One of the courses I most loved to teach — one I didn’t teach as often as I would have liked — was a course called Wisdom Literature. At one of the places I taught, this course was called “Making Peace with Reality.” Elsewhere, it had a more specific description, one that offers you the simplest possible definition of the term: “Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job.”
We’ll come back to coping with reality before this post is finished. Right now, let’s have a look at why those three biblical books fall under the rubric of Wisdom Literature. The key is a verse from Jeremiah. His enemies are scheming to get rid of him, but (as he quotes them in Jer 18:18) they are not worried that they will lose anything by no longer having to listen to him:
There will be no loss of teaching [תורה] from the priest, nor counsel [עצה] from the sage, nor oracle [דבר] from the prophet.
If you like, this is the abbreviated biblical discussion of epistemology: how we know what we know. There are three sources of knowledge:
• תורה [torah], the traditions that our priests hand down to us.
• דבר [davar], the word of God transmitted to us via God’s prophets.
• עצה [etzah], the advice that a sage can give.
A “sage” in the Jeremiah verse is a חכם ḥakham, someone “wise” as this word would be translated when it’s an adjective, and wisdom is חכמה ḥokhmah.
Where do these three kinds of knowledge come from?
Prophecy comes directly from God to the prophet in real time. There is no more immediate way for a person who is not a prophet to gain knowledge than this. That is why Jewish tradition says that a slave-girl — the lowest social rank they could imagine — saw more at Mount Sinai, when the Torah was given, than Isaiah or Ezekiel ever experienced. This kind of knowledge is divine.
Tradition comes from God as well, but not in real time. It is passed down (according to this Jeremiah verse) through the priesthood, and they provide it to the rest of us when necessary. This kind of knowledge is called torah, a word that due to the Greek Bible is often translated into English as “law,” but which really means “teaching” or “instruction.” Because of its original source, this kind of knowledge is also divine.
Wisdom is different. Wisdom is human.
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In an earlier day, “wisdom” might have been called “philosophy” in English. It encompasses all of human thought about the world, ranging from technical skill to the most profound questions about existence. It’s by no means non-religious, but it focuses on the ways human beings can use their own minds to understand reality — and, at its most profound, how to “make peace” with the reality we experience.
Most of the books of the Bible fall into the categories of history or prophecy or belles-lettres (what we today would call “literature”). All of these are focused on God’s role in the world and more specifically on God’s relationship with the Jews (“Israel”). Even the love poetry of the Song of Songs is in the Bible because it is traditionally reinterpreted as being religious poetry.
But three biblical books, the ones I mentioned at the top of this post, aim the focus in the opposite direction. Let’s discuss them in turn. (You can read more about them in “Voices of the Wise,” Chapter 7 of my book The Bible’s Many Voices.) As we’ll see, they all connect wisdom to religious belief, but in three very different ways.
Proverbs explicitly states, in its first words after naming the book as “the proverbs of Solomon,” that its purpose is to get people “to know wisdom [לָדַ֣עַת חָכְמָ֣ה la-da’at ḥokhmah]” (Prov 1:2). Indeed, before the collection of proverbs begins in chapter 10, the first nine chapters of the book are poems in praise of Wisdom, personified in Proverbs 8–9 and again in Prov 31:10–31 as a woman.
We’re told in 1 Kings 5 that “God endowed Solomon with wisdom and discernment in great measure” (v. 9) and that he “composed three thousand proverbs” (v. 12). For present purposes, the point is to say that the proverbs in the book of Proverbs are understood to be epitomes of wisdom, “knowledge in a nutshell.” The most trite-sounding of them, if you slow down and spend time with it, can open up a profound discussion about values.
Indeed, Proverbs presents itself as a book of instruction, and it is generally assumed that it is largely composed of material that was used to train an educated class of ancient Israelites, perhaps even the scribes who were responsible for transmitting the Bible itself to us. This is “mainstream” wisdom, which presumes and accepts the standard beliefs of religion and does not explicitly challenge them. Proverbs announces from the very start that “fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov 1:7).
Ecclesiastes (or Qohélet, as the book and the character who speaks it are called in Hebrew), does challenge those beliefs. It is the one book of the Bible where we really do feel that we are meeting an individual speaking directly to us about himself, albeit from behind a sort of mask. The key word of the book is הבל hevel, a word that literally refers to “gas” or “vapor,” something one cannot really get hold of. (That is also the Hebrew name of Abel in Genesis 4, which tells you his parents did not give him that name. Stay tuned to my Bible Guy blog on Substack for more discussion on that point.) It’s the word we know from the King James translation as “vanity of vanities,” but we don’t use the word vanity this way in English any more. The best short, accessible explanation of what Qohelet is talking about I know of is Lisa Wolfe’s on the Bible Odyssey platform, where university scholars of the Bible present their work for the public.
The basic platform of the book of Proverbs is that honesty is the best policy. It’s intelligent to do the right thing. The opposite of righteous is not “evil,” but foolish. Qohelet, however, doesn’t think intelligence, or human effort of any kind, guarantees good results. What makes his book wisdom literature is that Qohelet describes how he has tried to live in the wisest possible way, but the nature of the world frustrates his attempts. Eventually, the voice that begins and ends the book, having presented the words of Qohelet to us, concludes, “Fear God and keep His commandments” (Eccl 12:13).
Job has an individual voice as clear as that of Qohelet — but we don’t get the feeling that we are learning anything about the writer who is speaking to us. He is a brilliant writer; I call him the Beethoven of the Bible. But don’t ask me anything about who he was or when he lived. (I do think that he lived after the return from Babylonian exile, since according to the scholar of Hebrew language Avi Hurvitz the prose story that frames the book is written in Late Biblical Hebrew. I present that work in more depth as the conclusion to my LBH series on this blog.)
Everyone knows that the book of Job discusses, in broad terms, the problem we call in English “when bad things happen to good people.” The Hebrew expression is terser: צדיק ורע ללו tzadik v’ra lo ‘someone righteous who has it bad’. There are many ways to understand the book, yet the amazingly intricate, even learned poetry that makes up most of the book cannot obscure the basic plot of the easily readable story that frames the poetry: Although Job is righteous, bad things happen to him because God wants to win a bet. This is not an explanation of how to be wise, nor of a search for wisdom, but a drama that calls the things wisdom examines into question. I’ve written in my Many Voices book that I read the book of Job like a symphony, and to me its center is the 2nd movement, the “adagio” of Job 28, where we read, as in the other two books, that “Fear of the Lord is wisdom” (Job 28:28).
There are two final points I want to make in this post, and then I’ll stop. Otherwise I’ll be tempted to teach the entire semester’s worth of material in one ultralong session.
• There are other parts of the Bible that seem to be influenced by the wisdom literature or by “wisdom attitudes” — that is, looking at the world with the help of the human mind, not necessarily to the exclusion of prophetic oracles or priestly tradition. The most important of these for me is the book of Deuteronomy. As I discuss in my book Theologies of the Mind in Biblical Israel, to me it seems that Deuteronomy came directly out of the “mainstream” wisdom tradition that we find represented in the book of Proverbs. If, as I think, the author of the Holiness Code was trying to combine a priestly perspective with that of Deuteronomy, we might expect to find traces of “wisdom” in the Torah as well. I look for them particularly in H (Leviticus 17–26), in the Joseph story, and in Genesis 2–3 and its story of the Tree of Knowledge. There are wisdom psalms as well, for example Psalm 19.
• Because wisdom is human and not divine, Wisdom Literature even in the Bible itself can look to the equivalent material in other cultures for perspectives on how to live, small picture and big picture alike. Ecclesiastes is well-known for quoting from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and though it’s less well-known, Proverbs 22:17–23:14 seems to be a Hebrew writer’s version of the Egyptian “Instruction of Amenemope.” One might want to call some of the Bible’s legal texts wisdom literature in this sense, since they adapt and revise laws from the ancient Near East that were written to cope with some of the same social and economic situations that faced the Israelites. It’s clear that the laws of Exodus 21–23 (“The Covenant Code”) are a continuation of the Babylonian legal tradition we find in the Code of Hammurabi and elsewhere. But that’s a post for another time.
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