The Oxford Handbook of Wisdom and the Bible

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Social Setting ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Current State ◽  
Christian Thought

This volume both reflects on the contested nature of the Wisdom Literature category and takes advantage of the opportunities it presents for reconsidering the concept of wisdom more independently from it. The first half explores wisdom as a concept, with essays on its relationship to skill, epistemology, virtue, theology, and order in the Hebrew Bible, its meaning in related cultures, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Patristic and Rabbinic interpretation, and, finally, its continuing relevance in the modern world, including in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thought, and from feminist, environmental, and other contextual perspectives. The latter half considers “Wisdom Literature” as a category. Scholars address its relation to the Solomonic Collection, its social setting, literary genres, chronological development, and theology. Wisdom Literature’s relation to other biblical literature (law, history, prophecy, apocalyptic, and the broad question of “Wisdom influence”) is then discussed before separate chapters on the texts commonly associated with the category. Contributors take a variety of approaches to the current debates surrounding the viability and value of the Wisdom Literature category and its proper relationship to the concept of wisdom in the Hebrew Bible. Though the organization of the volume highlights the independence of wisdom as concept from “Wisdom Literature” as category, seeking to counter the lack of attention given to this question in the traditional approach, the inclusion of both topics together in the same volume reflects their continued interconnection. As such, this handbook both represents the current state of Wisdom scholarship and sets the stage for future developments.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-186
Author(s):  
Laura Quick
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
The One

The conclusion brings together the threads of the preceding chapters in order to demonstrate the major insight of the book, namely, that for the biblical authors personhood was negotiated in relation to the body and bodily objects. These insights have far-reaching implications for how we understand ancient conceptions of the body, the person, and relationships. On the one hand, dress is essential to the articulation and construction of identity, and this is also the case in the modern world. On the other, the multi-material aspect to ancient bodies is very different from modern Western ontologies. Ancient constructions of dress and the body are thus like and at the same time quite unlike our own. These constructions animate and inform biblical literature, and so are essential to properly understand and unpack the Hebrew Bible.

scholarly journals Israel’s Neighbors and the Problem of the Past

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Key Terms

Tellingly for their importance to ancient Israelite audiences, Israel’s closest geographical neighbors—the Canaanites, Arameans, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Philistines, and Phoenicians—appear nearly as much in the Hebrew Bible as the three dominant empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt. Indeed, several of these smaller neighboring groups individually feature more frequently in the Bible than the mighty Assyrians. These numbers tell us that Israelite authors and their audiences were frequently engaged with their bordering neighbors. The story Israel has to tell about itself deeply involves these smaller, lesser-known nations. By way of beginning the investigation, this chapter clarifies some issues of geography and discusses key terms, such as nation, state, tribe, and addresses other problems of describing borders and national neighbors in the ancient (and modern) world.

scholarly journals Les styles du temps

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-110
Author(s):  
Olivier Abel
Keyword(s):  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
Death Time

Starting from Ricœur’s last meditations on death, time, and eternity, we first seek to show the difficulties of Whitehead’s idea of a memory of God who would be “the great monad” (which frightened Jean-François Lyotard), or the Hegelian recapitulation. The navigation then reverses towards the insurmountable plurality of temporalities. In the wake of Marielle Macé’s work on style, we will seek not only in narrativity, which is itself a form of resistance to totalizations, but in all genres and forms of language, the infinitely varied ways of dealing with time. If we agree to reintegrate the Ricœurian studies of biblical literature into the philosophical field, we will resituate biblical narrative, itself inseparable from the prescriptive of the Torah which is always already there, in its textual intersection with other biblical literary genres, the broken time of the prophetic irruption, the eternal everydayness of wisdom literature, the metaphorical games of the hymn, etc.

The Pursuit of Wisdom at Qumran

2021 ◽  
pp. 616-634
Author(s):  
Matthew Goff
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
Ancient Judaism ◽  
The Dead

In recent years, the category of Wisdom Literature, primarily a designation for a type of biblical literature, has been applied to texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. At the same time, the usefulness of Wisdom as a literary category has been questioned. This situation prompts us to examine why we have the category, what its limitations and problems are, and also to assess its value. Genre theory encourages us to understand the nature of Wisdom as a literary category, recognizing that it is not simply a taxonomic scheme but also an etic and constructed convention of reading. Employing this category to classify texts, from both the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, has pragmatic value for interpreters despite its limitations, since it helps us recognize the affinities between texts so classified and better understand the pedagogy of ancient Judaism.

The Bible Made Me Do It: Christianity, Science, and the Environment

1995 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest L. Fortin
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Environmental Disaster ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Modern Natural Science ◽  
Christian Thought

The blame for the environmental disaster that threatens to overtake us unless something is done to avert it is often laid at the door of the Bible and the tradition that comes out of it. Typical of this trend is Lynn White's landmark essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), which traces the West's ruthless exploitation of nature to the biblical injunction that human beings are to “subdue” the earth and exercise “dominion” over all other living things. Ironically, White's indictment all but coincided with the triumph of an older theory the object of which was to demonstrate against the Enlightenment that, far from being hostile to modern science, the glory of our civilization and the instrument of its conquest of nature, the Christian tradition was the principal agent of its emergence. Christianity would thus be simultaneously and for the same reason responsible for what is best and what is worst in the modern world. The article challenges the premise that these two theories share, namely, that modern science is a child of premodern Christian thought. It begins with a restatement of what was once the commonly accepted view of our relationship to nonhuman nature and ends with a brief account of the essential limitations of modern natural science.

Same-Sex Relations in the Biblical World

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore W. Jennings
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Saint Paul ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Biblical Texts

While the Bible is often understood to forbid same-sex love, a closer examination reveals a wide variety of forms of same-sex love that are presupposed and even celebrated in these texts. After demonstrating that biblical texts taken to prohibit same-sex love have been misunderstood, the chapter explores multiple forms of same-sex love in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Love between women in the story of Ruth, the expressions of warrior love in the stories of David and the centurion who came to Jesus, the transgendering of Israel in the prophets and the transgendering of Jesus and Saint Paul in the New Testament, even tales of sexual awakening and violence, provide a rich tapestry of same-sex love exhibited in biblical literature giving deeper meaning to the message of divine love which for Christians is exemplified by Jesus.

Israel Knohl. The Divine Symphony: The Bible's Many Voices. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003. xv, 207 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-163
Author(s):  
Marvin A. Sweeney
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
General Concept ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Per Se

In this wide-ranging overview of biblical literature, Israel Knohl argues that the Hebrew Bible does not present a consistent or monolithic viewpoint concerning ancient Israel's or Judaism's understanding of God, itself, and the world in which it lived. Rather, Knohl contends that the Bible presents a pluralism of viewpoints that to a great degree anticipates the pluralistic outlook of Rabbinic Judaism. This will hardly come as a surprising thesis to anyone familiar with modern biblical and theological scholarship. Indeed, it takes up the classic question of unity and diversity within the Hebrew Bible that might be illustrated by Gerhard von Rad's well-known Old Testament Theology. Von Rad recognized the diversity of traditions that informed the various writings and viewpoints now gathered in the Bible while simultaneously trying to systematize them into a general concept of Heilsgeschichte, that is, “salvation history” or “sacred history.” Such Heilsgeschichte moved inexorably to what von Rad believed would be the ultimate culmination of human history. Knohl's contribution comes not in relation to the model of pluralism in the Bible per se, but in relation to his argument that so much of the priestly literature that engages in pluralistic debate with other biblical works is rooted in the monarchic period of ancient Israel's (or Judah's) history. In this respect, Knohl's own work—although original in its own right—owes much to an earlier model advocated by Yehezkel Kaufmann, one of the founding fathers of modern Israeli biblical scholarship.

Wisdom Influence

2021 ◽  
pp. 408-422
Author(s):  
John L. McLaughlin
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Deuteronomistic History ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Wisdom Traditions ◽  
Clear Cases

One would expect to see points of contact between the Israelite Wisdom Literature preserved in the Bible and the other components of that collection. Scholars have proposed Wisdom influence in books from most parts of the biblical corpus, including the Pentateuch, the Deuteronomistic History, the Psalms, and the Prophets. This essay proposes three criteria for evaluating such proposals and demonstrates their application to specific texts. The results range from no evidence of actual Wisdom influence to clear cases of direct influence from Israel’s Wisdom traditions on other types of biblical literature.

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