Wisdom: The Collected Articles of Norman Whybray

Margaret Barker, Katharine J. Dell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351872652
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This collection of articles confirms Norman Whybray's place as one of the foremost contributors to scholarship on wisdom literature in the last three decades of the twentieth century. A former President of the Society for Old Testament Study, and winner of the British Academy's Burkitt Medal, Whybray wrote extensively on Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and his interests extended to Job, Ben Sira, and wider areas of concern such as the relationship of wisdom to other Old Testament books and genres. Including a Foreword by David Clines and an Introduction by Katharine J. Dell, this collection brings together for the first time all of Norman Whybray's articles in this subject, thus not only inspiring afresh, but also providing a useful resource for scholars interested in that enigmatic group of writings that make up the wisdom literature of the Old Testament.

PART III
Ecclesiastes/Qoheleth

Chapter 11

Qoheleth the Immoralist? (Qoh. 7:16-17)

THE meaning of the admonition ʾal-těhî ṣaddîq harbēh (Qoh 7:16a), usually translated by “Do not be too righteous” or some equivalent phrase,¹ is a matter of crucial importance for the understanding of Qoheleth’s teaching as a whole. The word ṣaddîq in biblical Hebrew is, in ethical contexts, an absolute term.² Qoheleth’s apparent failure to commend righteous behavior whole-heartedly seems therefore to leave him open to the charge of teaching immorality. Many interpreters virtually admit his guilt, though not usually in so many words.³ They speak of his doctrine of the golden mean.⁴ Qoheleth, they say, was indeed advocating a middle path between virtue and vice, and for two reasons: (i) his experience had taught him that neither necessarily has any effect on men’s fortunes in terms of divinely imposed reward or punishment; (ii) it had also taught him that extremes of any kind are in practice more likely to lead to disaster than is moderation.

Other interpreters have sought to understand the verse in some other way which would acquit Qoheleth from the charge of immorality. These interpretations are of many kinds, and cannot be discussed here in detail. Most commonly it is argued that by ʾal-těhîṣaddîq harbēh Qoheleth does not mean “Do not be too righteous” but “Do not strive too hard to achieve righteousness”—that is, through an excessive concentration on legal observance or pious practices. Scholars have suggested two alternative reasons for the giving of such advice: (i) Such striving after perfection is not a virtue, but rather a sin: that of pride or blasphemy.⁵ (ii) Such excessive behavior is not required by God, and is to be avoided: for on the one hand its goal is beyond man’s capacity and so it can achieve nothing; and on the other hand it makes life joyless, leading to narrowness and bigotry. So, in one way or another, the striving after perfection produces misery.⁶

A rather different interpretation is put forward in this essay, namely that Qoheleth is not warning his readers either against an excess of righteousness nor against an excess of striving after it but against self-righteousness: against the state of mind which claims actually to have achieved righteousness or perfection.⁷ Such a state of mind is often a consequence of an undue striving after perfection, but is nevertheless to be distinguished from it.

A. Verse 16a and its immediate context

Vss. 16-17 comprise two tripartite poetical lines which appear to constitute a unit both of form and content:

Their internal arrangement makes an almost symmetrical pattern of correspondences, parallels and contrasts. Each line consists of three parts, each of which begins with the same word: ʿal, wěʾal, lāmmâ,. Each begins with a pair of negative admonitions or warnings joined by the copula, and within these there is again an almost complete parallelism: negative particle, verb or verbal clause, adverb (except in 17b where the adverb is lacking). The third clause of each line consists of an interrogative sentence introduced by lāmmâ and again followed by a verb or verbal clause. In each case the interrogative form conceals a positive assertion.

The parallel pairs 16ab, 17ab also correspond—at least ostensibly—in sense: they both refer respectively to righteousness/wickedness and wisdom/folly in an antithetic parallelism: the first appears to be a warning against “righteousness” and wisdom—or rather an excess of these qualities, the second against wickedness and folly. Three of these four clauses are qualified by harbēh or yôtēr, words functioning as adverbs with a superlative sense: “greatly, very.” There is also a parallelism of sense in the two clauses 16c, 17c; they say what will happen if the advice is ignored.

A noteworthy feature of vs. 16a is that the auxiliary verb hāyâ (“to be”) with an adjective ʾal-těhî ṣaddîq) is used instead of a simple verbal clause (ʾal-tiṣdaq). The choice of this construction is especially noteworthy because both the parallel clause (ʾal-titḥakkam) and also the contrasting and corresponding clause in vs. 17a (ʾal-tiršaʿ) use the simple verbal clause. The choice of the auxiliary construction in vs. 16a may be partly for stylistic reasons: it gives the clauses a neat chiastic form: auxiliary (16a), simple verbal clause (16b), simple verbal clause (17a), auxiliary (17b). Nevertheless it is unlikely that stylistic considerations would have overridden those of sense, and the possibility that there is some further significance in the choice of těhî ṣaddîq rather than ʾal-tiṣdaq needs to be examined.

I

The use of the construction hāyâ + adjective (or noun) to express a continuous state of affairs or a permanent characteristic would of course have been unavoidable if no verb cognate with the adjective had existed. It would also have been a natural choice if the verb in question existed, but was not in common use. But when, as here, the auxiliary construction is used in preference to a cognate verb which is in common use the question arises whether it conveys some particular nuance which distinguishes it from the latter.

Such cases appear to be relatively rare; and usually there is some special reason for the choice of this construction. Among these reasons, which sometimes occur in combination, are the following: syntactical necessity or convenience; the desire to give special emphasis to a particular word; play on words; the existence of a technical or special meaning of the adjective or noun which cannot be conveyed by the verb; and the need to indicate the continuing existence of a state of affairs where the use of the verb might imply a single action. It would also appear—though in view of our limited knowledge of the range of biblical Hebrew this is difficult to assess—that in some cases, even though the verb in question occurs relatively frequently, the even greater frequency of the adjective has led to the choice of the latter rather than the former. Some examples may clarify the matter.

In Gen 3:1 (wěhannāḥāš hāyâ ʿārûm, “Now the serpent was wise(r)”), the adjective ʿārûm may have been chosen for emphasis or because of the rarity of the verb ʿāram, which occurs only four times in the qal; but the choice was more probably made for the sake of a play on the words ʿārûm (“crafty”) here and the plural adjective ʿărûmmîm (“naked”) in 2:25.

In Gen 34:25 bihěyôtām kōʾăbîm, “while they were still sore,” indicates a continuous state which the simple verb would not unambiguously convey.

In Gen 39:6 wayěhî yôsēp yěpēh-tōʾar wîpēh marʾeh, “And Joseph was handsome and good-looking,” could hardly have been expressed by the rather rare verb yāpâ (which only occurs six times in the qal) because of the double qualification of Joseph’s beauty. The repetition of the verb would have been clumsy.

In Exod 23:9 (gērîm hěyîtem, “you were sojourners”), gēr is a technical term, and the verb gûr would therefore be inadequate to express the exact meaning intended.

In Deut 23:15 (Engl. 23:14) (wěhāyâ maḥănêykā qādôš, “and your camp shall be holy”)⁸ the adjective was probably chosen because the verb is rather rare in the qal and almost exclusively used⁹ of things becoming “holy” as the result of contact with other holy things or persons.

In Josh 19:9 (kî-hāyâ ḥēleq běnê-yěhûdâ rab mēhem, “for the portion received by the sons of Judah was too large for them”) the choice of the adjective rab rather than the verb rābab may be due to the fact that the verb, though not entirely rare, is much less frequently used than the adjective, and also in order to emphasize that the meaning here is not “become (too) large” but “be (too) large.”

In Job 1:1 wěhāyâ hāʾîš hahûʾ tām wěyāšār, “and the man was perfect and upright,” is more emphatic than would have been the use of the verbs tāmam and yāšar, which would necessarily have stood at the beginning of the sentence.

In Job 1:3 (wayěhî hāʾîš hahûʾ gādôl, “and the man was great”) the adjective is used partly for the same reason as in Job 1:1 but mainly because the verb gādal normally means “grow up” rather than “be great.”

In Ezek 18:5 there occurs the only example, apart from Qoh 7:16, of the use of hāyâ as an auxiliary verb followed by the adjective ṣaddîq: wěʾîš kî-yihyeh ṣaddîq wěʿāśâh mišpāṭ ûṣědāqâ ...’, “And if a man is righteous and does what is just and righteous. ...” Here it would seem that Ezekiel has been influenced by the formula ṣaddîq h, “he is in the right,” belonging to the priestly formula of judgment, and which he himself quotes at the end of this paragraph (vs. 9); and that he is, therefore, using ṣaddîq as a technical term. In fact he uses the verb ṣādaq in the qal only once, in the familiar phrase ṣādaq min-, “to be more righteous than. ...” There may also be another reason for his choice of the adjective here. The remainder of this long and complex stentence—it ends only in verse 9—-consists of a series of clauses which together define what Ezekiel means by ṣaddîq. These are all simple verbal clauses, beginning with wěʿāśâ, “and does,” which immediately follows ṣaddîq. The adjective is therefore most probably used here to distinguish the general designation of the category of person whose actions are then defined—that is, the ṣaddîq—from the defining clauses. If the verb ṣādaq had been used the sense would not have been clear.

Finally the use by Qoheleth himself elsewhere in his book of the construction hāyâ + adjective (or noun) must be considered. Apart from the two occurrences in 7:16-17 there are three such cases: 1:12; 2:19; 12:9.

In 1:12 (ʾănî qōhelet hāyîtî melek ʿal-yiśrāʾēl bîrûšālāyim, “I, Qoheleth, was king over Israel in Jerusalem”), the noun melek is clearly more appropriate than the verb mālak, even though “was king” is a possible translation of either expression. This is the formal opening of the “autobiographical” section of the book, the “Solomonic fiction. “As has been pointed out by several commentators,¹⁰ it is in the same tradition as that of the opening phrases of the type of composition known as the “royal instruction”; it is also reminiscent of the opening words of royal inscriptions.¹¹ The use of melek formally identifies the speaker, not only stating the fact that he ruled over Israel in Jerusalem, but also giving the title of the office which he held: that of melek, king.

In all the other instances in Ecclesiastes, including those currently under discussion (7:16, 17), the noun or adjective which accompanies the verb hāyâ is either ḥākām, “wise,” or sākāl, “fool.” In 2:19 (ûmî yôdēaʿ heḥākām yihyehʾô sākāl, “And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool”), it would have been impossible...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• I Introductory Wisdom Articles
• II Proverbs
• III Ecclesiastes/Qoheleth
• IV Job
• V Ecclesiasticus/Ben Sira
• VI The Social Context of Wisdom
• VII Wisdom in Relation to Prophets and Psalms
• VIII Linking up with a Wider Theological Theme
• Name Index