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Ausgabe: | April/2024 |
Spalte: | 289-291 |
Kategorie: | Judaistik |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Kwon, JiSeong James, and Seth Bledsoe [Eds.] |
Titel/Untertitel: | Between Wisdom and Torah. Discourses on Wisdom and Law in Second Temple Judaism. |
Verlag: | Berlin: De Gruyter 2023. XXII, 393 S. m. 3 Abb. u. 1 Tab. = Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature. Geb. EUR 99,95. ISBN 9783111069319. |
Rezensent: | John J. Collins |
This volume was planned in conjunction with Kwon’s post-doctoral research on »scribal discourses of Wisdom and Torah« for his habilitation at Lausanne. It includes the papers presented in two sessions of EABS in 2019 and at an international conference at Lausanne in 2021, supplemented by some further papers that were solicited to round out the volume.
The editors began with the question »was Israelite Wisdom influenced by and ultimately transformed into the Mosaic Torah in the Hellenistic period?« This question was modified in light of the fact that some scholars, including some contributors, question whether there was any cohesive Israelite wisdom tradition that was ideologically distinct from the cultic/covenantal tradition. The essays in the volume reflect a range of views on wisdom and Torah in both ancient and modern scholarly discourse.
The volume is divided into five sections. The first deals with Proverbs and Ben Sira. JiSeong Kwon critiques the view that »torah« in Proverbs 1–9 reflects Mosaic, especially Deuteronomic discourse. Kwon allows that the sages were aware of the Torah but denies that Proverbs was shaped by a »Torahizing« redactor. Kwon’s main interlocutor in his essay is Bernd Schipper, who contributes the following essay. Schipper does not engage Kwon’s arguments directly but argues for Deuteronomic influence in Proverbs 28, and for a nomistic rather than instructional connotation of »torah«. Pancratius Beentjes compares the use of Torah in the Hebrew fragments of Ben Sira with the use of nomos in the Greek. He notes that the words wisdom and torah are never used in parallelism in the Hebrew fragments and suggests that we should think of a correlation of Law and Wisdom in Ben Sira rather than identification.
The second section contains essays on Job, Qoheleth and the Wisdom of Solomon. Tobias Häner evaluates the relation of Job to Pentateuchal texts. He concludes that Job is taking a critical stance toward Deuteronomy and the Priestly source. It takes a skeptical view of human knowledge and this involves an attenuation of the claims of the Torah. This epistemological standpoint, found especially in Job 38–39, did not prevail in later Jewish tradition. Stuart Weeks focuses on Qoheleth 7:25–29 in relation to Proverbs 1–9 and warns against any assumption that wisdom developed in a uniform way. It is not the case that Qoheleth is a polemic against Torah, but the skeptical attitude of the book reflects resistance to the kind of affirmations that we find in Ben Sira. The epilogue of the book seems eager to dispense with wisdom altogether. Luca Mazzinghi argues that wisdom and law are complementary in the Wisdom of Solomon in providing a full cosmological understanding. The author is also influenced by Stoic philosophy. He reads the law through the lens of wisdom and regards the two as in harmony with each other. Lydia Gore-Jones, in contrast argues that nomos in Wisdom is not identified with the Law of Moses but rather with the universal divine law accessible through wisdom.
The third section contains essays by Mark Sneed, Eckart Otto and Lindsey Davidson. Sneed argues that the differences between the legal and sapiential traditions are not due to different worldviews but to the texts having different functions and rhetorical modes. He argues for a correlation between the sayings in Proverbs and the social norms and legal precepts in the law codes of Exodus, and to a lesser extent Deuteronomy. He assumes that they would all have been produced in the same scribal circles. Otto in contrast argues for an amalgamation of distinct traditions, but ties this to a complex theory of the redaction of Deuteronomy. He locates the amalgamation of Priestly, Deuteronomistic and sapiential motifs in the postexilic period. Davidson’s article is distinctive in focusing on an epitaph from early Roman Egypt in which a magistrate and judge is described as »crowned in wisdom«. She takes the epitaph as evidence for an association of wisdom with expertise in the law.
The last two sections have two essays each. Section 4 contains essays by Torleif Elgvin on the Song of Songs and by George Brooke in the Hodayot and the Psalms Scroll from Qumran. Elgvin draws attention to two wisdom sayings in the Song 8:6–7 that can serve as hermeneutical keys to a sapiential reflection on love. Brooke demon-strates various ways in which wisdom and Torah are woven together in prayer texts. Neither tradition takes precedence over the other. In the final section Thomas Römer qualifies von Rad’s characterization of the Joseph story as a »didactic and wisdom novella«. It is rather a Diaspora novella that incorporates sapiential elements. A later revision of the Joseph story stresses the ethical dimension of his wisdom. In the final essay, Seth Bledsoe suggests that Tobit’s story depends on Ahiqar’s credentials as an exemplary figure of the Jewish past. Ahiqar held a more formative place in some Jewish communities than has been hitherto realized. He functioned much like the patriarchs in conferring authority by association.
This is a rich volume which illustrates both the distinctiveness and the variety of wisdom traditions in Second Temple Judaism. It is not comprehensive. The most notable omission is the wisdom literature from Qumran, especially 1Q/4Q Instruction. The volume would have been enriched by discussion of the role of wisdom in the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, in light of the centrality of the Torah in the association, and also by the inclusion of the sayings of Pseudo-Phocylides from Egypt, which seems to draw on the Decalogue, even while it is cast as the work of a Greek poet. But the range of material included in this volume is impressive. The inscription studied by Davidson and the essay on Ahiqar by Bledsoe bring into the discussion material that is hardly ever studied in books on Jewish wisdom.
One cannot expect a collection of essays to provide a systematic treatment of a subject or a coherent thesis. There are obvious disagreements between some contributors. In fact the juxtaposition of different views is one of the most interesting aspects of the volume, especially when we get divergent essays paired together, in the case of Proverbs and Wisdom of Solomon. On the whole, the essays complicate the usual view of the subordination of wisdom to Torah in the Second Temple period. The volume, however, does not maintain a consistent focus on this question and becomes quite diffuse in the later sections.
The editors acknowledge the recent trend in scholarship to question the distinctiveness of the wisdom tradition, chiefly by including the essay of Sneed. Most of the contributors, however, have no difficulty in recognizing wisdom as a distinctive tradition, even if it is varied. The main question that remains open is the role of Torah in this literature. While the editors wisely refrain from pressing conclusions, the volume raises serious questions as to whether Wisdom and Torah are ever simply identified in this literature. It makes a valuable contribution to an ongoing discussion.