Biblical Wisdom, Then and Now

Frances Flannery, Nicolae Roddy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367481308
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000415018
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume examines biblical wisdom literature both in its historical context and as it relates to a host of contemporary themes, including overcoming social divisions, reading from a place of inclusion, healing from trauma, and challenging religious attitudes toward climate change and animals.

This volume delivers fresh insights on biblical wisdom texts, exploring ways in which wisdom literature speaks perennially to the human condition despite the differences in societies then and now. Employing both biblical studies and theological approaches, the diverse group of authors in this collection examine biblical wisdom literature from a variety of perspectives and methodologies to illuminate the relevance of wisdom for ancient audiences such as exiles, scribes, and leaders, as well as for contemporary audiences concerned with challenges such as climate change, social division, and healing from trauma. Its eleven chapters utilize an accessible style that brings erudite scholarship on biblical wisdom to a broader audience.

Biblical Wisdom, Then and Now will be an invaluable resource for undergraduates, graduates, and specialists in biblical studies, as well as the more general reader with an interest in biblical literature and its reception.

Part I

Biblical wisdom then

DOI: 10.4324/9781003041580-2

1 Wisdom for the exiled

An intertextual approach

Katharine J. Dell

DOI: 10.4324/9781003041580-3

In 2004, I contributed a chapter to a volume entitled In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel asking the question: “How much wisdom literature has its roots in the pre-exilic period?” I complained there that scholars nowadays have all but forgotten wisdom’s “earlier stages” in the focus on late dating, especially in the Persian period, and in moves towards scribal culture, final stages of composition, and final form. I was going against the tide then, and in some ways again now with my question concerning what wisdom activity may have been going on in the Exile. In that earlier piece I noted that some scholars “see the whole wisdom enterprise as having substantially arisen at or just after the Exile, perhaps out of the institutional void that was left after the destruction of Temple and palace” (Dell 2004, 251), and cited Camp (1985) and Clements (1992), to whose works I shall briefly return below. I argued then, on the basis of Proverbs, that proverbial material had important oral and literary roots in the pre-exilic period. Furthermore, rather than viewing any signs of wisdom influence as purely redactional, I strongly argued for seeing a wealth of wisdom features in other texts that were clearly on a developmental timeline starting in the pre-exilic period. I am not sure that my calls have had much impact on the scholarly tide—if anything there has been even more skepticism since then about the wisdom category and whether we can even speak of groups of wise men at work or literature confined to this educational and didactic category (Weeks 2010; Sneed 2015a; Kynes 2018, 2019). The view of a much more homogenous scribal culture, which breaks down divisions between groups, has gained popularity (Kwon 2016; Sneed 2015b; see also Boda et al. 2018). Can we speak any more of wisdom influence if wisdom is simply in the cultural mix of the learned? Are our genre distinctions between types of literature breaking down?

I have long argued that wisdom literature is not to be hived off into a corner and that Job in particular of the “big three” has less in common with the other two so-called “wisdom books” (Dell 2015). I have called for the noticing of intertextual links across the canon (Dell and Kynes 2012, 2014, 2018) that helps to reinforce this sense that a broader “intellectual tradition” (Whybray 1974) is at work, not just “later” but “earlier” too, without being too precise about those boundaries. For me, it is not about dating everything late and seeing much of the material as redactional—it is about formative influences and, turning this chapter’s theme, the formative influence of the Exile. I am suggesting here that intellectual activity on this level would mainly have happened in Babylon where the exiles were situated, where we have evidence of settled living (Cogan 2013) and oral and literary production, and where there would have been more likelihood of contact with Babylonian texts. I wish in this chapter then to evaluate the claim that “the whole wisdom enterprise” substantially arose “at or just after the exile,” with a specific focus on this period in terms of literary texts and intertexts.

The exilic situation

However one evaluates the Exile in historical terms, whether it was a great tragedy in the life of the nation or a mere inconvenience for a few years, when one reads the literature that is clearly of the time (notably Lamentations and exilic Psalms 137, 44, 69, 74, 79, and part of 89) there is no doubt that for the Israelites it represented, as Brueggemann put it, “an acute crisis of displacement” (1997, 75). The shift from independent state to exile in a foreign land and then, fifty years later, a return under the overlordship of foreign powers was a dislocation of considerable magnitude. It was an institutional crisis—the institutions needed to run a separate state disappeared. There was no need for a capital city, for a king, or for a temple, and these were lost along with the land itself. Upon return, a temple was built; but Jerusalem never again had the same status as part of the Persian Empire, and there would not be another king in Jerusalem until the Hellenistic period. Whether 8,000 and 10,000 citizens of Jerusalem left in two deportations respectively (2 Kgs. 24:14, 16) or 3,023 and 832 citizens (Jer. 52:28–29, a figure which may exclude women or children), it is clear that many of those who left were political leaders (e.g., King Jehoiachin) and the educated (2 Kgs. 24:12–15).

Our attention then shifts from Jerusalem to Babylon where the core of the nation went, including King Jehoiachin, who is also mentioned in Babylonian records (Cogan 2013), and from where any future hope of return might spring. Jeremiah, who remained in Judah, says this in Jeremiah 24:1–10 using the metaphor of the good and bad figs. Our attention is also attracted there because Ezekiel, a deportee in the first wave, was prophesying from his location in Babylon, giving us a Babylonian perspective on events both back in Jerusalem and, more significantly, directly from the exilic situation. We are given the impression that those deported were treated quite well and given some freedom. So the king was released and dined at the king’s table (2 Kgs. 25:29; Jer. 52:33); Ezekiel had a house at which elders among the exiles gathered (Ezek. 8:1); and the Murashu tablets from the Persian period indicate that some Jewish exiles settled down and never returned to Israel, such that their Hebrew names and settlement persisted. Whether there was continued to worship or not is debated—was there enough to inspire the writing of Psalms? Was this the beginning of a synagogue-style tendency of meeting in order to teach and discuss rather than to worship in any sacrificial sense? Was this a time when family life, and with it the proverbial material, filled an inevitable institutional void? This final question is the one to which I wish to turn for my first section of detailed attention.

The recontextualization of Proverbs

It is clear that the Exile provided a fresh context for the re-evaluation of old ideas and the creation of new ones. Much was “recontextualized” (following Brueggemann’s idea of a “double reading” of all texts at the Exile).¹ This is what Clements suggested in his book Wisdom in Theology, namely that wisdom material found a new relevance in this period. A new context demanded a new formulation or at least a new set of emphases. He argues that proverbs, many of which may have existed for a long time, found an important fresh context among those of the Diaspora from the time of the Exile onwards, and that this led to a decisive development in the ideas of and production of wisdom literature. In the context of the old structures of national life having broken down—no monarchy, no temple—a vacuum was created that was filled by the wisdom literature, which was practical and universal, and therefore of primary relevance in this situation. Clements writes, “For a time wisdom held a unique key to understanding the new world in which the Jews found themselves among the nations” (25–26).

Another scholar arriving at similar conclusions in this area is Camp (1985), who speaks of the possibility of a new post-exilic contextualization of the proverbs in a situation where there was no king and in which Israel was a vassal state, under the power of neighboring superpowers. She sees this as involving a reorientation of old perspectives in a new context which has the family as its central focus rather than the cult. Old family wisdom once again finds a fresh and relevant context. This later emphasis was to pick up on wisdom’s traditional role in family education, but this time to see the family as the central point in social organization and to see wisdom as a medium of God’s blessing.

These are attractive ideas from these scholars, but there is little evidence within the wisdom literature itself for such a view. Family wisdom belongs to every stage of Israelite development and probably persists in this period, but it is impossible to date particular familial proverbs to specific times. Indeed, if any part of the book of Proverbs belongs to this period, it might be Proverbs 1–9, with its instructions from father to son that present a family context but do not contain the kinds of familial proverbs to which these scholars refer. I personally think that Proverbs 1–9 is substantially formed before the Exile occurs, but much scholarship puts it after the Exile on the grounds of its more mature theological reflection. I believe that strong Egyptian links put the instructions earlier, and that Deuteronomic links also place it there (Dell 2006). Anyway, I am not going down this particular road today. Suffice it to say that this scholarly suggestion of a flowering of wisdom at the Exile is not enough to build on with sure foundations.

There has then been an older tendency in scholarship to see the Exile as the time when the full literary flowering of the nation took place.² That idea has, as I have indicated, been replaced with models of later writing contexts leading up to the final form of material. I do not want to get involved in these arguments here, but I want to stress that I see the Exile as an important point on the continuum of the production of texts—often a new context, often a recontextualization, but unlikely predominantly to represent the final stage of material. Indeed, I would argue that the period did not offer the stability for extensive writing—the lack of court structures that housed the sages, administrators and court personnel would have led to a crisis where the production of texts was substantially halted. This means that we have to look outside the wisdom literature to engage intertextually with prophecy that was still going on during the Exile in the Babylonian context, as I shall do here. The disruption caused by this crisis ultimately spawned more texts and a deeper engagement and further recontextualization of the material into more educational and didactic contexts in an emergent broader scribal culture that went on to define the later post-exilic period (as argued by Sneed 2015b).

Another important aspect of Israel’s sojourn in Babylon was their contact with Babylonian myths and literary culture, which greatly influenced the wisdom material as well as other parts of the canon. While Proverbs is arguably influenced more significantly by Egyptian literary culture, especially the instruction texts, as well as by local Canaanite culture (Day 2010), Job seems to emerge from the ashes of exilic loss and trauma, heavily influenced by Babylonian parallels (Dell 2013). The parallels with Babylonian literature, such as the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, are striking and it is hard to believe that the author...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction and case study: Wisdom for challenging times: Ecclesiastes, Job, and a vote for compassionate theology
• PART I: Biblical wisdom then
• PART II: Biblical wisdom now
• Index of Biblical References
• Index of Modern Authors
• Subject Index