The Place and Limits of Wisdom Revisited (original) (raw)

Perspectives on Israelite Wisdom : Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar

The Place and Limits of Wisdom Revisited Although it might be unfair to cast the Law and the Prophets, by implication, in the role of the ugly sisters, it would be hard to deny that wisdom literature was for a long time the Cinderella of biblical studies. In his 1697 epilogue to the story of that unhappy girl, Charles Perrault drew the pragmatic moral that: 'It's no doubt a very good thing, to have spirit, courage, breeding, good sense, and other such qualities, of which one receives a share from heaven. Although you may be beautiful for having them, however, they will be useless for your advancement if you don't have godfathers or godmothers to assert them.' 1 And so it was, indeed, for wisdom literature, which, lacking any fairy godparent to get it to the ball, mostly languished in the kitchen for decades during the mid to late twentieth century, despite its many acknowledged virtues. In a period that focused so much upon the big theological themes of salvation history and covenant, its ideas were marginalized both by the recognition that it showed little interest in those themes, and by the belief that the wisdom books expressed foreign ideas that were barely compatible with them, if at all. 2 It is against this general background that we must view Walther Zimmerli's famous essay on the 'place and limits' of wisdom, which is now celebrating fifty years since its original, 1963 publication (Zimmerli 1963). An English translation followed a year later in the Scottish Journal of Theology (Zimmerli 1964): this is not always very close to the German, is sometimes rather cryptic, and has to be used with caution, but it surely helped to bring 1 C'est sans doute un grand avantage D'avoir de l'esprit, du courage, De la naissance, du bon sens, Et d'autres semblables talens Qu'on reçoit du Ciel en partage; Mais vous aurez beau les avoir, Pour vostre avancement ce seront choses vaines Si vous n'avez, pour les faire valoir, Ou des parrains, ou des marraines. The story was originally published in Perrault 1698. 2 These ideas find their clearest expression in the work of Horst Dietrich Preuß, published a few years after the article by Walther Zimmerli on which I shall be focusing here: see especially Preuß 1970; 1974: 171-77. 2 Zimmerli's opinions to a wider audience, as did the reprint of this version in James Crenshaw's 1976 collection of important essays on wisdom (Crenshaw 1976: 314-26). Subsequently, this study has been cited very widely, because although it was by no means an attempt to overturn existing paradigms, it did try to make of them something more positive, and although its actual conclusion picks up virtually nothing of importance said previously in the essay, we can find, earlier in the discussion, a genuine, if rather backhanded attempt to recover wisdom for the mainstream. This was not something that even the high priest of salvation history, Gerhard von Rad, had attempted seriously in his influential Theology of the Old Testament, published a few years before, (von Rad 1957-60; 1962-65), and when von Rad subsequently turned his attention more specifically to wisdom literature, his approach was essentially to portray wisdom as a quite separate tradition (von Rad 1970; 1972). There are some important lessons still to be learned both from what Zimmerli gets right and, I think, from what he gets wrong, so I want to begin by summarizing very briefly the argument that he advances, and then using that argument as a basis to explore, from the perspective of more recent scholarship, the principal problem that he is trying to address.