Essential reading for scholars and students in wisdom studies

This collection of essays explores questions that challenge the traditional notion of a wisdom tradition among the Israelite literati, such as: Is the wisdom literature a genre or mode of literature or do we need new terminology? Who were the tradents? Is there such a thing as a “wisdom scribe” and what would that look like? Did the scribes who composed wisdom literature also have a hand in producing the other “traditions,” such as the priestly, prophetic, and apocalyptic, as well as other non-sapiential works? Were Israelite sages open to non-sapiential forms of knowledge in their conceptualization of wisdom?

Features:

• Recent genre theory in distinction from traditional form criticism


• Ancient Near Eastern comparative material


• A balanced collection that includes essays that seriously challenge and affirm the consensus view, as well as those that reconfigure it

Mark R. Sneed is Professor of Bible at Lubbock Christian University. He is editor of Concepts of Class in Ancient Israel (Scholars Press) and author of The Politics of Pessimism in Ecclesiastes: A Social-Science Approach (Society of Biblical Literature).