Wisdom Literature Bible Definition

Much of the surviving wisdom literature of ancient Egypt dealt with life after death. Some of them take the form of dialogues, such as The Debate Between a Man and His Soul from the 20th to the 18th Century BC, in which a man from the Middle Kingdom laments about life while talking to his Ba. [11] Other lyrics show a variety of views on the afterlife, including the rationalist skepticism The Immortality of Writers and Harper`s Songs, the latter oscillating between hopeful confidence and reasonable doubt. [12] To say that wisdom books belong to a macrogender or a vaguely defined gender does not mean denying that there are significant differences between them. Literary critics are talking more and more about genres in the sense of prototype theory. The idea is that we recognize such things by identifying prototypical examples. For example, we might think of a kitchen chair as a prototypical chair and recognize other chairs as much as they resemble it. A throne or piano stool are also items to sit on, but they are very different from kitchen chairs. In the case of biblical wisdom literature, the book of Proverbs is prototypical. Preacher deviates from it in some ways, but still recognizably resembles it.

The book of Job is more distant because it is constructed as a dialogue with a narrative framework. The arguments for including Job in wisdom literature are based primarily on the discourses in the dialogues, which are very similar to wisdom instructions. one of the biblical books (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiastical) believed to contain wisdom At one time, scholars believed that Solomon had introduced schools of writing to Jerusalem, in the manner of the training of Egyptian scribes. It was learned that he married Pharaoh`s daughter and therefore probably knew Egypt. Solomon has also been credited with “Solomonic enlightenment,” and important biblical sources, such as the Yahwist story in the Pentateuch, have been attributed to his reign. However, this view has lost popularity. It is now recognized that Jerusalem was a very small place during the reign of Solomon (around 950 BC) and would not have needed many scribes. (It also seems unlikely that a pharaoh would have given his daughter to the king of such a small town.) The city developed considerably more than 200 years later during the reign of King Hezekiah, and the wisdom tradition probably developed at that time. In fact, a section of Proverbs would consist of Proverbs collected by “the men of Hezekiah” (Proverbs 25:1). In Egypt and other ancient Near Eastern countries, proverbial and instructive literature was used in the training of scribes. In fact, proverbs were used in primary school until modern times.

The children learned to write by copying them and learned basic behavioral lessons at the same time. There were no public schools in ancient Israel; The schools are said to date back to the first century BC. Were introduced to Judea. But there were certainly schools of writing where a small number of people learned to write in order to serve as scribes for the king and the temple. Ben Sira refers to his “school” or house of study in the early second century B.C. (Sir 51:23). The biblical book of Proverbs was probably written for doctrinal purposes. The “attitude in life” of Job or the preachers is less clear. “Wisdom literature” is the generic term for the books Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (=Qoheleth) and Job in the Hebrew Bible. Two other important books of wisdom, the Book of Ben Sira (= Ecclesiasticus) and the Wisdom of Solomon, are found in the Apocrypha, but are accepted as canonical in the Catholic tradition.

Some psalms (e.g. 1:19, 119) are considered “wisdom psalms” by analogy with the major wisdom books, and other similar writings are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The label simply derives from the fact that “wisdom” and “foolishness” are frequently discussed in these books. The name is old, which dates back at least to St. Augustine. Wisdom is a textual literature in which direct speech is the norm. These can be single, proverbial or hortatory sentences chained together, or longer poems and speeches, some of which tend towards the philosophical. From the earliest times, wisdom was associated with King Solomon.

According to 1 Kings 4:29-34, wisdom literature is a popular literary genre in the ancient Middle East. This genre is characterized by wisdom sayings that are believed to teach divinity and virtue. The key tenet of wisdom literature is that although traditional storytelling techniques are used, books also claim to offer insight and wisdom about nature and reality. The most famous examples of wisdom literature are found in the Bible. The following biblical books are classified as wisdom literature: ⁕Book of Job ⁕Psalms ⁕Proverbs ⁕Preachers ⁕Song of Songs ⁕Wisdom ⁕Sirach The genre of writings of mirror princes, which has a long history in Islamic and Western Renaissance literature, represents a secular element related to biblical wisdom literature. In classical antiquity, Hesiod`s advice poetry, especially his works and days, was considered a genre similar to Middle Eastern wisdom literature. The Corpus Hermeticum is a work of Egyptian-Greek wisdom literature in the form of a dialogue between Hermes Trismegistus and a disciple. Most of the text dates from the 1st-4th centuries AD, although the original materials the texts may be older; [13] Recent research confirms that the syncretic nature of Hermeticism originated in Roman Egypt, but the content of the tradition corresponds to the older wisdom literature of ancient Egypt, suggesting origins in the time of the pharaohs. [14] [15] The Hermetic texts of the Egyptians dealt mainly with the invocation of spirits, the reinvigoration of statues, Babylonian astrology, and the new practice of alchemy; Other mystical themes include divine unity, purification of the soul, and rebirth through enlightenment of the spirit. [16] The question of whether wisdom literature represents an indubitable worldview in ancient Israel is also controversial. As we have already noted, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job never refer to Israel or events in its history. Should we assume that this is only a matter of gender and that the same authors may have written psalms or prophecies on other occasions? Later wisdom literature, such as the Book of Ben Sira, the Wisdom of Solomon, and some of the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, openly refer to the history of Israel as a source of examples.

Ben Sira affirms that all wisdom is “the covenant book of the Most High God, the law which Moses commanded us” (Sir 24:23). There seems to be no inherent reason why anyone could not refer to Israel`s history in a wisdom instruction. If we do not find such references in the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, then we must conclude that the Torah and the Hebrew Scriptures were not an essential frame of reference for wisdom teachers. Conversely, it does not seem that the forms of wisdom teaching were necessarily related to a particular worldview or life. Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes all agree that there is no judgment after death and no reason to expect eschatological upheavals or radical changes in the conditions of human life. This is still true of Ben Sira at the beginning of the second century BC. However, this changes in the wisdom books of the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the wisdom of Solomon. Solomon`s wisdom considers belief in a post-mortem judgment to be essential to a moral life (Wisdom Solomon 2–5). It does not seem, therefore, that the worldview of Proverbs must always be the worldview of wisdom literature. There has been some discussion about whether “wisdom” should be considered a literary genre. On the one hand, wisdom literature consists of a collection of books that have much in common and that can be usefully grouped together.

For some researchers, this is enough to justify classification as a genus. On the other hand, it is not a unique literary form as, say, a vision or a psalm. If we were to reserve the label “genre” for a single literary form, then we could say that the “wisdom guide” or even the proverbial collection is a genre. “Wisdom” could be described as a macrogenre – a type of writing that uses a group of related literary forms. The use of generic terms in ancient literature is rather arbitrary. The book of Proverbs, for example, is called “mishle Shlomo,” which usually translates to “Proverbs of Solomon.” However, a “mashal” is not a direct equivalent of the saying. The term can also refer to a parable or allegory. (The root meaning seems to be something that can be used by analogy, but it is not precisely defined.) This is not to say that people in ancient times did not perceive generic relationships. The fact that what we call “books of wisdom” were often called “solomonics” in ancient times is a kind of rudimentary generic analysis.

This is true even for books that could not have been written by Solomon, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, written in good Hellenistic Greek and presumably dated to the turn of the ages.