Tracing Sapiential Traditions in Ancient Judaism. Edited by Hindy Najman, Jean-Sébastien Rey, and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar

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This volume covers traditions and articulations of Jewish wisdom from the Hebrew Bible through to late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The authors reflect on wisdom as a valid though imposed and sometimes limiting category. Concentration is on the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple, and finally rabbinic systems of wisdom and knowledge. The volume seems to focus on terminological and literary challenges (What is wisdom?), on the grouping or sub-grouping of texts within the sphere of wisdom, or wisdom-like (Is this or that text a wisdom text?), and focuses particularly on the transmission, continuity, and development of different aspects of form, context, and content (How is wisdom expressed over the centuries?). The first essay, ‘Is “Wisdom Literature” a Useful Category?’ by Stuart Weeks, explores the history of modern scholarship on ‘wisdom’ in the Hebrew Bible and how its residual echoes remain as methodological problems today. Weeks shows how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars framed early debates and definitions of wisdom through searches for coherence and shared features in content and form, rather than context and purpose, as well as limited/limiting notions of education in ancient Israel. James Kugel, ‘The Theme of Long-Range Planning in the Joseph Narrative and Some Second Temple Period Writings’, compares elements of wisdom, specifically divine long-range planning, in the Joseph narrative (Genesis 37; 39–48, e.g. Gen 50:20) with similar glimpses of divine chronological certitude in Daniel, 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, the Slavonic ‘Ladder of Jacob’, Ages of Creation (4Q180), and Jubilees. Next, Stéphanie Anthonioz (‘A Reflection on the Nature of Wisdom: From Psalm 1 to Mesopotamian Traditions’) considers the sapiential motif in Psalm 1 of tree metaphor (Ps. 1:3), observing that the wisdom motifs and didactic language in Psalm 1 witness to dynamic streams of tradition in ancient Israel that are also characteristic of ancient Near Eastern iconography and literature—namely, Gilgamesh.