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Wisdom Phenomenon

Mankind is set the unending task of mastering life, to form order out of chaos, to make sense out of what seems to be a complex and ambiguous mass of experiences.  

As man has reflected upon his experiences throughout the ages, history and literature will testify that the conclusions drawn from his observations are similar regardless of geographic, temporal or cultural boundaries.  Wisdom can be viewed as a reflection on the great human question of the meaning and purpose of life.  It takes into consideration, love, suffering, death, God, and how we should relate to these.  It is concerned with human solutions and is not primarily religious in character.  

Wisdom seeks to teach people how to conform to the order of the universe in which the secret of happiness and success should lie.  It can be said, therefore, that wisdom is the art of living a good life and it leads one to seek out what leads to life and not death.  This however leads to the ambiguity of justice.  

Because experience has shown that sometimes the good suffer and the evil prosper, there must be a system of reward and punishment that is beyond man’s purview.  The problem of divine justice was raised in both the wisdom writings of Mesopotamia and Israel. Wisdom developed a transcendent quality to it and, as in the case of Job, the reward for the good life that he had led would be fully realized in the next life.  

With the introduction of divine justice into the wisdom tradition, religious beliefs helped to enforce morality among men.  The sages in Israel realized the universality of the questions posed by wisdom and drew freely from the wisdom experiences of other civilizations.  

The historical roots of wisdom can be traced back to man’s desire to get a fix on his experiences and the environment.  The historical roots of Hebrew wisdom can be traced back to folk wisdom that was handed down mostly in oral form from generation to generation, similar to the way it happened in other traditional societies.  The earlier wisdom developments were strongly influenced by the sapiental writings from powerful neighboring countries.  

With the exception of Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom, the Israelite wisdom books do not address the major themes of the Old Testament such as Law, Covenant, Election and Salvation.  Instead, they achieved a diversity of expressions through proverbs, riddles, plant and animal life, and ethics.  Like the writings of their neighbors from the East and the Southwest, Hebrew wisdom writings were concerned with the individual and his destiny, not the history, prophesy and fulfillment of their nation.  The Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations peaked before the time of the Israelite wisdom phenomenon and had developed an extensive wisdom corpus that was familiar to the Hebrew sages.  

From the middle of the second millennium B.C.E., Palestine was mostly under Egyptian political control or threatened by it.  Because of its proximity, Egypt also had close trade relations with Palestine.  For these reasons, Egyptian cultural influences, including its wisdom traditions, had a great impact on Palestinian thinking.  The Hebrew patriarchs migrated to Canaan from the upper Euphrates and, although Palestine was geographically closer to Egypt, the Palestinians were culturally closer to the Mesopotamians.  Palestine was also under the influence of Mesopotamia between the eighth to sixth centuries and after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. the cream of Hebrew society was sent to Babylonia.  

Not only did these civilizations influence Israel’s wisdom writings, they were held as the standard to be surpassed.  This can be seen in the comparison of Solomon’s wisdom to the wisdom of Mesopotamia and Egypt in 1 Kings.  The writer boasts that, “God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and largeness of mind like the sand on the seashore, so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the East, and all the wisdom of Egypt.  For he was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol; and his fame was in all the nations round about” (1 Kings 4:29-31).  The inspired author went on to give examples of Solomon’s superiority as the sage of all sages by making reference to the subject matter of Solomon’s proverbs and songs; “He also uttered three thousand proverbs; and his songs were a thousand and five.  He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall; he spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish.  And men came from all peoples to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom (1 Kings 4:32-34)."  

Although the later proverbs attributed to Solomon dealt mostly with human character and behavior, the reference here to plants and animals, things external to human character and behavior, bears similarity to some of the early Egyptian and Mesopotamian wisdom writing.  The early Egyptians developed word lists or classification lists of natural knowledge.  These word lists or noun lists are called Onomastica.  There were no definitions or descriptions of these nouns, but they provided a comprehensive outline of knowledge at that point in time in the Ancient Near East.  The Sumerians also had a Noun List or inventory of phenomena that was similar to and preceded the Egyptian Onomasticon.  These lists were constantly revised and expanded, and classified phenomena in related groups.  

It is reasonable to conclude that the wisdom writers of Israel drew from the observations and experiences of the civilizations East and South West of Palestine.  But it is the questions, not the answers, that the Israelite sages borrowed and learned from the Ancient Near East and incorporated into their wisdom corpus.

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