Divine Action and Hebrew Wisdom

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Abstract At an early stage in his Bampton Lectures, Cod’s Action in the World, Maurice Wiles mentioned the familiar emphasis of the Old Testament on the ‘acts of God’ and the way in which this was exploited in the ‘Biblical Theology Movement’ earlier this century (Wiles 1986: 8). He recognized this, and rightly, as a primary feature of the biblical writings. He then went on to mention two qualifications. The first was that this feature was by no means as distinctive a characteristic as had often been supposed: and with the passage of time this qualification has come to be stronger and more widely recognized. ‘Docs he [God], like Zeus, send out thunderbolts in his displeasure;,’, Wiles asks (Wiles 1986: I), hinting at an awareness that the ‘God who acts’ in this drastic sense belongs to the pagan, mythological world rather than to the biblical and Christian. The second qualification was that, even in recognizing the importance of the ‘mighty acts of God’ for the Old Testament, he added, in his own words, ‘even if one finds it a little difficult to know what to do with the Wisdom literature’. The Wisdom literature, he thus suggested, was sparing or restrained in its mention of the mighty acts of God, and difficult to fit into any scheme dominated by ‘acts’ of that kind.