. A virtue ethicist is interested in how to acquire the ¿xed and stable moral dispositions from which virtuous actions will Àow. The most signi¿cant aspects of a moral life are not those in which 1

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dif¿cult decisions are needed in marginal cases, but those that relate to the general style of a person’s day-to-day life. 2. Central to a good life is moral formation, the development of a moral character over time. 3. Moral rules are not laws operating in an abstract way, or divine imperatives that must be obeyed, so much as a distillation from many good decisions made by virtuous people. One’s life does often need to follow rules in the sense of rules of thumb, but rules are not the be-all and end-all of morality. A good life involves decisions made on the basis of the particularity of each situation as it arises, in the light of one’s general moral disposition. This emphasis on particularity brings virtue ethics close to situation ethics, and has been developed especially by Martha Nussbaum. The image she uses to illustrate this is the special kind of ruler that was devised on Lesbos, which bends so that it can be used to measure curves, as contrasted with an ordinary ruler that works only with straight lines. 4. To live a life of virtue one needs a moral vision, which means the ability to ‘read’ the successive situations one ¿nds oneself in from an ethical point of view. These points are all very closely interrelated, and add up to a single type of ethics that cannot be placed on a spectrum with Divine Commands at one end and Natural Order at the other: it represents a different way of thinking about ethics altogether. In my 1999 article I suggested that, though the Bible can be used by a virtue ethicist, there is very little evidence of virtue ethics in the Bible itself. I based this partly on the rather black-and-white character of much biblical morality, which does not on the face of it encourage the subtleties of virtue ethics. I now think, though, that there is more to be said, and that the wisdom literature in particular shows evidence of thinking along lines not far removed from virtue ethics.
First, there is the whole emphasis on training and instruction, and the possibility of progress in wisdom: ‘give instruction to a wise man, and he will be wiser still’ (Prov. 9.9). The purpose of the book of Proverbs is to guide people in the right paths: ‘for learning about wisdom and instruction, for understanding words of insight, for gaining instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice, and equity; to teach shrewdness to the simple, knowledge and prudence to the young—let the wise also hear and gain in learning, and the discerning acquire skill’ (Prov. 1.2-5). Teaching is at the centre of the wise man’s task, and this is markedly true

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in Ben Sira, with his invitation to join his school—whether this is meant literally or metaphorically. Teaching does not seem to be conceptualized as the rote learning of rules or precepts, but as the gradual acquisition of insight and discernment. Second, there is the emphasis on what ‘works’ in human conduct. Sometimes there has been a division of opinion among scholars as to whether wisdom is genuinely empirical, based on actual observation, or only, as it were, theoretically empirical—presenting as observation matters that are really dogmatic assertion. The ‘I have seen’ formula is relevant here: presumably the author of Proverbs’ claim to have seen young men strolling around in red-light districts is genuinely empirical; whereas the assertion in Ps. 37.25 that ‘I have been young, and now I am old, and yet I have never seen the righteous man forsaken, or his offspring begging for bread’ is dogma—he must have done! The friends in Job often assert that they have observed certain regularities in the world when in practice they are uttering platitudes that are only sometimes true. Qohelet talks of what he has seen, but is generally interpreting rather than merely reporting it. The question of empiricism in wisdom is thus quite dif¿cult, and it gives trouble in Egyptian wisdom as well as in the Israelite version. This is discussed by Schmid (Schmid 1966). But whether the wisdom authors are reporting or dogmatizing, they are in any case talking about what will lead to practical results in the way human life is lived: they are interested in what Eckart Otto calls a gelingendes Leben, a life that succeeds—not a ‘successful life’ in the sense of a life crowned with glory and wealth, but a life that accomplishes what human life is meant to accomplish. Against Heaton’s rather secular sketch of the wise man’s life which I quoted at the beginning of this essay, ‘success’ as Otto understands it has a considerable ‘spiritual’ component: it means a life lived in conformity with the moral order and in ‘the fear of the LORD’. To aim at this kind of life implies something like a virtue ethic. Apart from the religious component, it is not very far from the ideal for human life presented in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: life lived in accordance with an ideal of human nature, in harmony with and respect for others. That the parallel with Aristotle has not been developed in Old Testament studies has historical reasons: the assumption for much of the twentieth century that there was nothing in common between Athens and Jerusalem, and the belief that all authentic Old Testament teaching on morality came under the aegis of a Divine Command Theory. Wisdom was marginalized because it did not ¿t this model, and its own af¿nities, especially with Greek and Hellenistic morality, remained undeveloped and largely unexamined. In fact the 1

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space between Greek and Israelite ethics narrows considerably if one lets the wisdom literature be an important strand in the latter, and that in turn may suggest that other Old Testament material, such as law, is not as far removed from Greek ideas as traditionally thought. Where law is concerned, Anselm Hagedorn’s monograph Betweeen Moses and Plato (Hagedorn 2004) succeeds in showing many parallels between Greek and Hebrew traditions, and with the current interest among classicists on looking east, to Mesopotamia and Syria-Palestine, we can expect more along these lines. Third, the wisdom literature does present a moral vision. Richard Hays has popularized the use of this term in the case of the New Testament (Hays 1997), but it can equally be applied to the Old. If we want sketches of what a good human life would look like, the wisdom literature is the place to look. Classically Proverbs 31 presents the person who is now sometimes called the ‘woman of worth’, an ideal type with many surprising features, if we start with an assumption that women were regarded as mere chattels, but in fact conforming quite well with some Old Testament stories about powerful and inÀuential women: one thinks of Rachel, Abigail, Esther, and Judith, to name but four. These are not laws about how women are obliged to behave, but rather an ideal to strive for, and many of the characteristics are in some ways, as we might say, unisex—not exclusive to women. The same is surely true in reverse of the ideal picture of the righteous man in the often-neglected text Job 31, which is the subject of an excellent study by Manfred Oeming (Oeming 1994): the good man here has features which could be shared by good women too. Both texts talk of moral probity, care for the poor, what we might anachronistically call ‘family values’, and psychological aspects as well as action: thinking right thoughts, devising wholesome and bene¿cial plans. Neither text is much connected with legal material, nor do they refer to the alleged distinctives of Israelite thought. But they certainly set out a ‘moral vision’, and to that extent are, again, close to virtue ethics. So there is a rich vein of ethical thinking in Old Testament wisdom literature, once we abandon the idées ¿xes of twentieth-century biblical theology, and especially its desperate concern for what was distinctive in Israel. There is much in Proverbs that Aristotle could have assented to, if he had known it; and there is everything to gain in encouraging comparison between the ethos of wisdom and a virtue ethic deriving from him.

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Bibliography Anthes, R. 1952 Assmann, J. 1995 Barton, J. 1979 1999 2014 Berger, P. 1969 Delkurt, H. 1993 Gese, H. 1958

Die Maat des Echnaton von Amarna (JAOSSup, 14; Baltimore: American Oriental Society). Ma!at: Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im Alten Ägypten (Munich: C.H. Beck). ‘Natural Law and Poetic Justice in the Old Testament’, JTS 30: 1-14. ‘Virtue in the Bible’, Studies in Christian Ethics 12: 12-22. Ethics in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press). The Social Reality of Religion (London: Faber). Ethische Einsichten in der alttestamentlichen Spruchweisheit (Biblischtheologische Studien, 21; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). Lehre und Wirklichkeit in der alten Weisheit: Studien zu den Sprüchen Salomos und zu dem Buche Hiob (Tübingen: Mohr).

Hagedorn, A. 2004 Between Moses and Plato: Individual and Society in Deuteronomy and Ancient Greek Law (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Hays, R.B. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation. 1997 A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). Heaton, E.W. 1974 Solomon’s New Men: The Emergence of Ancient Israel as a National State (London: Thames & Hudson). Hengel, M. 1974 Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period (London: SCM Press). Houston, W.J. 2013 ‘The Scribe and His Class: Ben Sira on Rich and Poor’, in T. Römer and P.R. Davies (eds.), Writing the Bible: Scribes, Scribalism and Script (Durham: Acumen): 108-23. Knight, D.A. 1985 ‘Cosmogony and Order in the Hebrew Tradition’, in R.W. Lovin and F.E. Reynolds (eds.), Cosmogony and Ethical Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press): 133-57. Kotva, J. 1996 The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics (Washington, DC: University of Georgetown Press). Kovacs, B.W. 1974 ‘Is There a Class-Ethic in Proverbs?’, in J.L. Crenshaw and J.T. Willis (eds.), Essays in Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt, in Memoriam (New York: KTAV): 171-89. 1

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Lovejoy, A.O. 1936 The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). MacIntyre, A. 1981 After Virtue (London: Duckworth). McKane, W. 1970 Proverbs: A New Approach (London: SCM Press). Meilaender, G. 1984 The Theory and Practice of Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). Nussbaum, M.C. 1986 The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 1990 Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press). O’Connell, M.J. 1960 ‘The Concept of Commandment in the Old Testament’, Theological Studies 21: 351-403. Oeming, M. 1994 ‘Ethik in der Spätzeit des Alten Testaments am Beispiel von Hi 31 und Tob 4’, in P. Mommer and W. Thiel (eds.), Altes Testament: Forschung und Wirkung. Festschrift für Henning Graf Reventlow (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang): 159-73. Otto, E. 1994 Theologische Ethik des Alten Testaments (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). Rad, G. von 1972 Wisdom in Israel (London: SCM Press). Rogerson, J.W. 2004 Theory and Practice in Old Testament Ethics (ed. M.D. Carroll R.; London: T&T Clark International). Schmid, H.H. 1996 Wesen und Geschichte der Weisheit. Eine Untersuchung zur altorientalischen und israelitischen Weisheitsliteratur (BZAW, 101; Berlin: Alfred Töpelmann).

‘MOTHER IN ISRAEL’: WOMEN AND WISDOM Jenni Williams

1. Introduction ‘Hear, my child, your father’s instruction, and do not reject your mother’s teaching’ (Prov. 1.8). But who should be hearing this instruction and teaching: a child or a son? In John Barton’s contribution to the present volume, the argument is made that the inclusive language often used in the English renderings of Proverbs’ encouragement to get wisdom is misplaced, since the addressee is male. I ¿nd this argument persuasive. In Proverbs there are warnings to young men to stay away from the perennial temptations of liquor and women, never warnings for young women to stay away from rakes. Israelite mothers collude in this way of thinking. Accepting this argument, however, raises a whole series of secondary questions. What is the role of wisdom for women in Proverbs? For even as a prudent wife is a gift from the LORD himself (19.14), so also a mother who does not teach wisdom is disgraced by her negligence (29.15). Is there some kind of difference between the wisdom women exercise and the wisdom men exercise? Is the wisdom of women always somehow circumscribed by patriarchal, male authority structures? Does the Old Testament portray women as capable of exercising wisdom independently? These are some of the questions I intend to explore in the present study. I will consider wisdom in the household, wisdom in the public place, and ¿nally Proverbs speci¿cally, asking how, in the light of the foregoing discussion, the orientation to the male in Proverbs 1–9 might be considered. Wisdom is portrayed in the Old Testament as an active process, the ‘human attempt to make life comprehensible and manageable, to seek to understand its nature and its patterns’ (Dell 2000: 6). If considered in connection with discernible divine order and a God at the ‘limits of wisdom’, what we are actually describing is the ability to learn and think

WILLIAMS ‘Mother in Israel’: Women and Wisdom

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actively in a particular way. Essentially, it is the capacity in any context to understand a situation and apply wisdom in such a way as to bring about a desirable state of shalom. 2. Women and Wisdom We might begin with the idea that often in the Old Testament narratives, when women attempt to demonstrate wisdom, matters usually end in unforeseen negative or failed outcomes, what might be characterized as dis-order, at least from the author’s point of view. This is best exempli¿ed in situations of counsel, where a woman’s insight persuades a man to some course of action. In Genesis, there is Sarai’s advice concerning how to bring Yahweh’s promise of a son to ful¿lment (Gen. 16.2), Rebekah’s plan to make sure that the elder son will indeed serve the younger one (27.6-10), and Rachel’s belief that children will bring her life or, at least, that not having children will be the death of her (30.1). In the monarchical stories, the role of wives or mothers in advising the king frequently leads him to negative behaviours: witness Jezebel’s advice in the matter of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kgs 21.7-10), the practices of Maacah (15.9-14), and Bathsheba’s misguided advocacy (2.19-25). The Chronicler notes the role of Athaliah in leading her son Ahaziah into bad ways (2 Chron. 22.2-4). In each of these cases, a woman exercising her capacity for wisdom leads to disorder and is shown to be ‘bad’ wisdom from the author’s perspective. However, there are also examples, at least across the Deuteronomistic History and later writings, of women whose counsel is good and whose wisdom brings not disorder but -#+ [e:] occur. The Masorah, how™ which suggests monophever, has transmitted the form as -K9+’ , thongization of /aw/ > [u:].33 This phonological feature actually occurs in colloquial Arabic dialects of North Africa (Pereira 2011: 958), though to the best of my knowledge it is not attested in any Arabian dialects.34 All said, we may assume that -K9+’ ™ (‘the populace’) reached Hebrew from some North Arabian dialect which included both the de¿nite article al and the lexeme qnjm resulting from the atypical shift of /aw/ > [u:]. How many Àuent speakers of ancient Hebrew would recognize the word cannot be said, though one may assume that the educated elite understood the word, in like proportion to the number of ancient Israelites who

related form mqm, ‘assembly, meeting’, in Qatabanian. This evidence from Ancient South Arabian may be less relevant, given the considerable geographical remove of these inscriptions from ancient Israel; though it does demonstrate the widespread use of cognates to later Classical Arabic qawm, ‘people’, throughout the Arabian peninsula in antiquity. 33. For discussion concerning the parallel diphthong /ay/, see Young 1992; Steiner 2007. 34. For one possible instance, limited to initial position, see Rabin 1951: 165 n. 15, though as the author states, ‘Cases of au becoming nj are rare outside the Maghrib’. 1

RENDSBURG Literary and Linguistic Matters in Proverbs

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would have apprehended the bilingual wordplay inherent in ! šQ6L8 – (see above). To be sure, no emendation of the Masoretic text of Prov. 30.31 is required. The alterations suggested by scholars—including #/3 + -9 (McKane 1970: 664), either #/3 + -9 or #/3 -9 + (Murphy 1998: 233), or #/3 -#9 + ( ‘not to rise-up against him’) (Waltke 2005: 462)— are all unnecessary once one identi¿es the origin and meaning of MT -K9+’ ™ (‘the populace’).35 (The reader may have noticed my translation of the word :' –$:’ ™$ at the beginning of Prov. 30.31 as ‘saluki’. I have opted for this rendering, since an animal with outstanding loins is demanded.36 I have used ‘saluki’ speci¿cally—as opposed to ‘greyhound’ or another species— since this dog is depicted in ancient Egyptian artwork and because it is treasured by the Arabs as a great hunting dog, even though dogs generally are eschewed in the Islamic tradition.37 I owe this suggestion and observation to Stephanie Dalley. Such a meaning for :' –$:’ ™$ would ¿t well with the Arabian context discussed above. Note that :' –$:’ ™$ connotes a bird of some sort in Rabbinic Hebrew [e.g. t. ‫ۉ‬ul. 4.9]—in Modern Hebrew, speci¿cally ‘starling’—though to my mind an ornithological identi¿cation is not suitable to Prov. 30.31, unless a strutting cock is intended, but this seems most doubtful. For more on the ornithological term :' –$:’ ™$, see Nissan 2011: 450-51.) 10. Egyptian InÀuence in Proverbs In terms of Egyptian inÀuence, we should note Prov. 22.19-20: 35. One ¿nal comment here, for the sake of bibliographic completeness: Kassis (1999) makes no mention of the Arabian word present in Prov. 30.31. 36. As sensed by two medieval Jewish commentators, Abraham ibn Ezra and Gershon ben Levi (= Ralbag = Gersonides); see further Forti 2008: 119. The latter, in fact, stated explicitly 0) - #1'13# ,#8+ -'''8! #!#)'+#'< -'1=/! 9 +)! #!# 7#:+ :!/'