Interpreting Old Testament Wisdom Literature

David G. Firth,Lindsay Wilson

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830891122
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

In popular perception, Wisdom literature is a "self-help" or "philosophy" section of the Old Testament library—the odd and interesting bits of canonical mortar between History and Prophets. Themes that are prominent elsewhere in the Old Testament receive only scant attention in the wisdom books. Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes focus on everyday life rather than on God's special dealings with the nation of Israel. But Old Testament scholarship has come to see the wisdom of the wise as reflecting an aspect of the Israelite worldview, not something totally foreign. The covenant beliefs are presupposed, even if rarely rising to the surface. Wisdom must be learned from parents, teachers, and friends, but it is ultimately a gift from God—not primarily intellectual but intensely practical. The issues addressed—justice, faith, wealth, suffering, meaning, sexuality—are highly relevant today. The focus of this volume is on both wisdom books and wisdom ideas. The first section surveys recent developments in the field of Old Testament wisdom, and the second section discusses some issues that have arisen in Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, and examines the Song of Songs as a wisdom text. The final section explores wisdom in Ruth, in some Psalms, and in the broader field of Old Testament narrative (from Joshua to Esther), while also examining wisdom, biblical theology, the concept of retribution in wisdom, and the vexed issue of divine absence. The following contributors are featured: - Christopher B. Ansberry- Craig G. Bartholomew- Lennart Boström- Ros Clarke- Katharine J. Dell- David G. Firth- Gregory Goswell- Ernest C. Lucas- Brittany N. Melton- Simon Stocks- Lindsay Wilson

PART 1:

THE STUDY OF WISDOM TODAY

1. OLD TESTAMENT WISDOM TODAY

Craig G. Bartholomew

Introduction

There is an immense amount at stake in our work on Old Testament wisdom. Wisdom is about navigating life individually and corporately amidst its many challenges. If there is something special about Old Testament wisdom, namely that it is inspired and fully trustworthy, as Christians believe, then we have a major responsibility to handle it well, and to make its resources available to academy, church and world today.

It is indeed gratifying, albeit somewhat overwhelming, to see how much attention Old Testament wisdom continues to receive. It was not always so. An effect of historical criticism in its early days was to marginalize Old Testament wisdom. Wellhausen, for example, paid virtually no attention to wisdom literature, regarding it as late and secondary.1 Consequently, the thorough application of the historical-critical method to ‘historical’ Old Testament literature occurs earlier than it does to wisdom literature. Gunkel’s form-critical approach was particularly significant in moving wisdom into the foreground of Old Testament studies.

Since Old Testament wisdom moved back into focus an enormous body of work has been produced,2 so that today a crucial question is how to orient oneself in relation to it, so as to see the most creative ways forward. By its nature any framework is reductive, but I propose that the most helpful way to see the whole is in relation to a series of turns.3 In the late nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century historical criticism with its various methods – source criticism, form criticism, tradition history and redaction criticism – dominated study of the Old Testament wisdom books. From the 1970s onwards Old Testament study was deeply affected by the literary turn, with its various methods such as New Criticism, structuralism, narrative analysis, rhetorical analysis, reception history, and so on, leading to fresh new ways of reading the wisdom books. There can be no doubt that the literary turn raised all sorts of important questions about the validity of the ‘assured results’ of historical criticism, but before the literary turn could be fully appropriated, the postmodern turn was upon us. The effect of postmodernism was to usher in an era of wild pluralism with a smorgasbord of readings being done of Old Testament texts, including wisdom. With its wariness of power and totalizing metanarratives postmodernism reinforced a growing emphasis on ideological critique of Old Testament texts. More recently, and in important ways related back to Karl Barth, and to Brevard Childs’ canonical hermeneutic, we have witnessed a theological turn in biblical studies, with an emphasis on reading the Bible as Scripture for the church. This too has manifested itself in studies of Old Testament wisdom.4

We can thus think in terms of the following turns:

Historical

Literary

Postmodern

Theological

In terms of this framework it is important to note that one turn does not obliterate (an) earlier one(s). Of necessity they interact with and upon each other. Nor is it the case that later turns are not present in earlier ones. Historical criticism, for example, placed great emphasis on ‘literary criticism’, but the later focus on Old Testament wisdom as literature scrutinized the extent to which historical criticism understood the literary dimension of texts. Historical critics also retain an interest in the theology of wisdom, but theological interpretation makes its goal that of reading Old Testament wisdom as Scripture for the church. The postmodern turn may now be running out of steam but it has been so diffusive in its effects that to a large extent historical criticism has remained the default mode for many Old Testament scholars. The theological turn is a minority school and a broad one at that, so its longer-term effects remain to be seen.5

In this chapter we will begin by defining wisdom, and we will then examine the journey of the Old Testament wisdom books through the lens of the turns identified above. After that we will assess the current state of Old Testament wisdom studies as a prelude to concluding with an assessment of where work needs to be done today.

Defining wisdom

Crenshaw refers to wisdom as an ‘elusive creature’ and asserts that ‘Each definition captures a significant feature of wisdom, but none of them succeeds in isolating the total phenomenon that gave birth to wisdom literature’.6 What ‘gave birth’ to Old Testament wisdom is an historical question and we may well not be able to solve this speculative issue. However, it remains worthwhile to try to delineate the contours of Old Testament wisdom.7 Proverbs is the foundational Old Testament wisdom book and from it, read as a literary whole, we see that wisdom is:

• an attribute of Yahweh (Prov. 8:22–31);
• the means by which Yahweh created the world (Prov. 3:19–20);
• and thus built into the fabric of creation8 and crying out to be heard by humans in all areas of life (Prov. 1:20–21);
• needed by humans in every area of life if they are to flourish (Prov. 3:13–18);
• rooted and grounded in the fear of Yahweh (Prov. 1:7 etc.);
• antithetically opposed to folly, an ever-present possibility in the world (cf. Prov. 9 on Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly’s houses and invitations);
• developed into a tradition through the experience of living in God’s world.

In brief, Old Testament wisdom deals with how to navigate life ‘successfully’.

The extent of the Old Testament wisdom corpus is debated. Clearly it includes Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, but some also include Song of Songs, and the Catholic canon includes other wisdom books such as Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon. Old Testament introductions tend to confine Old Testament wisdom to the three major books of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, and we will do likewise. An additional issue is the extent of wisdom influence in the rest of the Old Testament. Gunkel, for example, found a number of psalms to be wisdom ones, and this view retains its influence today.9 Views have waxed and waned regarding the extent of wisdom influence in the Old Testament. Writing in 1985 Crenshaw speaks of the danger of wisdom becoming an ‘insatiable “Sheol figure” who swallows the rest of the Hebrew canon’.10 Debate has centred on developing criteria for such influence without a consensus emerging.11 Intertextuality, which we will discuss below, holds the possibility of clarifying this debate.

Historical criticism and Old Testament wisdom

Since historical criticism to a significant extent remains the default mode for many biblical scholars, we do need to take note of it to orient ourselves in the present and to be sure to retain its lasting contributions. Although the roots of historical criticism go back much earlier than the nineteenth century, it was in the second half of the nineteenth century that this approach came to fruition in Germany and spread to the rest of Europe, the UK and the USA, as noted above.

Initially marginalized by Wellhausen, several factors altered this situation in relation to Old Testament wisdom. In the context of his form-critical approach Gunkel argued that the form and nature of Old Testament wisdom, especially in Proverbs, are so distinctive that they cannot be derived from prophecy and law, and thus be secondary, derivative and late. The Sitz im Leben of wisdom in Israel should rather be located in a particular wisdom class of men.12 Old Testament wisdom also bore an international character and the wise were probably in touch with other Ancient Near Eastern wisdom writings, a view soon confirmed by the discovery of the Instruction of Amenemope.13 Thus the Old Testament wisdom texts might be late but the oral tradition behind them has its roots in Israel’s origins. A long historical process of development thus underlies the Old Testament wisdom books, lending itself to tradition-historical analysis which was taken up with vigour by Hugo Gressmann.14 According to Gunkel the original, basic form was the brief didactic saying and especially that of the proverb. Over time it developed into more extended and written forms with new styles of its own. The later wisdom was more religious than the earlier worldly, pragmatic form.

It was thus only towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century that fully historical-critical works on Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes appeared.15 Modern study of Old Testament wisdom is therefore just over 100 years old, and there is surely a book waiting to be written with the title A Century of Old Testament Wisdom Study: c. 1908–c. 2008. Also of significance was the realization that Old Testament wisdom is above all else a theology of creation, and thus deeply theological. Zimmerli states categorically, ‘Wisdom theology is creation theology.’16

Two aspects of the historical-critical hermeneutic as it was applied to the Old Testament need to be borne in mind. One was the developmental view of Israelite religion and the other was the methods applied to Old Testament texts. These two were, of course, intimately related. Writing in 1956 Hahn says,

No historian of the nineteenth century, trained in the methods of scientific research, undertook to expound a historical development without first examining the available written sources critically. The initial task of the higher critics, accordingly, was a purely technical one: the careful analysis of the composition of the books of the Old Testament. Even in the eighteenth century, J. G. Eichhorn, ‘the father of Old Testament criticism’, had seen clearly that, before criticism could proceed with its task of investigating the historical circumstances under which the writings had been produced, the problem of defining the textual limits and the special characteristics of the underlying sources must be solved.17

Hahn’s phrase ‘the careful analysis of the composition of the books of the Old Testament’ is heuristically useful. Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, albeit in different ways, have all been subjected to historical-critical analysis of...