For decades, the Wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible has been the “poor relation,” living in the shadow of other supposedly more significant biblical genres, such as the Law and the Prophets, as well as the stories in Genesis. Wisdom literature (primarily the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job), we are told, is “secular,” intended mainly to educate courtiers and administrators. It has more in common with Egyptian and Mesopotamian Wisdom texts than with Israelite theology, and its concerns have little or nothing to do with the great events of Israel’s salvation history.
More recently, however, Wisdom literature—sapiential literature, scholars call it—is being reevaluated. The renewed interest in it is almost faddish, but well justified, as scholars find new depths to this old Wisdom.
Wisdom (Hebrew H|okhma; Greek Sophia) literature offers a way of looking at the world. This literature speaks to our own age in an especially profound way. For most people today, the starting point for understanding is personal experience rather than a set of religious beliefs—an outlook very much in agreement with the worldview of Wisdom literature.
Wisdom literature is concerned with everyday relationships. Its most basic form is the proverb. Proverbs 10–22 present a whole string of maxims about how to relate to others and how to get the most out of life, often by drawing a contrast between good and bad behavior. Hard work is praised: “A child who gathers in summer is prudent, but a child who sleeps in harvest brings shame” (Proverbs 10:5). “A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich” (Proverbs 10:4). Good character is encouraged: “A gossip goes about telling secrets, but he who is trustworthy in spirit keeps a thing hidden” (Proverbs 11:13). Careful speech is advocated: “When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but the prudent are restrained in speech” (Proverbs 10:19). Speaking the truth is important: “Truthful lips endure for ever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment” (Proverbs 12:19). In general, Proverbs presents life as a path full of choices. The wise will select righteousness and so reap life’s rewards; the path of the fool is paved with pitfalls and traps: “Whoever is steadfast in righteousness 028will live, but whoever pursues evil will die” (Proverbs 11:19).
Any definition of Wisdom literature naturally begins with the Book of Proverbs. The book has various sections, each with its own character and context. Proverbs 10–22, which contain the main section of maxims, largely reflect a simple, agricultural background. Proverbs 1–9, however, reflect a city background and contain theological reflection in the form of instructions (and fewer maxims). In these chapters, Lady Wisdom stands at the gate of a city and calls out to young men to listen to her (Proverbs 1:20–33). Her call comes shortly after the instruction that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Proverbs 1:7). The advice in this section is to trust in God, who holds the key to meaning in life, and in Wisdom, who represents knowledge of God to human beings.
The Book of Ecclesiastes also contains some proverbs, although the author, rather like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, spends most of his time refuting them.1 For the author of Ecclesiastes, referred to as Qoheleth, “the preacher,” in the beginning of the book, life has become meaningless. His characteristic phrase is “All is vanity and a striving after wind” (Ecclesiastes 1:14b, 2:11 etc.). He tests various proverbs and finds that life does not always match the ideal. What is the point of a life of hard work, he asks, if all that happens at its end is that you die?
I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who will come after me—and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.
Ecclesiastes 2:18–19
The preacher has moments of optimism about Wisdom—“Wisdom gives strength to the wise more than ten rulers that are in a city” (Ecclesiastes 7:19) —but generally his mood is more skeptical. His advice is to enjoy life while you can: “So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 8:15). The frustration of the Wisdom quest is that however much a person tries to find the meaning of life, it remains elusive. Only God knows the key to it.
The Book of Job contains few proverbs. Instead, its deep concern with what happens to good and bad people relates the book to the Wisdom quest.2 Job is a good man, who has lived according to the maxims of wisdom advocated in Proverbs. Then, unexpectedly, calamity comes—he loses his family, his wealth, his status and his health. How is he to understand his new predicament and still retain his faith in God? The Book of Job suggests some possible answers. One, given in the prologue, is that this is a test set up by God and Satan to see if Job will remain faithful despite calamity. The friends who come to comfort Job—Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar—suggest that if his life is now a mess, he must have done something wrong or been less wise or righteous than he thought he was (Job 4:7–8, 8:3–4, 11:4–6 etc.). Job’s wife tells him to curse God and die (Job 2:9); he might as well relinquish his faith and his life. But Job is determined to understand and will not give up. At the book’s climax, God appears to Job. He tells Job that God’s ways are greater than those of human beings; God created the heavens and the earth, and he knows the answers to the “big” questions about the universe. Who is Job that he should know all the answers? There are reasons for suffering that human beings cannot understand; Job has to be satisfied with that. The book concludes with a “happy ending” that sees Job restored to good fortune, with a new set of children to boot. But we are left with the question: Does this mean that the path of Wisdom is not worth pursuing?
The Hebrew Bible’s Wisdom literature, then, is a 029curious mixture, both expressing the certainties in life in the form of maxims and questioning those same certainties in the more pessimistic or skeptical literature of Job and Ecclesiastes.3
What was this literature’s purpose? The close parallels between Proverbs 22:17–24:22 and the Instruction of Amenomope, a school exercise book used in Egypt to train young men to be administrators of the state, might suggest that this literature was created for use in similar institutions in Israel.4 Some scholars, therefore, argue that there was a great expansion of the state under David and Solomon, requiring an administrative class to serve it. These administrators, they add, would have been educated in schools based on the Egyptian model. The presence of proverbs in prophetic works such as Isaiah and Jeremiah has suggested to some that all influential and educated men may have been trained in wisdom schools.5
Many scholars, however, now feel that this “school” context for wisdom has been overstated.6 For a start, both the literary and archaeological evidence that these schools existed is weak. Furthermore, while real points of comparison exist between Proverbs 22:17–24:22 and the Instruction of Amenomope, the Israelite literature developed at least a millennium after that of Egypt. Can we really speak of the dependence of Israelite literature on Egyptian texts that predate them by hundreds of years?7 To strain the analogy further, the Israelite state did not have the magnitude of the Egyptian one, and so the need for schools on the Egyptian pattern in Israel becomes questionable.
Moreover, the proverbs concern everyday life—not the problems of courtly life. Even the proverbs concerning the king, such as “The glory of a king is a multitude of people; without people a prince is ruined” (Proverbs 14:28), do not necessarily belong to a court context; anyone is entitled to express an opinion about the king. It seems likely, then, that much of what we have in Proverbs, especially from chapter 10 on, grew over many generations of family instruction, preserved perhaps in clan groups in the days before the monarchy. The family context would have provided a point of stability amidst the changing political fortunes of Israel, with a particular emphasis on the family perhaps developing at times of crisis, when national life was in a state of flux.8 Proverbs were probably preserved in oral form for many centuries until they were finally written down by those with literary interests, such as the “officials of King Hezekiah” mentioned in Proverbs 25:1. Proverbs 1–9, generally considered a later section, may have been added at this stage, although they too may have had earlier origins: in city life, in family instruction or in a wider 030educational context, or even alongside cultic and Temple life, in which there may have been opportunities for education.9
Scholars used to think that the earliest Wisdom was secular in character. Most proverbs concern human relationships and activities and do not even mention God. They warn against strong drink: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise” (Proverbs 20:1). They comment on human nature: “‘Bad, bad’ says the buyer; then goes away and boasts” (Proverbs 20:14). They appreciate the advantages of wealth: “The wealth of the rich is their strong city; in their imagination it is like a high wall” (Proverbs 18:11). However, “Wealth hastily gotten will dwindle, but those who gather little by little will increase it” (Proverbs 13:11).
Where is God in all this? God may be in the background, but he is undeniably involved in human concerns at all levels: “The Lord is a stronghold for the upright, but destruction for evildoers” (Proverbs 10:29). It is God who maintains the moral order in these proverbs—he upholds the righteous and punishes sinners. He knows the thoughts that people have: “The plans of the mind belong to mortals, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord” (Proverbs 16:1). God, who holds all the answers, is at the limits of the quest for Wisdom. Wisdom is the ordering principle in the creation of the world. As Lady Wisdom says: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work…I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was 031daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (Proverbs 8:22, 30–31).
Some scholars believe that the references to God in Proverbs were added to an earlier, completely human-oriented text.10 But the way the more theological and the less theological proverbs are all mixed together makes this unlikely.
In Ecclesiastes God holds a more prominent position. Ecclesiastes reiterates that God knows all the secrets of humanity: “Just as you do not know how the breath comes to the bones in the mother’s womb, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything” (Ecclesiastes 11:5). Humans seek to understand, but in the end, only God is capable of understanding everything. All one can do is “Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:13b–14).
In Job God is at the center of concern. Job rails against God in his attempt to understand his miserable plight, but God’s answer is to parade the works of creation before Job. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know!” (Job 38:4–5a). There is more than a touch of sarcasm here. Once again we are presented with the theme of the limitations of human efforts to achieve understanding.
Job and Ecclesiastes are often dated to the post-Exilic period—Job to the fourth and Ecclesiastes to the third century B.C.—and may possibly represent the work of educated fringe groups or renegade sages.11 They are hard to imagine in a school context and are thus likely to be the product of wider literary circles that recognized the limitations of the Wisdom quest.
In my view, Wisdom literature is not to be regarded as “secular” or “nontheological.” Rather, its theology is different from that in the rest of the Hebrew Bible. It does not begin with God’s self-revelation in history—with the Exodus, the covenant and salvation history. It does not even mention these events. Rather, its starting point is the quest for meaning, for order, for understanding and fulfillment in human life. In a wisdom context the theological significance of God is different: God is the one who creates, maintains and sustains the earth and all its creatures.12 In Wisdom literature, God reveals himself through the natural world, through societal order and through the personification of Wisdom.
People today are often suspicious of a set of beliefs presented to them as a package that needs to be taken on trust. One might find a set of beliefs that one can happily adopt as one’s own, but many feel this will compromise their individuality. Many people have what they might term a general moral sense that convinces them that killing is wrong, for example, whether or not they are aware of or believe in the Ten Commandments. This moral sense, like the Wisdom literature, is grounded in experience, not necessarily in one’s own, but in that of the generations, in what has been passed down in families and social groups, in schools and in religious circles.
The worldview of the Wisdom writers bears striking similarities to today’s views. Both come from experience, from relationships, from basic observations about how to treat people. Both offer advice that is universally true for each generation. Both share a profound understanding of human characteristics—good and bad—and of the ease with which standards slip and chaos ensues. Both appreciate good things—carefully spoken words, responsibility, neighborliness, good food, marriage, money—and warn against bad things—quarrelsomeness, foolishness, estrangement, deception, sloth, lying.
Perhaps the Bible’s Wisdom literature also offers insights today’s worldview lacks. Ecclesiastes acknowledges that the rhythms of life—“For everything there is a season and a time…a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted…” (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2)—are beyond human control. The Wisdom books remind us that our destinies, too, are in the hands of the creator God. We can either accept this fact and rejoice in a relationship with God and the created world or we can let it drag us into cynicism, as the author of Ecclesiastes tends to do. Like Job, we may not understand the reasons for our suffering, but rather than losing faith in a moment of despair, we can grow through the experience and move toward a fresh understanding of and relationship with God. Like Job, we can realize that answers are not easy to come by, but we can trust in the God who holds the key to all wisdom, all knowledge and all understanding.13
This God is not simply an inaccessible creator, a great watchmaker, who sets the world ticking and then sits back. The Hebrew Bible’s Wisdom literature shows us that God is accessible through the human quest for understanding, that he is there in the very order and structures of society and that he has a profound knowledge of human nature and of the universe that he created. As we see in Proverbs, God shows us that various paths 046are open to each of us. And when all is said and done, he is there to give meaning and direction to our lives if we wish to trust in him.
For decades, the Wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible has been the “poor relation,” living in the shadow of other supposedly more significant biblical genres, such as the Law and the Prophets, as well as the stories in Genesis. Wisdom literature (primarily the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job), we are told, is “secular,” intended mainly to educate courtiers and administrators. It has more in common with Egyptian and Mesopotamian Wisdom texts than with Israelite theology, and its concerns have little or nothing to do with the great events of Israel’s salvation history. More recently, however, Wisdom literature—sapiential literature, […]
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Proverbial material can be found throughout the Hebrew Bible. Jeremiah and Ezekiel, for example, quote the proverb “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Jeremiah 31:29b; Ezekiel 18:2b), in order to refute it. Eating sour grapes coats the teeth with a dry, bitter substance. The proverb’s statement that the bitter taste can be passed on through the generations suggests that children suffer for the actions of their parents. Jeremiah and Ezekiel want to argue against this, to assert that everyone has a chance in life and a child cannot be blamed for the actions of his or her parents. Clearly the presence of a few proverbs in any book is not enough to characterize it as Wisdom literature. Prophetic books such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel belong to a separate “prophetic” genre. It is only where we find proverbial material and Wisdom concerns in large measure that we can truly speak of Wisdom literature. So, while we find many Wisdom concerns in psalmic laments and may speak of some “Wisdom psalms,” we would not classify the entire Book of Psalms as Wisdom literature.
2.
On the question of the definition of Wisdom and the discussion of Job as a Wisdom text, see Katharine J. Dell, The Book of Job as Sceptical Literature, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 197 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991).
3.
Robert B.Y. Scott, The Way of Wisdom in the Old Testament (New York: Macmillan, 1971). Job and Ecclesiastes are characterized by Scott as “Wisdom in revolt.”
4.
Notably Eric W. Heaton, Solomon’s New Men (New York: Pica Press, 1974).
5.
Many of the instructions of Proverbs 1–9 contain admonitions from father or mother to son, suggesting a family context, but those of the school persuasion thought that father and son probably referred to teacher and pupil in the school context.
6.
See Stuart Weeks, Early Israelite Wisdom (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994): “The biblical and epigraphic evidence adduced for schools seems very weak indeed and can certainly not support any hypothesis of an integrated school system” (p. 153).
7.
R. Norman Whybray, “The Structure and Composition of Proverbs 22:17–24:22, ” in Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Michael D. Goulder, ed. S.E. Porter, P. Joyce and D.E. Orton (Leiden: Brill, 1994).
8.
A suggestion made by Ronald E. Clements in Wisdom in Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992).
9.
Some interesting contextual parallels to the kind of family wisdom I have been describing have recently come to light from the totally unrelated culture of Africa. Friedemann W. Golka has written a fascinating book, The Leopard’s Spots (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), in which he makes a case for a clan or family context for many proverbs. He draws parallels, for example, with the proverbs about the king, and shows how, in quite primitive cultures, concern is expressed for the king or chief and the societal order is seen to depend on his well-being. The instinct to compose proverbs and to muse about the meaning of life is known to be a basic human trait; we find proverbs in all folk cultures from around the world. Therefore, it may be that we have more work to do in finding parallels from, say, Chinese folk wisdom that could shed important light on our biblical texts.
10.
William McKane, Proverbs (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970).
11.
See Dell, The Book of Job, for the suggestion that Job may have been produced by a group of “skeptics” on the edge of the Wisdom enterprise.
12.
Creation has generally been regarded as a late development in Israelite thought, coming into full union with the salvation history only at the time of Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–66), as the Exile was reaching its close, about 550–539 B.C. However, the perception of God as creator can be found in the earliest Wisdom literature, suggesting that creation faith may have been a more formative influence from early times.
13.
Dell, Shaking a Fist at God: Understanding Suffering Through the Book of Job (New York: [Harper Collins] Fount paperbacks, 1995).
