"Mystery" in the Wisdom of Solomon and 4QInstruction (original) (raw)

While endorsing the overall project of this volume, I raise in this essay two significant questions about how this relationship between Wisdom and Prophecy should be explored. First, is the term “Wisdom” as a designation for a category of biblical books more of a hindrance than a help? Von Rad first asked this question in 1970, as he wondered whether the term “disguises what stands behind it rather than depicts it properly.” Recently, the questions about the viability of “Wisdom” as a category are beginning to mount, as Sneed’s recent edited volume, Is There a Wisdom Tradition? (2015) makes evident. The vague, arbitrary, and subjective category may indeed be a mask that distorts the meaning of its contents. Worse than that, the level of abstraction from the text at which the genre seeks to unify these diverse books invites scholars to import their modern presuppositions into their interpretation. It seems unlikely that the Israelites would have grouped texts together because they demonstrated individualism, humanism, empiricism, rationalism, universalism, or secularism. That list of purported Wisdom traits sounds a lot more like a conception of wisdom from the modern age, more specifically the nineteenth century, which, suspiciously enough, is when we first encounter the Wisdom Literature genre we have today (Bruch 1851). “Wisdom Literature,” as Crenshaw (1976) has observed, indeed often stands “as a mirror image of the scholar painting her portrait.” The second question that must be considered when exploring Wisdom’s relationship with Prophecy is whether form criticism is the best starting place for this comparison? As a method, form criticism has recently begun to encounter its own pressing questions (see, e.g., Sweeney and Ben Zvi 2003, Weeks 2013). Whybray (1982) argued thirty years ago that the lack of a clear definition of Wisdom has hindered discussion of its relationship to Prophecy, and that problem is only greater today. Instead of simply building on the widespread and yet questionable presupposition of a separate Wisdom genre, this project could be an excellent way to test some of the common form-critical conclusions about the nature of that purported genre and its relationship with the rest of the Hebrew Bible. But this testing will be most effective if it does not presuppose its conclusion, but instead treats the so-called wisdom books as individual texts before it groups them as “Wisdom,” if it does so at all. By comparing the contents of Wisdom with a number of prophetic texts, this project has the potential to break through the genre boundaries that have previously limited their interpretation. By beginning with form criticism, however, it might only perpetuate Wisdom as mask and mirror by exchanging a consciously intertextual comparison of individual texts for the comparison of two genres abstracted from the texts, and, even worse, the “movements” then abstracted from those genres.