Wisdom Tradition – See with New Eyes

Wisdom as intercultural and transnational

Let’s begin by exploring what I call the cross-cultural borrowing or sharing of wisdom that took place in the old-world Middle East (sometimes called the Ancient Near East), which will help in understanding more about wisdom’s universality. The Hebrew wisdom literature, for example, which carries over into the Christian Bible, occasionally borrowed from outside of Israel, though disagreement exists as its extent. ¹ Raymond Van Leeuwen, a professor of religion and theology, writes that in early chapters of Proverbs a series of speeches by parents to a young son is “especially akin to the Egyptian ‘instructions’ in which a royal father left a testament of wisdom to his heir.” ² McKane, who made an extensive study of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian wisdom “instruction” for his book Proverbs: A New Approach, writes that there was “an international genre with definable characteristics which can be described in syntactical terms,” and that sentences and sections of the book of Proverbs show “formal characteristics [of] this international genre” (p. 6).Although disagreements remain as to the extent that different peoples borrowed wisdom from each other, such sharing might be expected

More specifically, and significantly, an entire passage from the Egyptian wisdom book of Amenemope, written long before the Book of Proverbs, appears almost verbatim in Proverbs 22:17–23-11. Also, a Babylonian text called The Counsels of Wisdom includes a section of about 150 lines that is typical of advice given in the Hebrew and Egyptian wisdom literatures: avoid bad companions, be gracious in speech, do good to the needy, live in harmony with your neighbors, respect the king, and so on. Although disagreements remain as to the extent that different peoples borrowed wisdom from each other, such sharing might be expected if only due to the close intercultural living that was normative during many periods.

The last twelve chapters of Book of Genesis, for instance, have an Egyptian setting and most of the Book of Daniel takes place in Babylon. The Book of Ruth is closely connected with Moab and its traditions, and the Book of Esther, like Daniel, is set in exile, in Persia. The Book of Job describes its protagonist as the richest man “in the East,” apparently in the Arabian desert somewhere. And the Books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs are associated with Solomon, whose empire during his forty-year reign included many neighboring nations. Non-Israelite political and commercial representatives from foreign lands frequently visited at Solomon’s court, including the famous Queen of Sheba, who by all accounts traveled long and arduously to Jerusalem just to see if the rumors about Solomon’s wisdom were true. ³

Biblical scholars, then, are not surprised that the Israelites picked up what wisdom they could from other cultures. “Israel,” writes Witherington, “was willing to draw on the wisdom of other Ancient Near East cultures to help them understand and cope with life’s vicissitudes.” This is understandable, he concludes, because “Wisdom literature in general is less ethnic or culture specific than much of the rest of the Old Testament material. It has much more of an international flavor and application” (Jesus the Sage, pp. 11, 14, 16). Noted Old Testament scholar Gerhard Von Rad writes in Wisdom In Israel that when ancient Israel “participated in the business of cultivating her experiential knowledge…, she stumbled upon perceptions largely similar to those of other ancient peoples” (p. 5). (“Experiential knowledge” is a phrase von Rad uses synonymously at times for “wisdom.”)

Paulist priest Lawrence Boadt writes: “The close links of biblical wisdom to that of other nations stems from the need for a common ground of discourse and cultural understanding between people.” ⁴ It is also not surprising to Roland Murphy, professor of Old Testament, who reminds us that “Israel knew that she was a latecomer to the wisdom movement and that its origins were to be found among the eastern Arabs and the Egyptians.” ⁵ And part one of William McKane’s intricate book Proverbs (see bibliogaphy) deals extensively with what he calls “international wisdom.”

Forbearance toward religion and secularization

In our complex, changing, and globalizing world, it has become a brute necessity to work and play alongside people who are not like us – religiously, ethnically, socially, politically, economically. So unless we are trying to blow things up, we must find ways to work cooperatively together amidst our human diversity. What deeply appeals to me about the wisdom tradition is that it seems to have no historical equal to providing our race with a morally responsible way of reasoning for working cooperatively together toward human flourishing amidst our diversity. Put from the negative side, wisdom gives us a way of practicing our life and work in this world that is not qualified by and organized around sectarian reasoning, interests, or practice. The wisdom way is not about dividing and conquering. It is much more unitary. It opens our race up to fresh possibilities of cooperation and peaceableness, and perhaps in some situations, even human flourishing.What deeply appeals to me about the wisdom tradition is that it seems to have no historical equal to providing our race with a morally responsible way of reasoning for working cooperatively together toward human flourishing amidst our diversity

From the wisdom literature of the old-world Middle East, we know that wisdom was a trusted and relied upon way of reasoning that people from different cultures could employ when conducting their daily activities with each other. Those who practiced wisdom may not always have been able to embrace the other but, for wisdom, exclusion of the other was out (unless the other constantly wanted to remain out).

The agency of wisdom still offers our race a normative approach to life that makes it possible for individuals and communities who are different to build more cooperative, peaceable, and productive arrangements. Today, however, one of the most bewildering aspects of our culturally pluralist situations is the competing religious beliefs. When these turn militant and are not peaceably sorted without use of force, if they are not complicating a situation they may be contributing to violence. But it was no different in the old-world Middle East, whose cultures were no less religious than are many today. What our religiously activist world, however, has forgotten about the wisdom tradition, and what needs shouting, to come straight to the point, is: the wisdom tradition’s forbearance toward religion.

Further, today we are faced not only with issues and interests from competing, sectarian, or militant religious practice but with dilemmas posed by the secular/sacred split view of life, due to the ongoing secularization of life for hundred of years in the West and elsewhere. What also needs shouting today, it seems to me, in this: wisdom concentrates on the basic interests and concerns that are shared by the human family as a whole before any distinction is made between who is religious and who is not.

Because these two normative features of the wisdom tradition may at first blush seem unimaginable or controversial, bear with me in some discussion on this.

Religious roots

For one thing, for peoples of the old-world Middle East, quite unlike in the West today, there was no sacred/secular dilemma. That would have seemed unimaginable to them. As might be expected, the wisdom traditions of those cultures included some basic notion of God or the gods. Ancient Egyptians, for instance, believed that God “implanted order (ma’at) in the world.” Ma’at can be variously understood as the truth and order found in nature and the justice found in the human world, such as in “civic and social order, laws, right relationship within families and professions, and in relation to the king” (Clifford, p. 5). It’s not surprising, then, to find ma’at occasionally referenced in Egyptian wisdom instruction about everyday life, and sometimes it was treated as a divine, but impersonal, ordering principle (Witherington, p. 12.).

A religious root was equally true of the Hebraic wisdom tradition, but quite unlike any impersonal divine ordering principle, the Hebrew God Yahweh was an ordering Person. There is, then, this marked distinction: whereas Egyptian wisdom instruction sought to help Egyptians fulfill ma’at in everyday life, the Hebrew wisdom tradition had Yahweh as its starting point. After all, this is the literature that gives us the intensely religious statement: “The fear of the Lord [Yahweh] is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). It also includes instances where Israel’s covenant word for God, Yahweh, appears. In many English translations of the Christian Old Testament, Yahweh (yhwh, in the Hebrew) is set in small caps as “the Lord” to mark its use for “God” off from elohim and el, which were two other common words for “God” or “god” (in Hebrew) but which usually refer to a general or vague understanding of who God is. Elohim and el are typically translated as “God” or “god.”

As an aside, broadly speaking there are two kinds of God-language in the Hebrew Scriptures. One sort (yhwh) typically was used by the believing community, the others (elohim and el) were common property, so to speak. It is similar, today. Christians, for instance, speak of “our Father,” or “the Lord,” or “Jesus,” and so on, while people who do not claim any particular religious allegiance may speak of “the Almighty,” or “the Creator,” or “the Man Upstairs,” or, perhaps rather nervously, “God.” The former words “carry a special notion of God’s salvation, loving care, and personal commitment, and they imply a profession of one’s loyalty to God. They refer more to God’s character as God comes to be known in personal spiritual experience. The other terms … concentrate of the ideas of power, authority, and creatorhood in God – attributes held in common by all people” who talk about God, whether they believe in God or not. ⁶

But back to our topic. It is therefore a mistake, as Witherington points out, to impose on ancient wisdom literatures “modern notions which sharply distinguish the sacred from the secular” (p. 12.). It is easy to understand, then, why wisdom even today is considered a divine gift and why religions admonish their followers to pray for it. Nevertheless, wisdom traditions were not about religious instruction per se, at least not in any systematic way or in the sense that we today understand religion as distinct from secular. Instruction in religious life was not their purpose. Other literatures fulfilled that function, such as the comprehensive instruction for priests, ceremonial law, and congregational worship that fills the Book of Leviticus. Thus, even in the Hebrew wisdom literature, where we might expect to find it, there is “little interest in the history of Israel and its specific tradition of revelation: the torah as a body of laws, the covenant, the possession of the land, and the temple or cult” (Boadt, p. 1381).

It is not that religious influences, or overt religious words, or explicit religious ideas do not appear in the literature. They do. Yahweh (“the Lord” ) does appear in the Hebrew wisdom literature in overtly religious statements, especially in Proverbs, but when the word appears it is used by far in the context of practical instruction for “secular” life and work.

The secular and the religious: two troublesome ideas

Because wisdom literature focuses on matters of everyday life – on the shared concerns and interests people have outside their temple, synagogue, church, and mosque, I should say a few words about my use of the words “secular” and “religion” (or “religious”). I use them frequently in my work, and the way I use the word “secular,” in particular, has raised eyebrows among some of my Christian colleagues. I hope my explanation, here, will spare unnecessary objections. I tend to use the word “secular” merely as a shorthand to denote everyday life and work in the world, and I use the words “religion” and “religious” for what goes on in temples, synagogues, churches, and mosques. That is, I use the words descriptively as they are commonly understood today and not to endorse a secular/sacred split to life.I tend to use the word “secular” merely as a shorthand to denote everyday life and work in the world

In common usage today, religion typically means the commitment people have to God symbolically through ritual. It is used to indicate what goes on in their churches, mosques, or synagogues. It is about their sacred books, explicit witness, or devotional activities such as prayer and worship. In common usage, secular denotes the everyday activities people (believers, too) participate in that they do not consider religious, such as in the arts, science, law, business, work, finance, politics, legal processes, and social relationships. It is a way to differentiate these areas from “religious” life. That is how I am using the two words, merely descriptively in their normally understood sense today.

I don’t press the word “religion” into service, however, as if it were the guarantor of a healthy soul, as some do, but neither do I deploy it as if it were a dirty word, as others do (even some Christians). On the other hand, some colleagues have cautioned that by employing “secular” at all I am playing into the hands of the ubiquitous and powerfully influential worldview of secularism. You don’t want to be contributing to the secularization of life, they would say. So they suggest using another word, or dropping the word altogether, or using it only critically. Well, I’m sympathetic, but I have yet to find an equally connotative but less “offensive” synonym, and until such time I’m unwilling to drop the word or to use it as if it were only indicating some sort of bad disease.

Anyway, enough about that. End of apology. And end of the quote marks I’ve been putting around the word, because now, like it or not, at least you know what I mean by it! ⁷

 

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