On the Oxford Handbook of Wisdom and the Bible

I can’t say I was particularly impressed by this one; it seems to be doing too much at once. It’s an edited collection that aims at comprehensiveness without quite reaching it. On one hand it’s a set of essays on the history, themes, textual analysis, and origins of the Old Testament’s wisdom texts — Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the Wisdom of Sirach. On the other, the editor is skeptical that a wisdom tradition exists at all, asking to what extent “wisdom” is even a genre, comparable to the Pentateuch, the Historical Books, the Prophets, the Gospels, or the Epistles — and he’s inclined to say it isn’t. The good is that the book contextualizes the wisdom tradition against recent evidence from the Nile valley and Mesopotamia, and the overviews and thematic discussions of individual books are strong; I was especially interested in the Wisdom of Sirach, which I hadn’t known before, and in Job and Ecclesiastes, and there’s good writing on the continuities (or retroactive readings) between these texts and ancient Greek philosophy, especially in the Hellenistic period — one later essay puts the Solomonic collection in conversation with Plato’s Timaeus, which I found fascinating.

What I couldn’t see was why there’s such a concerted challenge to the idea of wisdom literature as a genre. What’s at stake, and what would the benefit be? Would it be better to read these as disconnected individual books? Maybe, but the claims of Solomonic authorship run like a thread through several of them, with Job and the Wisdom of Sirach the two that don’t fit — and Job is admittedly a fundamentally different text from anything else in the Bible. I do see value in calling these wisdom texts. They’re aimed at a more secular, ideally universal sense of understanding the world; there are references to God, of course, and one of the main themes is that we must be God-fearing, but they say far more than that — they’re therapeutic in ways the Pentateuch and the Historical Books are not, doing fundamentally different work, and there’s a real unity in that. I’m not sure what else has been written on the wisdom texts, but I wouldn’t consult this Handbook first.