1 Is “Wisdom Literature” a Useful Category? The term “wisdom” has come to occupy a rather interesting and unusual place in biblical studies. At one level, of course, it refers simply to a Hebrew word, and to a range of ideas associated with that word in the biblical texts themselves. It also, however, refers to a specific corpus of texts, and is often used as a generic literary description for that corpus—even though there is limited agreement about the contents of that corpus, and even though the most widely accepted members differ significantly from each other in most formal, literary respects. When the term is used also to describe a type of thought or worldview, it refers in principle to something shared by the different books in the wisdom corpus, but in practice, few if any of the concepts most widely described in this way are found in all those books. It is quite common, indeed, for scholars to extrapolate “wisdom” ideas from a single wisdom book, or even for ideas found in none of the Hebrew wisdom books to be characterized as wisdom on the basis of stories about Solomon, theories about the origin of wisdom literature, or ancient descriptions of other people and phenomena as “wise”. Consequently, a great deal has become drawn into the fold of wisdom, with little more than the term “wisdom” itself serving to assert some sort of continuity within so much diversity, and in the midtwentieth century, this was a significant factor in the explosion of studies claiming wisdom origins or influence for a wide range of biblical literature. That trend provoked some reactions, not least because it threatened to draw most of the canon into the fold of wisdom, but the most important of these reactions notably did not question the use of “wisdom” as such a broad concept, but merely focused on more precise methods for identifying it.1 Methodology has likewise tended to be the central focus in more specific and long-running debates about the identification of “wisdom psalms”—a pursuit that Norman Whybray memorably described as like making bricks without straw2—and the absence of agreement over such a basic matter has much to do with a reluctance to grasp the nettle of defining wisdom, or perhaps even with a failure to recognize that definition is a problem. As interest continues to grow in the relationships between biblical wisdom texts and later Jewish compositions from Qumran and elsewhere, these same issues have begun to re-emerge in a new form—not least because they were never really resolved in discussions of the biblical literature—and it is correspondingly important to ask whether we might not do better to scrap the phrase “wisdom literature” altogether, along with its related ideas, than to persevere with a way of characterizing material that succeeds in carrying so much baggage but so little precision. If we are to address that question, we ought to begin See especially J.L. Crenshaw, “Method in Determining Wisdom Influence upon ‘Historical’ Literature”, JBL 88 (1969): 129–42. 1 R.N. Whybray, “The Wisdom Psalms”, in J. Day, R.P.Gordon, H.G.M. Williamson (eds.), Wisdom in Ancient Israel. Essays in honour of J.A. Emerton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 152–60 at 152. 2 2 by asking, perhaps, just how we ended up talking about “wisdom literature” in the first place, and an answer to that more basic question, which has been posed surprisingly seldom, does shed some light on the situation in which we find ourselves.3 The term “wisdom literature” itself seems to have come into regular use by scholars during the second half of the nineteenth century, but it was simply a new way of referring to ideas and associations which were themselves, in fact, very old, albeit also very loosely defined. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, along with Song of Songs, had long been known as “wisdom books” in Christian circles, and formed, in effect, a division of the canon, which was strongly associated with King Solomon. At least in nonReformation Bibles, of course, this division also included Ben Sira and Wisdom of Solomon, and for some purposes, moreover, it could encompass the Psalms.4 It was not, therefore, a corpus of Solomonic works in particular, and even within the early church it had long been recognized in general that the apocryphal wisdom books were not written by Solomon.5 Proverbs itself, of course, refers to some of its content as the work of anonymous wise men, and the biblical account of Solomon’s reign not only names some of the king’s rivals, but also indicates that there was some international dimension to the sort of wisdom that he practised.6 Consequently there was an 3 Among the very few historical surveys of wisdom scholarship, special mention should be made of Rudolf Smend, “The Interpretation of Wisdom in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship,” in Wisdom in Ancient Israel. Essays in Honour of J.A. Emerton (ed. John Day, Robert P. Gordon, and H.G.M. Williamson; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 257–68. This focuses mainly on Proverbs, however. See also the more recent and wide-ranging Katharine J. Dell, “Studies of the Didactical Books of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament,” in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation (ed. M. Sæbø; vol. III/I The Nineteenth Century; Göttingen and Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 603–24. So, for curricular purposes, the sixteenth-century statutes of St Andrews declare, “libros sapientales vocamus librum Psalmorum, Proverbia Solomonis, Ecclesiasten, Canticum canticorum, (librum sapientie, et Ecclesiasticum)” See Robert Kerr Hannay, The Statutes of the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Theology at the Period of the Reformation: Edited with Introduction and Notes. (St Andrews University Publications 7; St Andrews: W.C. Henderson & Son, 1910), 117. 4 See, e.g., Augustine, De Civitate Dei 17.20 “Salomon … Prophetasse etiam ipse reperitur in suis libris, qui tres recepti sunt in auctoritatem canonicam: Prouerbia, ecclesiastes et canticum canticorum. Alii uero duo, quorum unus sapientia, alter ecclesiasticus dicitur, propter eloquii nonnullam similitudinem, ut Salomonis dicantur, obtinuit consuetudo; non autem esse ipsius non dubitant doctiores; eos tamen in auctoritatem maxime occidentalis antiquitus recepit ecclesia.” It is also true, however, that the Council of Carthage, in 397, recognized five books of Solomon as canonical for the African church, presumably including both Wisdom of Solomon and Ben Sira, and there is sometimes a certain haziness about issues of authorship. 5 6 See Prov 22:17; 24:23 and 1 Kgs 5:10–11 (ET 4:30–31). 3 awareness, even before widespread doubts began to be expressed about the Solomonic authorship of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, that there were many other wisdom writers in the ancient world. Although it was not traditionally numbered amongst the wisdom books for canonical purposes, this understanding opened a place for the book of Job, which was drawn into the wisdom corpus much earlier than has often been suggested. The first edition of Chambers’ Cyclopaedia in 1728 was certainly not a specialist work of biblical criticism, but foreshadowed later discussions by defining “Sapiental” as: an Epithet applied to certain Books of Scripture, calculated for our Instruction and Improvement in Prudence, or Moral Wisdom; Thus called in Contra-distinction to Historical and Prophetical Books. The Sapiental Books are Proverbs, Canticles, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, and Job; though some reckon this last among the Historical Books.7 This same definition is picked up in subsequent works of reference, and there is no reason to believe that it did not represent a common understanding.8 The article on Ecclesiastes in Leun’s 1795 biblical encyclopedia could similarly, without any suggestion of novelty, describe that book as “a very valuable example of the remains of the teachings of the sages among the Israelites, wherein the latter communicate the results of their experiences with the wise living of life”, and draw on the book of Job as an example of early Israelite engagement with the wisdom teachings of other nations.9 Before wisdom literature in its own right first began to become an object of scholarly interest in the nineteenth century, then, the books that came to be described that way already formed what was, in Art. “Sapiental”, in Volume 2 of E. Chambers, Cyclopædia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. (London : printed for James and John Knapton, John Darby, Daniel Midwinter, Arthur Bettesworth, John Senex, Robert Gosling, John Pemberton, William and John Innys, John Oshorn and Tho. Longman, Charles Rivington, John Hooke, Ranew Robinson, Francis Clay, Aaron Ward, Edward Symon, Daniel Browne, Andrew Johnston, and Thomas Osborn, 1728). 7 So, e.g., art. “Sapientel” in Joseph Nicol Scott, A New Universal Etymological English Dictionary (London : printed for T. Osborne and J. Shipton; J. Hodges; R. Baldwin; W. Johnston, and J. Ward, 1755); “Sapiential” in Volume 4, p. 2857, of John Wilkes, A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences; Comprehending All the Branches of Useful Knowledge, … The whole extracted from the best authors in all languages. By a society of gentlemen. (Second edition. London: W. Owen, 1764). In view of its early date, it is interesting to note also the title and selection of material in Zacheus Isham’s 1706 collection, Divine Philosophy: Containing the Books of Job, Proverbs, and Wisdom, with explanatory notes, which was published posthumously in London by Robert Clavell, Thomas Bennet and Robert Knaplock. 8 Johann Georg Friedrich Leun, “Prediger Salomo’s,” Biblische Encyklopädie oder exegetisches Realwörterbuch über die sämmtlichen Hülfswissenschaften des Auslegers: Nach den Bedürfnissen jetziger Zeit. Durch eine Gesellschaft von Gelehrten (Gotha: Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, 1795). 9 4 effect, a wisdom corpus. Furthermore, even if the definition in Chambers’ Cyclopaedia might be taken to suggest that “sapiental” literature is little more than a category of texts which are neither historical nor prophetic, it is clear that many scholars were making connections beyond the canon. Weisheitslehrer was a term already applied widely in German scholarship of the period to various ancient philosophers, and the idea that “wisdom teachers” were a familiar part of the ancient landscape enabled the Jewish wisdom books to be accommodated easily within existing contemporary paradigms, and to represent a much wider human phenomenon of individuals engaging with practical or philosophical questions about life—a phenomenon that extended far beyond Israel, and required no historical association between the writers involved. Friedrich Umbreit’s 1826 commentary on Proverbs, for example, notably discusses Job as a philosophical work alongside Ecclesiastes, and in a long introduction tries to set all three biblical wisdom texts against a much broader, even if little known, ancient background.10 What brings the books together in scholarship at this point, however, is not any apparent resemblance between them, but the role of each individually as a Hebrew counterpart to the philosophy of other countries. Two of the most important early studies—Wilhelm Vatke’s famously impenetrable 1835 volume on biblical theology11 and J.F. Bruch’s 1851 study of the wisdom books in particular12—were very clearly influenced by more specific contemporary ideas about the parallel development of societies, according to which philosophy or philosophizing appeared at a particular point in the history of a culture; indeed, Bruch’s volume is tellingly subtitled “A study in the history of philosophy”. In accordance with this understanding, both scholars dated the wisdom books late,13 and both noted that they stood apart from other traditions represented in the Bible: Vatke claims that they presuppose and assimilate religious ideas that had developed in the course of earlier Jewish history, but strike out in a new direction, in which issues of nationalism and the outer forms of particularism are permitted to slip Philologisch-kritischer und philosophischer Commentar über die Sprüche Salomo’s: Nebst einer neuen Übersetzung und einer Einleitung in die morgenländische Weisheit überhaupt und die hebräisch-Salomonische insbesondere (Heidelberg: J.C.B. Mohr, 1826), esp. pp. iv, xlviii–l. 10 11 Wilhelm Vatke, Die biblische Theologie wissenschaftlich dargestellt: Erster Band. Die Religion des alten Testaments nach den kanonischen Büchern entwickelt. (vol. 1; Berlin: G. Bethge, 1835). 12 Johann Friedrich Bruch, Weisheits-Lehre der Hebräer: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie (Strasbourg: Treuttel und Würtz, 1851). 13 As regards date, Vatke allowed the possibility that some material in Proverbs might be authentically Solomonic (Die biblische Theologie, 294), but viewed the first part of the book as much later, assigning the principal development of the book to the fifth century, alongside Job, with Ecclesiastes following later (p. 563). Bruch dates the extant books late, but does see an earlier development of the tradition, influenced by Solomon (Weisheits-Lehre, 49). Mention could also be made here of Ludwig Noack’s slightly later Der Ursprung des Christenthums (Leipzig: Friedrich Fleischer, 1857), which likewise traces the history of wisdom, and assigns similar dates (cf. esp. I, 109–10, 216–7). 5 from sight;14 Bruch suggests, more simply, that their engagement in free reflection gives them a “broader and higher view of life”.15 The demands of the new biblical criticism required both scholars, of course, to comment on the context of the writings, and Vatke suggests that wisdom teachers probably functioned alongside Levitical teachers of the Law. Although he is reluctant simply to identify one group with the other, he stresses that the differences between the two were probably not so stark as a simple contrast of their literary products might suggest: these wisdom teachers occupy, in some sense, the place earlier occupied by the prophets.16 Bruch, on the other hand, is reluctant to speak at all in terms of schools or of teachers whose task it was actually to teach, declaring instead that there is no trace of any school for sages, and that “the Hebrew wise men were not philosophers by profession; they constituted no class separate from other classes, but may have belonged to various different classes.”17 To a great extent, however, both scholars are still apparently modelling their ideas about the Jewish wisdom writers on much broader ideas about the place and function of ancient philosophers more generally, and for both the wisdom tradition remains something more like the Greek philosophical tradition than the activity of a specific group with common and distinctive opinions. Some aspects of this way of thinking about the wisdom books persisted in much of the scholarly literature for the rest of the nineteenth century. It is interesting to observe that, even as late as 1887, T.K. Cheyne could still describe wisdom as a “phase of Hebrew thought” which is “the link between the more exceptional revelations of Old Testament prophecy and the best moral and intellectual attainments of other nations than the Jews”.18 Cheyne does speak of the wise very much as a specific group or tradition, and it is apparent that the very fact of considering the wisdom books as a group in scholarship of this period does much to dispel the sense that they are a more miscellaneous collection. What they offer, he claims however, is an alternative approach rather than an alternative ideology, and he takes their apparent influence on the tone and phraseology of prophetic literature as a sign of mutual respect between prophets and wise men.19 The wise men do not stand in opposition to the 14 Vatke, Die biblische Theologie, 563–64. 15 Bruch, Weisheits-Lehre, 49. 16 Vatke Die biblische Theologie, 560–61. 17 Bruch, Weisheits-Lehre, 57–58. 18 T.K. Cheyne, Job and Solomon or the Wisdom of the Old Testament (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1887), at 117. An update to some of his ideas was provided in Cheyne’s later critique of S.R. Driver: see his Founders of Old Testament Criticism, Biographical, Descriptive, and Critical Studies, (London: Methuen, 1893), 337–49. 19 Cheyne, Job and Solomon, 120. 6 more spiritual and religious traditions of Judaism, indeed, but restrict themselves largely to the sphere of practical ethics, in which they take an approach that is realistic and humanistic, free from national prejudice, characterized by an adaptation of morality to human nature, and outwardly utilitarian.20 We may suspect here that Vatke’s Hegelianism has merely been displaced by a variety of nineteenthcentury humanism, and indeed, right down to the claims of William McKane in the 1960s, that wisdom was a tradition of secular Realpolitik,21 it is often difficult not to associate changing scholarly ideas about wisdom literature with changing contemporary pre-occupations. All the same, even into the early twentieth century, wisdom continued to be regarded as a particular expression of early Judaism, with little talk of an over-arching viewpoint or ideology, and with a canon that remained rather loosely defined. Johannes Meinhold’s wide-ranging, partly form-critical survey of Israelite wisdom, published in 1908 and sometimes depicted as the first modern study of wisdom literature, generally treats the wisdom books as an integral part of the culture from which they emerged.22 Although Meinhold snipes at what he takes to be wisdom’s petit bourgeois morality, rooted entirely in self-interest, and speaks about the influence of Greek and oriental wisdom on Judaism in terms which are not entirely positive,23 he also stresses the rootedness of wisdom in folk traditions and, to a greater extent even than many of his predecessors, he broadens the wisdom canon to include much other material, so that a sense persists here, as in earlier scholarship, that wisdom is integral to the broader biblical tradition. This was to change dramatically in the course of the twentieth century, but some aspects of those changes were foreshadowed much earlier, in the third volume of Heinrich Ewald’s history of Israel, first published in 1847.24 Ewald, who was reluctant to let go of the link between Proverbs and Solomon, based his account of the wisdom books less on the content of those books than on the biblical account of Solomon’s reign, and on other biblical references to wise men, extrapolating a narrative of glory and decline. Ewald speaks of a long period of peace under Solomon, and of exposure to the ideas of other countries, which must have provoked in Israel a range of important questions. These drove the nation to an intense investigation of the human and non-human world, giving rise to a quest that we would usually call philosophical, and a part of Solomon’s own brilliance 20 Ibid., 119, 121. 21 See especially his Prophets and Wise Men. (London: SCM Press, 1965). 22 Johannes Meinhold, Die Weisheit Israels in Spruch, Sage und Dichtung (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1908). 23 24 Ibid., 138–39, 306. Heinrich Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel bis Christus: in drei Bänden. (vol. 3.1; Göttingen: Dieterich, 1847), esp. 79–93. 7 is displayed in those Solomonic sayings preserved in Proverbs. Solomon sought, however, to create an entire natural history, and the wisdom of his time has a scope so comprehensive that readers in subsequent centuries struggled to understand it. Ewald’s ideas about the subsequent development of wisdom are outlined in a slightly later essay which he published in 1849, and on which he drew in subsequent editions of his history.25 We need not go into all the details of this characteristically speculative account, which also draws in questions about Jewish wisdom’s relationship with the thought of other countries, but the historical outline is fascinating. Ewald speaks of the growth and increasing influence of wisdom in the centuries that followed the United Monarchy: having manifested itself originally only in particular circles, it grew as students gathered around individual teachers, and we can find traces of developing wisdom schools as early as the eighth and seventh centuries, with wisdom’s influence spreading outward from there into almost every undertaking and into many different types of literature—as shown by examples from Isaiah. As wisdom spread, however, it became dangerously diluted, with less able students reluctant to engage with its religious dimensions, and provoked radical questioning or even atheism, with which the pessimistic literature is to be associated. From a high point under Solomon, then, wisdom becomes popularized and distorted, to the point that it stands in opposition to the basics of Israelite religion. It is difficult to judge how influential this account actually was. Ewald’s ideas about schools, at least, provoked a long-standing controversy,26 but other scholars do not seem until much later to have fallen into line with Ewald’s more negative appreciation of wisdom literature, and with his view of it as a dangerously distinct tradition, and, when they eventually did so, Ewald’s contribution was generally overlooked. The twentieth-century changes to wisdom scholarship were not unrelated, of course, to some of Ewald’s concerns: his ideas about Solomon’s reign re-emerge in von Rad’s more famous Solomonic Enlightenment,27 and Alt was to develop similar ideas about Solomon’s encyclopaedic Heinrich Ewald, “Über Die Volks - Und Geistesfreiheit Israel’s Zur Zeit Der Großen Propheten Bis Zur Ersten Zerstörung Jerusalems,” in Jahrbücher Der Biblischen Wissenschaft (vol. 1: 1848; Göttingen: Dieterich, 1849), 95–108. 25 26 There is a useful review of this and other contemporary debates about the wisdom books in Otto Zöckler, Die Sprüche Salomonis: Theologisch-homiletisch bearbeitet (Theologisch-homiletisches Bibelwerk: die Heilige Schrift Alten und Neuen Testaments, mit Rücksicht auf das theologischhomiletische Bedürfniß des pastoralen Amtes in Verbindung mit namhaften evangelischen Theologen: AT 2; Beilefeld and Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1867), 3–18. See especially Gerhard von Rad, “Der Anfang Der Geschichtsschreibung Im Alten Israel,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 32 (1944): 1–42. ET Gerhard von Rad, “The Beginnings of Historical Writing in Ancient Israel,” in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1965), 166–204. 27 8 natural history.28 Those changes, however, owe much more to a development that need hardly be outlined here: the twentieth-century quest for a biblical theology which both consolidated the religion of Israel (as depicted in the Bible) around a single key concept, and sought to make it unique within the ancient context. This quest, surely inspired more by religious than by historical concerns, was always going to have problems with a tradition that was notable both for its neglect of the religious ideas prominent in other biblical literature and for its associations with foreign literature— associations which were reinforced in 1924 by Erman’s recognition of a direct link between Proverbs and the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, but which had anyway become ever more apparent with the discovery of similar ancient texts.29 Wisdom literature’s non-conformity was consequently explained in terms of its affiliations with a much broader, international movement, and it was commonly understood to have been, at least originally, the product of a particular administrative class, which produced wisdom books for pedagogical purposes, probably in imitation of other such classes abroad. With its absence of revelation, its lack of interest in election, and its disconcertingly unProtestant inclinations to suggest either that humans could save themselves or that they could establish no real relationship with God, wisdom literature could be discounted by suggesting that it was, effectively, a cuckoo in the biblical nest. Much the same evidence that had been used in the nineteenth century to set the wise alongside prophets and priests was now used to present them as distinct from, and sometimes even as directly opposed to more genuinely Jewish religious traditions. I shall not dwell on those theories here, not least because I have criticized them in detail elsewhere, 30 and although they remain prominent in the work of a few scholars, they are no longer a commonplace of wisdom scholarship. The important point about them, in this context, is that they forced wisdom to become something concrete and coherent: if no real, mainstream Jew could have overlooked salvation history or the covenant as the basis of their religion, then the wisdom literature could not be understood loosely either as a current which ran alongside prophecy and historical literature in the mainstream Judaism of all or any periods, or as a sympathetic newcomer, but must be something See Albrecht Alt, “Die Weisheit Salomos,” TLZ 76 (1951): cols. 139–44. ET “Solomonic Wisdom,” in Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom (ed. James L. Crenshaw; The Library of Biblical Studies; New York: Ktav, 1976), 102–12. Ewald, Geschichte, 88, had drawn on 1 Kgs 5:13 (ET 4:33) to suggest this interest, and Alt links the same verse to Egyptian onomastica. The verse probably refers to parables and fables, however, which is how Josephus Antiquities VIII paraphrases it, and the onomastica have no relation to any such project; see Michael V. Fox, “Egyptian Onomastica and Biblical Wisdom,” VT 36 (1986): 302–10. Although the claim has been very influential, none of the biblical wisdom books themselves show any interest in taxonomy or scientific mastery of nature; see Stuart Weeks, Early Israelite Wisdom (Oxford theological monographs; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 111–13. 28 Adolf Erman, “Eine Ägyptische Quelle Der ‘Sprüche Salomos,’” SPAW 15 (1924): 86–93, tab. VI– VII. 29 30 Weeks, Early Israelite Wisdom. 9 religiously and culturally distinct. Wisdom as a tradition must, accordingly, have had its own ideas and beliefs to unite it, and all the points of contact with other biblical literature that had already been noted by previous generations became not an affirmation of commonality between different types of thought and literature, but potentially problematic communications, or “influences” between groups that were supposed to stand far apart. If the nineteenth century gave a name and shape to existing ideas about wise men and their books, it was the twentieth century that put them in uniform and set them to march together. Although the literary and historical evidence used to support it can be criticized on almost every front, the principal problem with this analysis is not that it misrepresents the ideas of the wisdom books that we possess, or their distinctiveness when set beside other biblical literature, but that it presupposes a coherence between them which is not self-evident from their content. If we set Ecclesiastes next to Job, for example, it is true that both books raise questions about beliefs that they portray as conventional: most fundamentally, Ecclesiastes doubts the ability of humans to gain anything lasting from life for themselves, while Job attacks the idea that divine sovereignty can be compromised by human expectations about divine justice. It so happens that each book, in its own way, is setting up straw men, and the actual conventionality of the opinions that they attack is somewhat belied by the many other attacks on such ideas that can be found in ancient literature; the more important point here, however, is that they are neither attacking the same things, nor adopting the same positions— Ecclesiastes, indeed, is strongly attached to the very idea of divine judgment which Job brings into question. The books also have self-evident formal differences, which substantially undermine James Crenshaw’s influential description of wisdom literature as a “marriage between form and content”,31 and, although we can identify shared interests or opinions in such matters as the unique power of God over the world as its creator, when the wisdom books share such views with each other, they generally share them also with much other biblical literature. More generally, it is true, to be sure, that the wisdom books all share an interest in wisdom, but even that is portrayed and understood in different ways, and if we are obliged to ask just what it is that both unites all these books and makes them different from others, then it is difficult to supply an answer more precise than that they all have an interest in the human capacity for survival and self-improvement in a world that serves the purposes of its creator. Whether even that can be said of strictly all the materials is questionable, and such matters are addressed tangentially at best in the Fürstenspiegel of Prov 31:1–9, or in the acrostic poem that follows it. It is not surprising to discover, therefore, that descriptions and definitions of wisdom literature tend to emphasize not the features shared by the biblical wisdom books, but the absence in those books of features found in most other biblical literature, such as an interest in national history or prophetic 31 James L Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 19. 10 revelation. This should not come as a surprise, because, as we have seen, membership of the wisdom corpus was never historically supposed to imply that the wisdom books had anything positively in common with each other, beyond the closer resemblance of each individually to philosophy than to history or prophecy. Even definitions based on distinctiveness, however, become problematic just as soon as we start to include the apocryphal wisdom books in our discussions, or to wonder why a text like Psalm 78 should choose to adopt language from Proverbs in its presentation of a historical survey. It is also important to observe that although we possess many other ancient compositions formally and generically similar to material in our wisdom literature, it is generally very difficult to separate those texts from other works: they each typically reflect the ideas of their own context and culture, and are distinguished by aspects of their genre or subject-matter rather than by any underlying ideology. To a great extent, furthermore, the same is clearly true of much in the biblical wisdom corpus: unless one is thoroughly determined not to do so, it is difficult to read Proverbs 1–9, for instance, without rapidly becoming aware of its strong affinities with the language of Deuteronomy, or to ignore the close relationship between Job and many Psalms. Indeed, it is often only the assumption that wisdom literature must be distinct which imposes distinctions: early readers clearly believed that the instruction commended in Proverbs 1–9 should be identified with the Deuteronomic Torah, and it is very likely both that the work itself intended such an identification, and that the “foreignness” of its female counterpart to wisdom is deliberately evocative of a common biblical trope for apostasy; many modern commentators, on the other hand, have excluded the possibility of such resonances almost a priori, even at the cost of imposing some very unnatural readings.32 All that is not to say, of course, that there are no differences of style or opinion between wisdom books and other compositions, but it would be difficult to make a case, either on circumstantial or on internal grounds, that any of the wisdom books stands wholly disconnected from the mainstream of Jewish thought and literature. These considerations are important also if we turn to understandings of wisdom literature that find coherence not in form or content, so much as in context and purpose. The understanding of wisdom literature as a professional literature is still held in some quarters, but is difficult to maintain in the face of a growing inclination to attribute all biblical literature to a small and broadly coherent literate class, rather than to distinct circles of priests, prophets and scribes; this is much more in line with the way in which scholars generally approach other ancient scribal cultures. This shift does not exclude the older understanding of wisdom literature as educational, which brings the wisdom books together through a shared didacticism, but that understanding likewise has itself to be set in the context of modern perspectives on the foreign literature. The most self-evidently didactic material in parts of Proverbs talks a lot about parental teaching of children, and it is this, above all, that has driven 32 See Stuart Weeks, Instruction and Imagery in Proverbs 1–9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 102–5. 11 perceptions of wisdom literature as pedagogical. The texts in Proverbs, however, have derived this language not from their own contexts of composition, but from the literary conventions of the ancient instruction genre, to which Amenemope belongs, and although Egyptian instructions were used alongside other types of composition as canonical texts, which were read and memorized as a way of enculcating culture, even there the parental setting was conventional.33 Correspondingly, we cannot derive a pedagogical context for Proverbs, let alone for wisdom literature more generally, either from such modes of address, or through analogy with the literature from which they were originally borrowed. Such a setting, of course, was always difficult to establish from the internal evidence of Job and Ecclesiastes, neither of which shows any interest in education at all, and even Ben Sira’s famous reference to a school in 51:23 is surely no more than an invitation to read his work, modelled on the invitation to enter wisdom’s house (Prov 9:4) which similarly closes Proverbs 1–9. We really are not in a position to say very much about the context for, or within which the biblical wisdom books were written, any more than we can say much about the contexts of most other biblical literature. The epilogue to Ecclesiastes portrays that book in very strongly literary terms, with materials arranged to be pleasing but also intended to be provocative, and it is not improbable that all the major biblical wisdom texts were written in the first instance for performance: we are sometimes too willing to impose on our texts an anachronistic dichotomy between erudition and entertainment. Despite occasional, frankly peculiar assertions that ancient sayings and instructions were intended to be plain and unambiguous,34 these works, like their foreign counterparts, are sophisticated compositionally and stylistically, as well as intellectually: nobody who has read any of the Hebrew wisdom books in the original is likely to be struck by their simplicity or plain speaking, while the notorious complexities of Amenemope are not untypical of Egyptian instructions more generally. No assessment of Job, in particular, can be even remotely adequate if it ignores the poetic quality of the text in order to focus solely on its ideas. Whatever the case, though, it is certainly not possible simply to distinguish or define wisdom literature in terms of its origin and function, when we know so little about either, any more than it seems practical to speak generally of wisdom forms or viewpoints. In short, then, modern scholarship has inherited a wisdom corpus that was not created on the basis of any internal consistency between its members. It served as a way to speak about miscellaneous books, 33 Ibid., 4–32. E.g., “The Instruction … does not aspire to be literature and it sacrifices imaginative outreach to pedestrian clarity … the concern of the instruction is above all to be clear and to leave nothing to chance or doubt”: William McKane, Proverbs: A New Approach (The Old Testament library; London: SCM Press, 1970), 317–18. More recently, similar claims are repeated in Francis M. Macatangay, The Wisdom Instructions in the Book of Tobit (Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies 12; Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 64. 34 12 which were each distinctive within the biblical canon, because they were neither historical nor prophetic, but which could each be associated with some more general human endeavour and, it turned out, with works that had similar interests but lay far outside the canon. Subsequent attempts to find coherence within that corpus have been motivated, in effect, by the problematization of its existence: particular understandings of Israelite religion and culture left no place for such books in the mainstream, and it was easier to conceive of them as an alternative tradition than as multiple exceptions to a rule. The broader scholarly context has now changed again, however, and after a few decades on the isolation ward, with only each other and a few foreigners for company, the biblical wisdom books have found themselves released into a world that is much more tolerant of diversity in the biblical canon. Accordingly, scholarship on the wisdom books over the last twenty years or so has shown a much greater willingness to deal with each book on its own terms, and although the texts are now frequently brought into conversation with other biblical materials, “wisdom influence” and associated concepts have been all but banished from discourse. It is difficult to return a genie to its bottle, however, and for those of us still wrestling with the degree of variety even within our tiny biblical wisdom corpus, it can be disconcerting to find that “wisdom influence” is alive and well outside our field, that the wisdom label is being attached to a whole new array of later Jewish texts, or that boundary-blurring concepts like “mantic wisdom” continue to run amok amongst scholars of later Judaism—even if it is also somewhat comforting to find that those scholars have had no greater success in agreeing a definition than biblical scholarship ever managed. Just as the biblical wisdom books had no monopoly over the terms ‫ חכמה‬and ‫חכם‬, which are used to describe everything from sewing (Exod 28:3) through to piloting boats (Ezek 27:8) or working as a professional mourner (Jer 9:16–17 [ET 17–18]), so scholars of the biblical wisdom literature have no right to restrict the uses of their modern equivalents by other scholars. Like the wise women of Jer 9, however, we do have some duty to make haste and raise a wailing over them, not because studentss of the later literature are wrong to see many links with the wisdom books, but because there are, I think, some important lessons to be learned about the way in which we should describe those links. From everything that I have said so far, it should be clear that labels like “wisdom” or “sapiential” have to be applied with great caution if they are supposed to suggest that a text, form or idea corresponds to some distinctive feature that is common to all the biblical wisdom books, if only because such features are very rare, and because, even at a fundamental level, there are siginificant differences between our texts. Indeed, there are few things, if any, that can be called “sapiential” in the sense of some general and meaningful connection with all the wisdom books. This becomes important when scholars start talking about “wisdom” influence, or simply using “wisdom” as an adjective, because such descriptions, which really mean very little in themselves, can readily displace or distort more significant associations with particular wisdom books. It is intriguing to see in 13 Ecclesiastes, for example, an interest in the processes of the world and an emphasis on determinative divine control that we might more naturally associate with apocalyptic texts. If we want to pick this up as an aspect of discussions about wisdom influence on apocalyptic, however, then we need to bear in mind that these are not readily described as “wisdom” views, except insofar as they are found in one wisdom book, and that their presence in that book cannot solely be explained with reference to other wisdom books: it is neither impossible nor really even improbable that they have been taken up in Ecclesiastes from some quite different source.35 Rather differently, we find a lot of materials in later texts that resemble the exhortations and even some of the specific advice in Proverbs, especially Proverbs 1–9, and this is often described as sapiential, despite the almost total absence of such materials in Job, and their very limited role in Ecclesiastes. Of course, it is possible that there were other texts like Proverbs, now lost, or that such borrowings were indirect, and we have to be cautious about presuming that material in Proverbs must itself have been used; it is difficult to see how anything useful might be achieved in such cases, however, by saying merely that a text is didactic, or shows wisdom influence, rather than noting its more specific affinities. It is methodologically problematic at the best of times to conduct discussions of literary influence with genres serving as proxies for actual texts, and when we are dealing with a concept so diffuse as wisdom literature, it is also potentially very misleading. In principle, it would be far more precise, as well as more accurate, to note the fact of resemblance or dependance, rather than to speak vaguely of sapientalism or wisdom influence, because, in the final analysis, writers work directly or indirectly with texts, and with their recollections of texts, not with abstractions. Although precision is desirable in discussions of influence, however, it can rather less helpful in discussions of genre and classification. We may readily observe, for example, that the Sayings of Ahikar probably stimulated the development of the Demotic instructions in Egypt, which differ in key respects from their classical predecessors, and that at least one of those instructions has taken from 35 Ecclesiastes seems to have a quasi-deterministic view of a world in which human actions unconsciously serve divine plans that cannot be known, and this corresponds to certain sayings in Proverbs as well; cf. Stuart Weeks, Ecclesiastes and Scepticism (LHBOTS 541; New York & London: T&T Clark, 2012). The God of Job, on the other hand, while surely no less incomprehensible or unconstrainable, is portrayed in the divine speeches as a deity who creates and responds, not one who plans and directs—indeed, the very plot of that book revolves around his willingness to change direction and around Job’s freedom to make his own choices. A different picture emerges again in Proverbs 1–9, where the presence of wisdom in creation means that humans do have access to knowledge of the divine will, and in which the difficulty of making good choices is a key concern. There may be some engagement with Proverbs 1–9 in Job 28, and perhaps even a qualification or critique of its ideas, depending on how we read that text, and it is very likely that Ecclesiastes knew it too: these three major texts, however, present three very different understandings of the world, and it is difficult even to find a reconciliation between them, let alone to speak of some common, “wisdom” view. 14 Ahikar the device of setting its instructional speech in the context of a lengthy narrative.36 It seems likely that Ahikar is also the prime influence on the book of Tobit in this respect: since he is anticipating his own death after praying for it, Tobit’s speech to his son Tobias in chapter 4 evokes the conventions of parental instruction in its context as much as in its content, as does his deathbed speech in chapter 14: instructions are supposed to be set not in the day-to-day teaching of children, but at the point of death or retirement, when the advice received and applied by one generation is passed on to the next. It would be no less absurd actually to describe Tobit as an instruction on that basis, though, than to ignore its use of instructional conventions, and there are many other texts where we find similar borrowings or allusions that cannot reasonably be regarded as determinative of genre: Psalm 34, for instance, draws heavily and self-consciously on the two main types of literature found in Proverbs, but is itself neither an instruction nor a collection of sayings.37 In such cases, it can be helpful to recognize the use of “primary (simple) genres” within “complex” ones, which is how Bakhtin describes the way in which epistolary novels, for example, can use the form of letters whilst remaining novels, or a detective story can include a railway timetable without requiring annual revision.38 This is a helpful concept for describing the quite widespread use of instructional forms and conventions in literature that we would not describe as primarily instructional in itself, and, as though to demonstrate that we cannot simply divide genres into primary and complex ones, there are likewise instructions, of course, that themselves employ or evoke other genres. We should also bear in mind, however, that different types of composition can be brought together in other ways. What distinguishes the Demotic instructions from their classical Egyptian forebears, for example, is the fact that they use long strings of short sayings rather than more solid blocks of advice: as Proverbs itself shows, such collections can and did enjoy an existence as “sentence literature”, quite separate from traditional instructions, but the two genres are commonly brought together, and the format of sentence literature given an instructional context. Similarly, in works like Ahikar and Tobit, the fact that an instruction is a speech, with a speaker, means that it can be brought together with the conventions of narrative, and that possibility is sometimes exploited in other ways elsewhere: 36 See especially Miriam Lichtheim, Late Egyptian Wisdom Literature in the International Context: A Study of Demotic Instructions (OBO 52; Freiburg, Schweiz: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983). The Demotic Instruction of Ankhsheshonqy, probably from the Ptolemaic period, similarly creates a complicated story in order to explain its own existence. See Stuart Weeks, “The Limits of Form Criticism in the Study of Literature, with Reflections on Psalm 34,” in Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in Honour of John Barton (ed. Katharine J. Dell and Paul M. Joyce; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 15–25. 37 Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres, and Other Late Essays (ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; trans. Vern W. McGee; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 62. 38 15 the New Kingdom Instruction of Any, for example, provides a response by Any’s son, so that the instructional speech becomes part of a dialogue, in which the value of instruction itself is debated,39 whilst in Proverbs 1–9 the conventions are exploited in a different way, so that similar instructional speeches are delivered by various speakers. Where the conventions that mark two genres do not clash, there is nothing to prevent a work belonging to both—which is why, for example, we can encounter even such oddities in modern literature as detective stories written in verse.40 For the generic purist, this is nothing less than miscegenation, which gives rise to much talk of mixed genre, or of works like Tobit somehow lying between different genres. These days, however, such purists are more likely to be biblical scholars than literary theorists, who tend to see genre less in terms of broad, exclusive classifications, and more as an aspect of interaction between texts. It is interesting that, say, 4QInstruction draws together materials from Proverbs and Genesis, and that it sets them in what appears to be an instructional speech, probably inspired by Proverbs, alongside ideas and motifs that we would commonly regard as apocalyptic; it is only in any way problematic, however, if we insist either on the incompatibility of those different materials, which is surely disproven by the very existence of such combinations, or on the need to impose some very specific generic tag. We can legitimately ask why the writer has opted to express his ideas in this way, and it is perfectly reasonable, moreover, to classify the text formally as an instruction, if we wish to do so, but we should not extrapolate ideas about its function or thought solely from its mode of expression. Writers seem to have borrowed the instructional format quite readily, often along with associated vocabulary and motifs from Proverbs, and there is no reason to suppose that all writers who did so felt themselves constrained either to align their own ideas with those of Proverbs, or to engage directly with them. Although it is important to be precise about sources of influence, therefore, rather than speaking loosely about wisdom or wisdom literature, it is no less important to recognize that there are different types and degrees of influence, and that those differences can become obscured if we try to impose the same rigid definitions and classifications upon every case that we encounter. It will be clear from all this that I have serious reservations about the usefulness of a term like “wisdom literature” in discussions about the relationships between different texts, whether those texts are the biblical wisdom books themselves, or the many works that have been linked to them. When we conduct a discussion in such terms, we not only reduce the the texts to an agglomeration of ill-defined See, conveniently, Michael V. Fox, “Who Can Learn? A Dispute in Ancient Pedagogy,” in Wisdom, You Are My Sister: Studies in Honor of Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday (ed. Michael L. Barré; CBQMS 29; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1997), 62–77. 39 40 Such as Martha Grimes, Send Bygraves (E Rutherford, NJ: Putnam Pub Group, 1989), and H.R.F. Keating, Jack, the Lady Killer (Hexham: Flambard Press, 1999). 16 concepts, but also conceal the particularities of the relationships between them. Having said that, however, I do not wish to imply for a moment that there were no big and significant conceptual shifts involved, and the literary influence of Proverbs, in particular, can hardly be disconnected altogether from the importance of its ideas. Proverbs 1–9 probably intended, and was certainly understood by subsequent readers, to offer a conceptualization of the Jewish law which aligned it with the place of teaching in the formation of the individual: just as one becomes more “educated” in some general sense by internalizing specific instruction, so one becomes more “wise” by internalizing the Torah, and this means that humans who have done so can align themselves with the divine will, and so discern what is good for them, even in situations that are not addressed directly in what they have learned. Such ideas are not wholly unrelated, of course, to the ancient use of instructions and other texts for enculturation, and they sit comfortably with Deuteronomy’s own demands to be learnt. They also provide, however, a way to understand the demands of the Torah as something more than the conditions of a now-broken covenant between God and Israel, and a new rationale for individuals to read and to learn them. It is impossible to say whether these ideas are a foundation for or merely a product of emergent Torah piety, but they are picked up and developed in much subsequent literature, often alongside other motifs prominent in Proverbs 1–9—not least the personification of wisdom, which is a key characteristic of that text, and was probably developed in the first place as a component of its broader imagery. Other texts have a role to play, and, for example, Job 28 is drawn into the presentation of wisdom in Baruch, but at this ideological level, as much as at the level of style, it would still be misleading to speak of all this in terms of some more general wisdom influence: we have no good reason to presuppose that such a synthesis pre-dated Proverbs 1–9, that the other wisdom books shared it, or that subsequent literature was drawing on some hypothetical pool of texts that were just like Proverbs 1–9. Although the concept of wisdom picked up from Proverbs is itself of great importance here, the concept of “wisdom literature” is not. That brings me back to the question posed in my title. If “wisdom literature” refers to an ill-defined corpus, the members of which adopt different views and different styles, and if it is clearly unhelpful for most purposes either to lump the wisdom books together or to distil from them some “wisdom” worldview with which none would wholly concur, then perhaps it is time that we stopped using such terms altogether. After all, if we still cannot agree on a precise meaning for them nearly two centuries on from the first studies, then their value, even as a sort of shorthand, is clearly limited. Although I should not wish to argue the point, I suspect that much the same might be said of other terms, like “apocalyptic literature”, or even “prophetic literature”, which tend similarly to group texts on the basis of very specific features, but then to imply some much broader coherence or historical connection between them. Discussions of form or genre in biblical studies seem often almost to be underpinned by an unspoken variety of philosophical realism, in which otherwise diverse texts and phenomena instantiate or approximate to universals, and in which a term like “wisdom” represents 17 neither simply the collection of wisdom texts nor some abstraction of their common elements, but a higher-order concept which unites the materials to which it is applied whilst transcending every specific aspect of them. At the very least, there has often been a signal lack of awareness either that the generic classifications which we impose may be significant only within our own systems of classification, or that our inclination to associate classes of literature with social phenomena or movements may have more to do with our own historicism than with history. Whilst it is not impossible that there was some self-consciously distinct wisdom tradition with its own all-embracing worldview and its own social and cultural location within early Judaism, labelling a group of texts as “wisdom” does not make it so. It is very clear, however, that this is exactly how the notion of a wisdom tradition initially, and almost accidentally, developed in modern scholarship, whatever other evidence was subsequently drawn in to support it. To the extent that we continue to reinforce such assumptions by using terms like “wisdom literature”, they are clearly not just unhelpful, but positively damaging, and perpetuate the idea that improbable hypotheses are actually established facts. It is not so easy, however, to abolish either the term or the concept that it implies. Although they may not know it by that name, most people, I think, will be familiar with Rubin’s Vase, a famously ambiguous silhouette, in which the viewer sees either two faces in profile, or a vase formed by the gap between them: depending on how one looks at the picture, each element is either a space or a bounded object. Despite the traditional association of some texts with Solomon, the wisdom books entered biblical scholarship as, one might say, space: they were loosely grouped together as Jewish exemplars of a much broader human philosophical tradition, set in contrast with more fixed and bounded traditions of law, cult and prophecy. When those other traditions came to be perceived as normative, however, then the perspective changed, and it was the wisdom books, as “wisdom literature” that became solid, and defined by the traditions around them in the canon. It is a feature of such pictures, however, that when the viewer has once seen a particular shape, it can be difficult ever to un-see it: when we focus on the space, it becomes solid. Correspondingly, now that the notion of a wisdom literature and tradition has become established, it is difficult to return to any looser conception of the wisdom books, however much effort has to be expended to sustain that notion, and however unhelpful it can be in practice. The boundary between wisdom and other books has worn very thin these days, and even if that boundary still stands, its existence may say more about the coherence of other biblical literature than about that of the wisdom books. That does not mean, however, that “wisdom literature” is even close to dropping out from the vocabulary of scholarship. We can put the term in its place, however, by saying what we actually mean. If a text resembles Proverbs, let us be a little nominalist for a change, and say that it resembles Proverbs, not that it has been influenced by wisdom literature; if it appears to reject Ecclesiastes, furthermore, let us say that, instead of referring vaguely to sceptical literature. We have perfectly good generic classifications like “instruction” or “sentence literature”, which clearly correspond to ancient understandings, and it is not 18 difficult to isolate specific themes or concepts without merging them into some “wisdom” view of God or the world. There may still be occasion to talk of “wisdom literature” as literature, and I have suggested elsewhere myself that the authors of the wisdom books may well have been conscious that they were writing in a long-established literary tradition.41 With appropriate qualifications, there may even be a role for the expression as a shorthand, and I’m sure that none of us would want to make our teaching or writing more long-winded than it has to be, or to fill our own book titles with lists of ancient compositions. Whatever we believe about the nature and background of the wisdom books, however, we must learn to start talking about them individually again, to appreciate that their significance and subsequent influence need not always have been mediated through some broader tradition, and to bring a greater precision to the way in which we discuss them. 41 Stuart Weeks, An Introduction to the Study of Wisdom Literature (T & T Clark approaches to biblical studies; London: T & T Clark, 2010), 126, 143–4.