The Chronological Development of Wisdom Literature

Author(s):  
Markus Saur

In this article, the historical localization of Hebrew Bible Wisdom Literature is discussed firstly with regard to the literary development of the books of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. By examining these books one can make several observations that help to reconstruct the history not only of the individual books, but also the history of Wisdom Literature as a whole. Wisdom Literature is understood in this context as the result of a process of discussion, interaction, and interdependence, and thus the documentation of a broader discourse surrounding Wisdom topics. This discourse is reflected in the whole of Wisdom Literature of the Hebrew Bible. From this point of view, the differentiation between the Wisdom books and some other Wisdom texts, such as the Wisdom Psalms or the book of Ben Sira, is finally placed within an era overview, and thus a short history of Wisdom Literature is presented.

2006 ◽  
pp. 112-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Nazarov

The attempts to reconstruct the instruments of interbudget relations take place in all federations. In Russia such attempts are especially popular due to the short history of intergovernmental relations. Thus the review of the ¬international experience of managing interbudget relations to provide economic and social welfare can be useful for present-day Russia. The author develops models of intergovernmental relations from the point of view of making decisions about budget authorities’ distribution. The models that can be better applied in the Russian case are demonstrated.


Author(s):  
William Schniedewind ◽  
Elizabeth VanDyke

Education is a wide-ranging topic concerning the variety of ways in which people acquire knowledge, skills, and behaviors. As a key facet of culture, one might expect education and instruction to appear frequently within the Hebrew Bible, yet biblical literature actually provides little direct evidence as to how the ancient Israelites learned. This is true both for traditional vocations, such as the production of pottery or soldiering, and for more scholastic pursuits, such as reading or accounting. Biblical scholarship has particularly focused on scribal education, with less attention to the broader questions of enculturation. Several passages, particularly Isaiah 28, Proverbs 22–23, and Ben Sira 51, refer to education and have engendered numerous discussions. Increasingly, though, scholars have turned to extra-biblical sources in order to understand scribal culture. Studies on scribalism in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Ugarit feature prominently in many overviews of Hebrew learning. In some cases, scholars posit that these foreign scribal systems directly influenced Israelite scribes. The New Kingdom administration of Egypt left its vestiges on the Late Bronze Levant, and the empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia also had a lasting impact on scribal curriculum and tradition. These contextual studies can also be used for comparison, helping scholars model what a scribal community in Israel may have looked like. Epigraphic material from the Levant has supplemented this picture. Archaeologists have excavated a number of school texts and seals that attest to the exercises and extent of Israelite education. However, the interpretation of the biblical, comparative, and epigraphic material remains fiercely contested among scholars. Scribal education had an immediate impact on the composition of the biblical corpus, and inquiries into Hebrew education often become intertwined with theories regarding the history of biblical literature. Furthermore, discussions of scribal culture are often divorced from questions of how the society as a whole transmitted skills and knowledge. The ancient Israelite scribe is thus decontextualized from his original setting. In sum, many questions regarding education in ancient Israel remain unanswered, tantalizing, and crucial to the field as a whole.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-121
Author(s):  
Nadezhda S. Stepanova

«Happiness» is one of the most significant cultural universals, semantically related to the concepts of the spiritual life of a man, the most important element performing meaning-forming and plot-forming role in an artistic work. The study of the reflection of notions about happiness in the autobiographical prose of V. Nabokov in the context of the literary and cultural situation of the first wave of Russian emigration is defined by the specifics of autobiography as a text that is created at the end of life and involves its recognition from the point of view of a person summing up intermediate or final results. The article analyzes the artistic concept «happiness» in the autobiographical prose of V. Nabokov; it determines its individual author’s content that is correlated with the general cultural content of the concept. The article is devoted to the study of the concept «happiness» as a complex emotional and value formation which reflects the universal artistic experience, recorded in the cultural memory, expresses the individual author’s understanding of the essence of objects and phenomena. The conceptual component of the word «happiness» in the creativity of V. Nabokov includes the harmonious fullness of life, freedom, the gift of creativity, the happiness of childhood, family, the hearth, the happiness of love and marriage, the enjoyment of life and its joys, a reflection of the personal history of upbringing and testing. The concept «happiness» implements not only semantic, but also axiological possibilities, reflecting both the own characteristics of the subject of the artistic image and the features of idiostyle of the writer.


Author(s):  
James L. Crenshaw

This chapter explores the wisdom literature and teachings of sages and scribes in ancient Israel, with a special focus on the postexilic and early Roman periods. Definitions of wisdom, sage, and scribe, their social status, their literary identities, and their teachings are discussed. Pertinent comparisons with ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature, Torah and Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and the history of ancient Israel anchor presentations of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and Wisdom of Solomon. The importance and pertinence of this literature and its teachings for ancient and contemporary seekers of wisdom are argued throughout.


Author(s):  
Dan Stone

This article explores the history of genocide by looking at collective memories, from the point of view of Western culture. Western culture is suffused with autobiographies, especially with traumatic life narratives about the legacies of abusive childhoods. For the individual victims of genocide, traumatic memories cannot be escaped; for societies, genocide has profound effects that are immediately felt and that people are exhorted never to forget. The discussion shows how genocide is bound up with memory, on an individual level of trauma and on a collective level in terms of the creation of stereotypes, prejudice, and post-genocide politics. Despite the risks of perpetuating old divisions or reopening unhealed wounds, grappling with memory remains essential in order to remind the victims that they are not the worthless or less than human beings that their tormentors have portrayed them as such.


Author(s):  
Steffen Heiberg

Arild Huitfeldt’s prefaces to the individual volumes of his Chronicles of Denmark (1595–1604) assume their character of political admonitions addressed to the young Christian IV. Harald Ilsøe has characterized Huitfeldt as a “secret” student of Machiavelli and has shown that the prefaces contain concealed quotations from the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. An undisguised ideal figure, whom Huitfeldt likes to quote, is Philippe de Commines. Huitfeldt, in his foreword to Hans Mogensen’s Danish translation of Philippe de Commines’ Memoirs (1605), accordingly adopts as his own ideal the analytical and “realistic” approach to writing history of Philippe de Commines and Guicciardini.Huitfeldt does more than simply paraphrase Machiavelli and de Commines. In his preface to King Hans’ history (1599), Huitfeldt, proceeding from this king’s efforts to reconquer Sweden, stresses that even a just war could go wrong. His arguments are political as well as moral and draw on undeclared references to Erasmus of Rotterdam’s antiwar essay Dulce bellum inexpertis – war is beautiful for those who do not know it – which is contained in his Adagia, a collection with commentaries of Greek and Latin sayings.Erasmus’ point is that war is often started by inexperienced princes, who lack insight.Huitfeldt’s use of such formulations in a preface to a young king, who desires an expansive foreign policy, must be seen as daring.By combining Erasmus and Machiavelli, Huitfeldt emphasizes that morality and realpolitik are not opposites; avoiding the devastation of war is a form of realpolitik.Relying one-sidedly on a military solution is a sign of inexperience, dulce bellum inexpertis. This point of view was reiterated at a meeting of the war council in 1604, where Huitfeldt and his supporters opposed the king’s war plans by explaining that politics is not simply a matter of having right on one’s side: he who aims to rule must be able to dissemble and to exercise self-discipline. One must take account of reality.


HOMEROS ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 29-34
Author(s):  
Nigiar ISGANDAROVA

This paper aims to articulate the problem of relationship between an individual and society and its outreach through literary texts. I argue that the paradigms of interrelation of women, men, and society, particularly in the communities with pivotal patriarchal status have been directly adapted to the concepts and theories of society development. In the history of philosophy and sociology, various paradigms of society have been developed; the most popular among them are associating society with a bio-organism, analyzing society and an individual from an anthropological point of view, constructing a functionalist approach to this problem. J.J. Rousseau, Spinoza, Diderot, R. Merton, E. Durkheim for centuries have attempted to define a society and highlight its essential features. In this research, the problem is developing through the literary texts of the prominent Azerbaijan writer Anar and his literary characters, focusing on their moral and ethical priorities. As a basis for our research, we have chosen the Robert Merton’s structural functionalism approach. In addition, I agree with many scholars who believe that the movement of history has a spiral shape and at each turn of this spiral, the assessment of the individual by society is equivalent to the totality of values determined by society itself. It is accepted that the number of moral values is stable, but their combination is changing, corresponding to the Fibonacci Sequence, where spirals have a fixed proportion determining their shape (Vauclair 2009). I propose that in all patriarchal societies, the mode of perception of a woman by a man occurs at the level of his genetic memory. Moreover, the memory dictates him the same values as it was centuries ago. The code has not been changed since the period of the Lost Paradise. We will trace this formula of stable genetic memory and changing forms of assessment in a male-dominant society on the examples of the literary characters in Anar’s “White harbor” and Edgar Poe’s “Ligeia”.


2018 ◽  
pp. 21-75
Author(s):  
Danuta Ulicka

The author attempts to reconstruct a short history of modern Polish literary studies not from the perspective of schools or methodological orientations that are usually applied, but from the perspective of what is known in sociology as cultural themes. This point of view offers the opportunity to (re)construct the process of continuity /discontinuity in the whole field of research focused on the problem of reference, which has been recognized as the most important one in Polish studies (as well as in Polish literature, and art) since its beginning in the first decade of the 20th century. In the broader scope the article attempts to rearticulate the definition of the discipline conventionally called “the theory of literature”, and to propose a new way of writing its history.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4.5) ◽  
pp. 601
Author(s):  
L. Yu. Ismailova ◽  
S. V. Kosikov ◽  
V. E. Wolfengagen ◽  
J. V. Mazurova

The paper considers the problem of conceptual modeling of the domains, in which a large number of changes takes place, possesses a number of specific features. Some of the features are connected to the nature of the ongoing changes. The problem becomes severe when the domain contains a large quantity of independently acting agents that can produce changes in various parts of the model, the sets of interrelated data being changed by different agents independently.Besides that, when supporting the dynamic nature models the possibilities of future changes in model objects might largely be deter- mined not only by their current state, but also by the past state - history of the objects in the model. The support to such history inside the current state of the object can be difficult, cumbersome or impractical for other reasons, which also stimulates the search for new ap- proaches to ensure the map of the changes of objects in the domain model.It is offered to receive the decision by single out the individual information identities, that can be called state trajectories from the con- ceptual point of view and object traces from the implementation point of view. They represent a sequence of changes in the state of mod- el objects essential for its support. The traces can fix not all changes of the corresponding objects, but only those which have an influence on the further behavior of the model. Various ways of supporting of traces are considered. The paper presents an approach to the deter- mination and the support to the traces, based on using a combination of methods of the intensional logic and applicative computational systems. 


1950 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
J. W. Blake

In speaking this afternoon on the study of African history, I am very conscious that the choice of subject is ambitious. Many aspects of African history are more and more attracting the close attention of scholars, and I wish to apply to the history of the African continent as a whole the experience gained by the study of some aspects of the history of one of the regions, the West Coast. For I have learned that there are dangers no less than securities in the pursuit in isolation of selected regional or topical studies. Authoritative regional histories—histories of the individual colonies of the European states in Africa—are badly needed. But it seems to me that such tasks of local specialized investigation should not be allowed, as they proceed, to throw out of focus the whole picture of African history. So I would respectfully suggest that a case exists for a broader and more integrated approach to the study of African history and for an interpretation of African events from the point of view not merely of the European but also of the Arab, the Indian, and above all the Bantu and the Negro. My appeal is for the study of African history mainly through African eyes and for its own sake.


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