I first encountered Hebrew as a member of the Lawrence University Concert Choir in 1991, when we premiered Allen Gimbel’s Three Sacred Pieces with Rinat, the national choir of Israel. Years later, studying wisdom literature with Michael V. Fox, I could finally read for myself the verse I had first sung—עץ חיים היא למחזיקים בה ותמכיה מאשר (Proverbs 3:18)—and it took my breath away. I will never encounter this text without hearing Gimbel’s gorgeous melody, but I have Fox to thank for my ability to read and understand it. It was with him that I first studied Torah (what would become the focus of my own research), as well as wisdom literature (the focus of his), and I am pleased to honor his memory by offering a new way to think about how they might intersect. I wish to extend my warmest thanks to the Association for Jewish Studies, whose support of contingent faculty and independent scholars made it possible for me to complete this work.
We have long thought of wisdom and Torah as distinct literary corpuses and modes of knowing. Torah (תורה) has become synonymous with “Pentateuch,” a body of literature consisting of law collections and the narratives that contextualize them. Wisdom (חכמה) has come to refer to a corpus of literature written by sages—scribes who operated apart from others responsible for law, history, prophecy, and ritual texts and with a distinctive set of concerns often deemed secular. Torah is framed as divine revelation, which humans are meant to assimilate and act upon, whereas wisdom involves the active pursuit of knowledge, guided by a set of values and skills taught by the previous generation and cultivated through experience and observation. These distinctions have long prompted us to ask what wisdom and Torah have to do with one another.1
Yet the distinction between them is not as sharp as we like to think. The word torah means “instruction” and refers not only to the law collections in the Pentateuch—which, as many scholars have noted, may be closely related to what we call “wisdom literature”—but also, as we will see, to ritual instructions, prophetic (oracular) counsel, and the very kind of parent-to-child instruction that characterizes the book of Proverbs, a central text in the wisdom corpus.2 Torah can thus come in a variety of different forms and from various sources, both human and divine.
As for wisdom, recent scholarship has called into question several long-standing framings. It does not fit distinctions between secular and religious or reason and revelation, which are a product of Enlightenment thought and do not hold in ancient literature.3 The wisdom in Proverbs may derive from the business of daily life, but there is nothing secular about the pursuit of it; it is framed as a process of discovering what God has hidden.
There is also no evidence that “wisdom literature” was written in distinct “wisdom circles.” Moshe Weinfeld looked to Jeremiah 8:8–9 as a sign that the scribes who wrote Deuteronomy, one of the key texts in the Pentateuch, were members of a class of sages: “How can you say ‘We are wise, and the torah of the LORD is with us’? The pen of the scribes has made it in vain! The wise have been shamed, shattered, and caught. They reject the word of the LORD, so what kind of wisdom do they really possess?” He understood this trenchant critique to be directed not at the text but at the sages, who failed to observe the very instruction they committed to writing, and rendered לשׁקר עשה עט שקר ספרים in verse 8 accordingly, as “The pen of the scribes has made it in vain!”4 Yet the social role or identity of an author does not mean that they are restricted to producing a particular type of literature; this leaves little room for the creativity in the use and blending of genres that is abundantly evident across the Hebrew Bible. Prophets, priests, and bureaucrats performed different functions in ancient Israelite society, yet their scribal training probably overlapped to a considerable degree, and aphorisms were likely at the heart of the curriculum.5 Wisdom has more to do with how one does a job than what job they do.6
Indeed, Jeremiah’s critique targets the wisdom of these scribes not because of their social role but because it is a character trait they allegedly claim for themselves but fail to live up to. Weinfeld’s reading of לשׁקר עשה עט שקר ספרים in verse 8 obscures what the text really says. He rendered לשׁקר as “in vain” on analogy to 1 Samuel 25:31, where David realizes that he has protected Nabal’s interests in the wilderness לשׁקר, which Weinfeld understood to mean “for naught.” Yet that is not quite the sense. David did this under the impression that Nabal was an ally, which proved to be an illusion when his men went to Nabal only to be rebuffed. The semantic range of שׁקר involves a lie, a breach of trust, or an illusion; 1 Samuel 25:31 and Jeremiah 8:8 are not exceptions.7 Moreover, Weinfeld overlooked the fact that שׁקר also modifies the pen itself (lit. “the pen of the lie of the scribes”). The meaning of this sentence is more accurately captured by “The deceitful pen of the scribes has made it [the torah of the LORD] into a false witness!” These scribes had a responsibility to guard torah (Jeremiah 28:8), to ensure that it is transmitted faithfully, but their scribal work was not done in good faith.8
Wisdom is thus more profitably thought of as a concept that, as Michael V. Fox has noted, entails “a high degree of knowledge and skill in any domain,” including the design and construction of objects, statecraft, and interpersonal relationships.9 Wisdom encompasses knowledge of torah (the instruction from which it is learned), the skill to actively interpret and apply that knowledge in order to succeed, and, as implicit in Jeremiah’s critique, ethical principles and character traits such as righteousness and integrity that govern how one puts one’s knowledge and skill to work. As for torah, the term, as we will see, is applied to a variety of genres, including not only the ritual and legal instruction in the Torah, but also prophetic speech and the very genres—aphorisms, riddles, and paraenetic discourse—typical of what we call “wisdom literature.” Wisdom comes into play any time a text or an utterance of any sort needs to be interpreted and applied in order to navigate one’s way forward in life.
Despite how we have come to use the terms, then, torah and wisdom are not distinct corpuses of literature that have to be related to one another through arguments about common Sitz im Leben or mutual influence. Rather, they refer to instruction, broadly speaking, and the knowledge, skill, and ethics with which it is engaged, and they are inextricably linked everywhere they appear. Throughout this article (in five installments), I will illustrate the intertwined nature of wisdom and torah beginning with a discussion of the Hezekianic corpus within the book of Proverbs, which I suggest may have played a role in navigating the politics of late eighth-century Judah. We will see that torah refers to both folk instruction and prophetic counsel, possibly before there was a Torah to speak of, and that wisdom is deeply political, concerned with the welfare of society as much as the behavior of individuals.
I will then look at how the political import of wisdom is embodied in the character of Moses, who interprets and applies torah—this time ritual instructions—in order to help the Israelites successfully make their way through the wilderness.10 Yet knowledge and skill can be applied in ways that are decidedly unwise, and I will show how this, too, is embodied in the character of Moses, as well as in the text of the Torah itself, providing a possible context for Jeremiah’s trenchant critique of the scribes. Finally, we will look at how the character of Moses and the Torah itself is repaired, through a generic shift that prompts readers to engage with the entire Torah—law collections and narratives alike—as if it were a corpus of instructional literature like the book of Proverbs.
Featured image: Washington Allston, Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecy of the Destruction of Jerusalem to Baruch the Scribe (1820), Yale University Art Gallery, Wikimedia commons, public domain.
- The various ways in which the two have been related in the history of scholarship are summarized by Eckhard J. Schnabel, Law and Wisdom from Ben Sira to Paul, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 16 (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1985), 1–4. ↩︎
- On the similarity of pentateuchal law collections to wisdom literature, see, e.g., Joseph Blenkinsopp, Wisdom and Law in the Old Testament: The Ordering of Life in Israel and Early Judaism, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1995); Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley, The Transformation of Torah from Scribal Advice to Law, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 287 (Sheffield Academic, 1999); and Bernard S. Jackson, Wisdom-Laws: A Study of the Mishpatim of Exodus 22:1–22:16 (Oxford University Press, 2006). ↩︎
- Will Kynes, An Obituary for “Wisdom Literature”: The Birth, Death, and Intertextual Reintegration of a Biblical Corpus (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Annette Schellenberg, “Epistemology: Wisdom, Knowledge, and Revelation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wisdom and the Bible, ed. Will Kynes (Oxford University Press, 2021), 29–44. ↩︎
- Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Eisenbrauns, 1992 [1972]), 244–81. All translations of biblical texts are my own except where otherwise indicated. My rendering of this clause follows Weinfeld’s reading (158–62 esp. 160) here, but I prefer to translate it differently (see below). ↩︎
- Mark Sneed, “Is the ‘Wisdom Tradition’ a ‘Tradition’?,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2011): 50–71. ↩︎
- For skepticism about whether “sage” was a role that could be associated with a distinct wisdom school, see R. N. Whybray, The Intellectual Tradition in the Old Testament, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 135 (de Gruyter, 1974), 6–54. For these critiques of Weinfeld, see C. Brekelmans, “Wisdom Influence in Deuteronomy,” in La Sagesse de l’Ancien Testament, ed. M. Gilbert, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 51 (J. Duculot and University Press, 1979), 28–38 and Alexander Rofé, Deuteronomy: Issues and Interpretation (T & T Clark, 2002), 221–30. ↩︎
- Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, Study Edition, trans. M. E. J. Richardson, 2 vols. (Brill, 2001), 2:1648–50. ↩︎
- On one line of thought, Jeremiah deemed this work problematic because it ossified the living word of God; for summary, see William McKane, Prophets and Wise Men, Studies in Biblical Theology (Alec R. Allenson, 1965), 102–12. Yet, as McKane points out, Jeremiah’s objection is not that their Torah was ossified but that it was false—a misrepresentation. Other commentators turn to various alternatives in order to avoid the idea that the scribes are being critiqued for how they wrote torah itself, even though this is the plain sense of the verse: J. A. Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1980), 300 suggests that they were teaching; Peter C. Craigie et al., Jeremiah 1–25, Word Biblical Commentary 26 (Word, 1991), 134 understands the problem as “oral distortion”; and Ernest W. Nicholson, The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, Chapters 1–25 (Cambridge University Press, 1973), 87 thinks that they were writing commentaries. Bernd U. Schipper, Hermeneutics of Torah: Proverbs 2, Deuteronomy, and the Composition of Proverbs 1–9, Ancient Israel and Its Literature 43 (SBL Press, 2021), 240 reads Jeremiah 8:8 as a critique of those who advocate for sapiential exegesis of a “literarily fixed Torah” in lieu of more divinely revealed torah; see also Bernd U. Schipper, Proverbs 1–15, trans. Stephen Germany, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2019), 39. In other words, the dispute is over exegetical approaches. As will become clear by the end of this series, I am inclined to think that the advocacy for sapiential exegesis of the Torah in a text like Deuteronomy 4 and the critique in Jeremiah 8:8 are not at odds with each other at all but are responding to the same phenomenon, which the authors of both texts found problematic. ↩︎
- Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1–9, Anchor Bible 18A (Doubleday, 2000), 32. See the four senses of חכמה offered by Fox, “Aspects of the Religion of the Book of Proverbs,” Hebrew Union College Annual 39 (1968): 55. ↩︎
- My reading of wilderness episodes throughout this series and my framing of the literary history of the wilderness narrative is based on Angela Roskop Erisman, The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Readers should refer to my discussions there of interpretive issues involved in the various passages, which will not be addressed in depth here. ↩︎
