Wisdom and its Literature in Biblical-Theological Context

WISDOM IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST Every culture, ancient and modern, has developed its own wisdom, and recorded much of it in literature. Such wisdom can be based on human experience from which people learn what is in life and how to deal with it. There are written storehouses of wisdom from many different cultures in which human experiences are crystallized and typically abstracted from their original contexts to become aphorisms which can be applied in new situations that the inheritors of such wisdom think to be apt. This commonality itself constitutes one of the problems of Old Testament wisdom in that the radical distinction between revealed truth in the word of God and human musing and philosophizing seems to break down. There is enough evidence from the Ancient Near East to support the view that Israel’s wisdom was a part of a common human activity of learning about life and seeking to pass on the gathered wisdom to succeeding generations. We have Sumerian and Babylonian wisdom that is far older than anything that is in the Bible. The Egyptians also produced wisdom works, one of which—Wisdom of Amenemope—is generally considered to be the origin of part of the Book of Proverbs (Prov 22:1723:11). There are examples of proverbial wisdom and the longer reflective creations emanating from Babylon and Egypt. Biblical Wisdom, as well as its foreign counterparts, can be more ref lective and can be expressed in longer compositions that indicate a less spontaneous origin than the empirical aphorisms and proverbs. Like the Book of Job, reflective wisdom may be the basis of a long and complex composition that addresses some of the great problems of life.