[Dialogue] 7/9/09: Spong: The Origins of the Bible, Part XXVI: The Wisdom Literature

Thu Jul 9 16:41:21 CDT 2009

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Thursday July 09, 2009 

The Origins of the Bible, Part XXVI: The Wisdom Literature

Four books of the Old Testament are generally regarded as being the constituent parts of what has been called "Wisdom Literature." They are Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. We have treated the book of Job earlier in this series (see Origins of the Bible XXIII) and will not repeat that. Job is also listed along with Jonah and Ruth as "protest literature" and it wrestles with the eternal human question of the meaning of justice and the nature of God. Today, I will focus on the other three of the "Wisdom" books, all of which are attributed in the mythology of the Jews to King Solomon, who was regarded as the wisest of the kings of=2
0the Jews. That reputation is based primarily on a story found in the first book of Kings, chapter 3, which portrays Solomon as asking God not for wealth or long life, but for the gift of wisdom to enable him to be a good king. When one reads what the rest of the Bible says about Solomon, however, the idea that his life was marked by wisdom is a very strange claim. He had a harem of 1000 wives. He quite literally dissipated the goodwill of his father, King David. Finally his unwise policies resulted in a rebellion at the time of his death which resulted in the secession of ten tribes from his kingdom to form the nation of Israel, also called the Northern Kingdom. For rebellious Jews to be willing to give up their ties with Jerusalem and the Temple and to break forever the sense of Jewish unity, which contributed over the centuries to Jewish weakness and a history of persecution, strikes me as anything but wise. Mythology, however, has strange power and the image of wise King Solomon has hung on despite the witness of history. The Wisdom Literature claims King Solomon in the same way that we noted earlier that the Book of Psalms claimed King David as its author. In neither affirmation is history well served. 
Turning first to the book of Proverbs, one discovers quickly that this book is in reality a compendium of four separate works augmented by several poems and a few appendices. Book I runs from Proverbs 1:1-9:18 and consists of ten extended discourses containing admonitions and warnin
gs, plus two poems in which wisdom is personified. One of them (8:1-36) appears to have influenced the prologue to the Fourth Gospel in which the logos is personified in quite similar language. This first book appears to have been composed in the late 4th or early 3rd century BCE, some 600 years at least after Solomon's death. 

Book II, which includes Proverbs 10:1-22:16 and Book IV, which includes 25:1-29:27 makes the overt claim that these words are "the Proverbs of Solomon." That claim is strange on many levels, but it should be noted that even the book of I Kings claims that Solomon's wisdom covered only the phenomenon of nature, not human behavior. 

Book III is composed of Chapters 22:17-24:42 and appears to have been based on a much earlier Egyptian book of Wisdom, which is dated about 1000 BCE. and is entitled the "Instruction of Amenenope." To this book is attached the first of five appendages 24:23-34. The others, which were attached to Book IV, constitute (1) a dialogue between a skeptic and a believer (30:1-9); (2) proverbs of a numerical type (30: 10-33); (3) the counsel of a Queen Mother to a young monarch (31:1-9); and (4) a portrait of an ideal wife of a prominent man (31:10-31). I have taken these divisions from the New Oxford Annotated Bible, but one can get them from almost any study of the book of Proverbs. 

The content of the book of Proverbs has insinuated itself into the common wisdom of our society far more deeply than most people imagine. One only has to r
ecall such familiar sayings as, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," "He who troubles the household will inherit the wind," "A soft answer turns away wrath," "A good name is to be chosen above great riches," "Spare the rod and spoil the child" (not exactly the quote from Proverbs, but close and it is most often repeated in this form) and "Train up a child in the way he(or she) should go and when he (or she) is old he (or she) will not depart from it!" Many people, including prominent politicians, repeat these phrases with little knowledge that they derive from the book of Proverbs. 

Wisdom literature became popular among the Jews in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, following the return from exile that began around 540. The cultural assumption was that the time of the prophets had passed. Divine revelation could no longer be anticipated and the voice of God was no longer heard, so people searched for guidance in life, in the accumulated experience of human wisdom. The wisdom message, cited time after time, was that good living would be rewarded, not in some afterlife, which at this time hardly existed as a concept in Judaism, but in the quality and integrity of their present life. When that did not seem to work out, as was the case in the story of Job, there was a sense of religious disillusionment. It was that feeling of disillusionment that became particularly apparent in the second major work in the Wisdom section of the Jewish Bible to which I now turn. 

The 
book of Ecclesiastes, or "Qoheloth the Preacher," a title by which this book is also known, is far more a philosophical treatise on the meaning of life than it is a testimony to belief. It even expresses despair about the reality of God and questions the primary beliefs of the Hebrew religion. Portraying God as the "inscrutable" originator of the world and the "determiner" of human fate, Ecclesiastes is skeptical of the human ability to make change and finally declares that no human accomplishments make any difference in determining one's ultimate fate. Thus, for this author, there is no clear meaning in life and no ultimate purpose for life. This means, says this book in its recurring theme, "All is vanity." There is also no hope for life beyond this life in this book, for it asserts that death brings only oblivion. 

One wonders how a fourth century BCE work of this nature managed to get accepted into the Hebrew canon of Scripture, since it appears to be at odds with most of the Jewish understanding of God. Two reasons are traditionally cited. First, in the first two verses, the book is attributed to the son of King David, a verse that was interpreted to imply authorship by King Solomon. The second is that an orthodox postscript was added in 12:9-14 that concludes with the admonition that "we are to fear God and keep God's commandments knowing that God will bring every deed into judgment." That is a strange ending for a very different book with a very different message and undoubtedly comes=2
0from the pen of a later editor, but this ending probably allowed the book to gain entrance into the sacred text. 

I have always liked the honesty of Ecclesiastes and the fact that this almost nihilistic writing could find a place in the scriptures of my faith tradition. I suspect, however, that those who claim a magical revelationary source for the Bible always skipped this faithless, despairing work.

The final book in the Wisdom section is entitled The Song of Solomon. This is a book of lyric poems or fragments of poems about courtship and human love. One commentator suggested that these poems were really bawdy songs sung in a Jewish pub by males lusting after the body of a female. Others have said that they are courtship songs written to be sung at weddings. Still others have suggested that these narratives portray a god and goddess in love. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that The Song of Solomon is erotic and it does extol the beauty and wonder of physical love and sexual attraction. It is quite obvious when reading this book that Israel never produced a Queen Victoria or a Victorian period of sexual repression. 

This writing also made it into the Canon of Scripture first by claiming, as it does in the first verse, that it was the work of wise King Solomon and, second, by being allegorized. Hosea, the eighth century BCE prophet, had understood God as the husband of Israel (Hos.7:16-19) and so these love songs were said to have been between God and God's bride, the Jew
ish people. In the Christian era, they continued to find allegorical interpretations by playing on the metaphor of the Church as the bride of Christ, a theme stated most overtly in the book of Revelation (21:2, 9). The Song of Solomon has also been interpreted through the ages as describing "the intimate experience of divine love in the individual soul." 

The Wisdom Literature formed another movement in the unfolding life of the biblical narrative. One other note of some historic interest is that the concept of "wisdom" was thought of as feminine and was indeed feminine in the Greek language into which these Hebrew Scriptures were destined to be translated. So it was that appeals to the "divine Sophia" (the Greek word for wisdom) helped to temper the heavily patriarchal character of biblical thinking about God. Many people would in time see "wisdom" as an aspect of the Holy Spirit and thus advocates for the feminine in the definition of God for the first time found in the "wisdom literature" a scriptural basis to support their claims. That concept, once so foreign in our faith story, has now moved to the place where more and more of us are willing to see God first as both mother and father, and second to recognize that whoever God ultimately is, God is finally beyond the limited language of human gender divisions. In time with our sexist preconceptions opened up scholars began to discover in the biblical text ideas that moved us beyond seeing God as an enlarged and unlimited being like ourselves. 
Then we found other divine images that were transpersonal, viewing God after the analogy of the wind, or the power of love or even after the analogy of a "rock." In each of these metaphors we began to see how it is that most of our God-talk is not really about who or what God is, but about making sense of the human experience of the "holy." There is a difference. So embrace the truth found in the biblical "Wisdom Literature," savor it and transform it into the symbols of your own experience. That is finally the only way to read this ancient, sacred and mythological book we call the Bible. 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Bernard Wheel of Oak Park, Illinois, writes: 
When I pray any kind of prayer, there is an energy created within me that I believe in some way adds to a sacred energy in the world. I'm not sure how far it gets, or whether it does any good other than add to the positive energy in the universe. If I'm made of "stardust" then maybe there is an energy connection with others, perhaps through our "ground of being." I know that praying, saying formal prayers, taking the various liturgical prayers, prayerful reading of scripture, meditation and the like, are energizing for me and I hope the energy goes somewhere. I'm happy with the energy.

Dear Bernard,

Thank you for your contribution to the debate on prayer and its efficacy. Yours is a perspective that is growing in popularity as the20old understanding of prayer, namely the petitioning of an external, supernatural being to come to our aid, begins to sink into the sunset, assigned there by the explosion of human knowledge about how the universe operates.

There is still much more to be said about prayer, but your words represent a welcome step into the dialogue for which I am grateful.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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