The Conceptual Setting of Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 809
The Canonical Setting of Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 811
The Historical Settings of Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 813
The Structural Setting of Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 817
Approaches to Hebrew Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 821
A Linguistic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 826
Literary Cohesion in Proverbs 10? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 833
A Linguistic Synthesis of the Syntax
of Proverbial Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 835
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
APPENDIX I: Collins' Line Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 843
APPENDIX II: An O'Connorian Analysis of the
Lines of Proverbs 10-15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 848
APPENDIX III: Ordered by First Colon
Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 859
APPENDIX IV: Ordered by Second Colon
Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 864
APPENDIX V: A Comparison with O'Connor's Line
Configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 868
APPENDIX VI: Types of Noun Phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 869
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 889
INDEX OF AUTHORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 949
SCRIPTURE INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 963
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AB Anchor Bible
AJSL American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literature
ANET J. B Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts
AnOr Analecta Orientalia
BA Biblical Archaeologist
BASOR Bulletin of the American Society of Oriental Research
Bib Biblica
BO Bibliotheca orientalis
BSac Bibliotheca Sacra
BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin
BWL W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature
BZAW Beihefte zur ZAW
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
Con B Coniectanea biblica
CurTM Currents in Theology and Missions
EvQ Evangelical Quarterly
EvT Evangelische Theologie
ExpTim Expository Times
HTR Harvard Theological Review
HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual
IDB G. A. Buttrick (ed.), Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible
IEJ Israel Exploration Journal
Int Interpretation
ITQ Irish Theological Quarterly
JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion
JANESCU Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia
University
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JBR Journal of Bible and Religion
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JEA Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
JETS Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
JJS Journal of Jewish Studies
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JQR Jewish Quarterly Review
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
Or Orientalia
OrAnt Oriens antiquus
OTL Old Testament Library
OTWSA Ou-Testamentiese Werkgenmeenskap South Africa
SAIW J. L. Crenshaw (ed.), Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom.
New York: KTAV, 1976.
SBLASP Society of Biblical Literature Abstracts
SBT Studies in Biblical Theology
Scr Scripture
SJT Scottish Journal of Theology
TB Tyndale Bulletin
TBu Theologische Bucherei
TToday Theology Today
UF Ugaritische Forschungen
VT Vetus Testamentum
VTSup Vetus Testamentum, Supplements
ZAW Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
INTRODUCTION
Until recently, the teachings of the ancient sages
found in the book of Proverbs had been neglected by modern
scholarship, which viewed the atomic statements as trite
truisms too simplistic to speak to the psychologically and
sociologically labyrinthical quandries faced by modern
man. The bald, empirical sentences and facile,
rationalistic deductions were perceived as culturally-
bound expressions with little relevance to the modern
pother. Proverbs' banal earthiness did not appear to rise
to the lofty heights of divine encounter, as found in
Isaiah; nor did its sayings penetrate the mysteries of the
divine hand's piloting history from chaos to the salvation
of a remnant, as beautifully narrated in the historical
books. Thus, exegetes and Old Testament theologians
alike, thinking that Proverbs did not participate in the
major motifs of the Old Testament, left Proverbs
untouched--as the orphan of the Old Testament. Its claims
of being the reflections of the wisest sages were viewed
as unattractive, abecedarian quips whose hugger-mugger and
disarray left the more systematic western mind with a
feeling of muddledness rather than mystery. The
parallelistic beauty of the poetic bi-colon no longer
fascinated its readers, who viewed the antitheses as
redundant and banally prosaic.
The purpose of this study is to recreate the
pragmatic context from which the sentences arose and to
which they spoke in such a way as to provide a foundation
for the establishment of the vitality and applicability of
these sayings to the present situation. The approach will
be in two complementary directions. First, the pragmatic
setting will be developed in order to provide an
illocutionary (i.e. the author's/user's speech act) basis
for reviving of the perlocutionary (i.e. the effect of
that speech act on the original audience) appreciation of
the message and artistry of the sentence literature.1
Second, the creative, poetic genius of the sages and
amazing, aesthetic delight will be unlocked via modern
techniques of linguistic and poetic analysis. These two
major goals may be broken down into more easily obtainable
sub-goals.
The first goal of providing an adequate
description of the pragmatic setting should not be foreign
to Old Testament students, as it stresses the necessity of
____________________
1 John Searle, Ferene Kiefer, and Manfred Bierwisch,
Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics, in Synthese Language
Library, vol. 10 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing
Co., 1980), p. vii.
recreating the historical poetic moment in which the
proverbial sentences were originally given, both in
terms of the original author's intentions (illocutions)
and in terms of what it did to the initial hearers
(perlocutions). Thus, the study is akin to a Sitz im Leben
type of approach in that it desires to show how a
particular setting gives rise to a corresponding literary
form. While this paper will seek to demonstrate that such
a one-to-one mapping from setting to form is too
simplistic, there will be an examination of the various,
original, sociological and institutional settings of
wisdom and the diverse forms which flowed from those
settings. The pragmatic situation goes beyond the setting
in life to a consideration of the Sitz im Literatur of the
sayings as formulated in the other ancient Near Eastern
cultures from third millennium Ebla and Sumer down to
Ptolemaic Egypt. The international character of the
sayings will provide a helpful backdrop for understanding
how and why the Israelite sages formulated their messages
as they did. Not only are the original historic and
literary settings necessary for an adequate understanding,
but also the canonical and philosophical settings must be
forwarded. What role do the proverbial sentences play in
the canon? How are they different from other canonical
formulations? How are they similar? What is their unique
contribution? What nexus is there between the message of
the rest of the canon and the wisdom literature? A survey
of the theological arena in which wisdom operated will
help highlight wisdom's contribution. It is indeed
peculiar that the great redemptive act of the Old
Testament, the Exodus, is not mentioned, nor are any of
the mighty acts of God in the conquest and settlement.
The heroes of Heilsgeschichte are all strangely absent, as
are the cutting pronouncements of divine judgment on a
sinful people. These canonical expressions of the
supernatural seem to give way to mundane fatherly
directives to hard work and techniques for pleasing one's
superiors. The literary forms employed are, particularly
in Proverbs 10-15, much shorter than those used by poets
elsewhere. These forms will also be examined as
reflective of the sages' Weltanschauung.
Having broadly introduced the historical,
literary, canonical, and philosophical settings of the
sentences, the study will then turn to the analysis of the
text (Proverbs 10-15) itself. An attempt will be made to
isolate and analyze the grammatical constraints which
provide the parameters of proverbial poetic expression.
In order to recapture the poetic moment from the
perspective of the either sage or the student, one must
come to an aesthetic appreciation of Proverbs--not just in
terms of the message of its words, but more in terms of
the artistic relationship between words and larger
constituents of poetic expression, including the line
itself. Until one can thrill in the understanding of the
poetic line and the situation of the proverbial moment,
the sayings will remain but trite observations of the
obvious. Proverbs, more than any other Hebrew poetic
expression, allows one to examine the bare bi-colon with
minimal strophic constriction. This study desires to
synthesize the most sophisticated techniques of poetic
analysis which have recently arisen in a plethora of
needed dissertations and discussions1 on Hebrew poetry
(vid. studies by A. Berlin, T. Collins, A. Cooper, E.
Greenstein, S. Geller, J. Kugel, and especially M.
O'Connor). Recent work has moved to further refine the
Lowth-Gray-Robinson semantic parallelism approach
(synonymous, antithetic, emblematic, etc.) and to
explicitly describe grammatical parallelism (syntactic and
morphological). The merits and demerits of each approach
will be discussed and a combination of the methods
employed by O'Connor and Collins will be applied to the
proverbial corpus (Proverbs 10-15). Geller's approach,
____________________
1 For recent discussions of poetics vid. JSOT 28
(1984), especially articles by Patrick Miller ("Meter,
Parallelism, and Tropes: The Search for Poetic Style," pp.
99-106), Wilfred Watson ("A Review of Kugel's The Idea of
Biblical Poetry," pp. 89-98), Francis Landy ("Poetics and
Parallelism: Some Comments on James Kugel's The Idea of
Biblical Poetry," pp. 61-87), and James Kugel ("Some
Thoughts on Future Research into Biblical Style: Addenda
to The Idea of Biblical Poetry," pp. 107-17).
though more comprehensive, was not opted for because it
was felt that its notational system would probably be too
daedal for the present purposes.
Not only will this dissertation seek to utilize
and reflect sensitivities gained from these excellent
studies, but an attempt will be made to propose a deictic
linguistic tool for the collection and analysis of poetic
syntactic data. There will be a survey of recent
linguistic techniques and the selection of a modified form
of Kenneth Pike's tagmemics. The six box tagmeme will
allow the analyst to monitor and collect data from both
the surface grammar and deep grammar of the poetic lines.
Case grammar, which explicates deep grammar relationships,
is as close as this study will get to a semantic analysis.
Because both deep and surface grammar are explicitly
monitored in the tagmeme, inter-lineal crossovers between
surface syntax and deep grammar will manifest the
craftsmanship of the ancient sages. Thus, modern
linguistics provides the tool which will highlight poetic
syntactic artistry both within and between lines. Such
techniques are extremely important, not only because they
reflect more adequate theories of language than the
traditional approach, but also because they allow for the
compilation of syntactic data via computer-aided
analysis.1 Once such data is collected, comparisons can
be made with syntactic data from other corpora, which, in
this study, has facilitated syntactic specification of
genre constraints. Chomsky's notion of syntactic
transformation has been employed with great benefit, as
often there are syntactic transformations between the
parallel lines. This extremely potent idea will be
broached and initial experimental studies and preliminary
results will be compiled specifying the syntactical
transformations commonly used by the sages. The presence
of syntactic transformations suggests that the parallel
lines may be even more closely syntactically knit than
earlier proffered by approaches which merely noted
syntactic repetitions. Thus describing the syntax by the
most satisfying linguistic techniques available has moved
the modern reader one step closer to the recreation of the
syntactic constraints which the original author employed
and the hearers enjoyed. Thus, syntactically, the modern
reader may now participate in the aesthetic appreciation
and dynamic understanding of the proverbial sentences as
they were originally given. No claim to completeness or
exhaustiveness has been made. Rather a method is proposed
____________________
1 F. I. Andersen, The Hebrew Verbless Clause in the
Pentateuch (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970) provides an
example of a tagmemic approach to the nominal clause in the
Pentateuch.
which this writer believes a more satisfying description
of Hebrew poetry. If nothing else this study demonstrates
the infinitely intricate beauty both in terms of the
expression of poetic features of syntactic equivalence and
variation. The stressing of syntax and the relative
avoidance of phonetics and semantics leave the present
study knowingly lop-sided. Various phonetic equivalences
and sound-sense relationships have been observed in a
non-structured way and the reader does well to pay
attention to the brief comments which suggest that formal
phonetic studies are needed for a fuller appreciation of
proverbial poetry.1 Since the discipline of semantics is
presently developing, it is hoped that an approach
retaining the meaning orientation of traditional
semantics, the lucidity of componential analysis, and the
scientific precision of formal semantics will be
forthcoming within the next decade. The need ultimately
is for a composite approach to poetry which includes
linguistically sophisticated approaches to syntax,
phonetics, and semantics in such a way that equivalences
and variations between and within parallel lines may be
monitored as well as plays between categories (vid. Prov
11:18). Until then, modern perceptions of the rich hues
of Hebrew poetry will remain faded into monochromic
____________________
1 Leo Weinstock, "Sound and Meaning in Biblical
Hebrew," JSS 28 (1983):49-63.
prosaicness. An exordial discussion will, in an intuitive
manner, demonstrate the fecundity of such a comprehensive
approach by validating the presence of literary cohesion
in Proverbs 10--a text in which literary cohesion is
almost universally ignored or rejected.
The actual chapters of the dissertation break down
basically into two halves. The first examines the various
types of settings: (1) the comparative literary setting;
(2) the conceptual wisdom setting; (3) the canonical
setting of wisdom; (4) the historical setting of wisdom;
and (5) the structural setting of wisdom. These
background chapters will be followed by a more
linguistically and textually oriented section which will
introduce various approaches to poetics (ch. VI) and
linguistics (ch. VII) and then apply the scheme designed
in this study to the text of Proverbs 10-15 (ch. VIII).
The corpus (ch. VIII) is included, as it is in most recent
dissertations (vid. Geller and O'Connor), so that the
results may be checked and the method illustrated.
Finally, chapter IX will demonstrate the literary cohesion
of Proverbs 10. This is one of the discoveries made by
this study--demonstrating the vitality of the method
employed. Chapter X will provide a desultory analysis of
selected syntactic patterns which the corpus has brought
to light.
The goal of this study has not been the production
of results, but of a methodology which will adequately,
not exhaustively, describe Hebrew poetic syntax. The
model will be tested on the corpus of Proverbs 10-15 and
the results compared to the analyses of Collins and
O'Connor. The study corroborates O'Connor's suggestion
that there are syntactic constraints on the Hebrew line.
It goes on to suggest that there are many sub-lineal
binding techniques, which occur below the isomorphic
matching of syntactic lines, between the
units/constituents of the paralleled lines. These
iso/homomorphic syntactic mappings between lines often
manifest surface structure equivalences and at other times
evince deep structure equivalences with all sorts of
aesthetically pleasing combinations in-between. It is
hoped that the reader will be able to go beyond the
mechanical details of the linguistic system employed to
begin to intuitively read and delight in the artistic
creativity of the ancient sages. Only then will one be
able to return and recreate the original poetic moment in
his own culture and blissfully inculcate its trans-
cultural principles into the memory (זכר) of his own son.
CHAPTER I
THE COMPARATIVE LITERARY SETTINGS OF WISDOM
Introduction
Renewed scholarly attention to wisdom literature
has received impetus from two sources, which have
provided not only an inchoation for initial studies but
also have biased the direction which those inquiries have
taken. The first source of stimulation was the discovery
of The Teaching of Amenemope in 1888, its consequent
publication by Budge in 1924,1 and, later, Erman's2
elucidation of the nexus between Amenemope and the book
of Proverbs. Erman's work created a tidal wave of
publications, which has continued unintermittently to the
____________________
1 E. A. Wallis Budge, Facsimiles of Egyptian
Hieratic Papyri in the British Museum with Description
and Summary of Content, second series (London: Longmans
and Co., 1923), p. 12; also E. A. W. Budge, The Teaching
of Amen-em-Apt Son of Kanekht: The Egyptian Hieroglyphic
Text and an English Translation with Translations of the
Moral and Religious Teachings of Egyptian Kings and
Officials Illustrating The Development of Religious
Philosophy in Egypt During a Period of About Two Thousand
Years (London: Martin Hopkinson and Company, 1924).
2 Adolf Erman, "Ein agyptische Quelle der 'Spruche
Salomos,'" Sitzungs-berichte der Preussischen Akademie
der Wissenchaften zu Berlin: Phil.-hist. Klasse 15 (May
1924):86-93.
present.1 Further discoveries of numerous "Instruction"
texts from Egypt, several proverb collections from Sumer,
and the libraries of Ashurbanipal have provided the needed
texts to sustain this recent interest in wisdom
literature.
The second source of stimulation has come from the
discipline of Biblical Theology. Major tensions have
arisen in the attempt to fit wisdom into theological
models which have myopically focused on the
Heilsgeschichte or covenant motifs.
This chapter will briefly survey the ancient
wisdom materials from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Syro-
Palestine. The following chapter will summarize the
discussions which have taken place under the province of
biblical theology in its struggle with the relationship
between alleged Mitten and wisdom.
Egyptian Wisdom
Ptahhotep to 'Onchsheshonqy
A survey of the ancient Near Eastern sources
provides a requisite Sitz im Literatur for a study of the
biblical book of Proverbs, in terms of the literary forms,
____________________
1 Glendon E. Bryce, A Legacy of Wisdom: The
Egyptian Contribution to the Wisdom of Israel (London:
Associated University Presses, 1979). Bryce gives the
most recent, thorough treatment of the subject. Coming to
quite a different conclusion is John Ruffle, "The Teaching
of Amenemope and its Connection with the Book of
Proverbs," TB 28 (1977):29-68.
genres, and motifs utilized in wisdom literature. Such
materials greatly aid our understanding of Proverbs and
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