Angela Roskop Erisman

She is a Tree of Life for Those Who Grasp Her: Rethinking Wisdom and Torah. Part 4: A Wise Torah

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Angela Roskop Erisman

We now have a better appreciation for what might have prompted the author of Jeremiah 8:8 to write “How can you say ‘We are wise, and the torah of the LORD is with us’? The deceitful pen of the scribes has made it into a false witness!” The Korah and quail episodes are part of a transformation of the Pentateuch that seeks to arrogate power to the high priest, one that introduces various distortions, including to the character of Moses.1 This version embodies a different kind of politics than we see in other parts of the Torah. The preferred relationship to power is never to question it, visceral motives such as fear are prioritized over skill and thoughtful judgment in how we exercise agency, and the use of manipulative rhetorical techniques, should one notice them as the author of Jeremiah 8:8 may have, leave one wondering what happened to righteousness as a core social value. Jeremiah’s “torah of the LORD” need not refer to a version of the Pentateuch, but it can, and we see in this revision the very kind of abuse the prophet condemns. Yet this version does not have the last word, and the relationship between wisdom and torah takes on a new dimension as the text is revised in order to encourage a different different reading, one more fully steeped in wisdom.

Wisdom in Deuteronomy

The wilderness narrative may not contain language that suggests the direct influence of wisdom literature, but the book of Deuteronomy does. It is tempting to see the overt references to “wise, discerning, and knowledgeable” leaders (1:3) and “righteous” laws (4:8) as an effort to prize obedience to divinely revealed Torah over the active pursuit of secular wisdom.2 This is particularly evident in Deuteronomy 16:18–20, which acknowledges that even the wise can be corrupted by bribes. The proposed solution to this problem is to pursue righteousness by faithfully obeying righteous laws (see also 4:5–8). This is the mark of true wisdom. Yet the need to qualify the laws as “righteous” suggests the possibility of laws that are not righteous, just as the need to specify that the laws God gave the Israelites at Sinai are “upright,” “true,” and “good” (Nehemiah 9:13) allows for the existence of laws that are crooked, false, and bad. Now that we recognize a version of the Torah in which the deceitful pen of the scribes played fast and loose with divine instruction to self-serving ends, we can see that wisdom is not the foil for “this Torah, which I set before you today” (Deuteronomy 4:8).3 The foil is right here, in a version of the Torah itself that exhibits strategy and cunning but questionable integrity.

This creates a significant problem. How does a reader discern the difference between “this Torah” and “that Torah”? On the one hand, “this Torah” frames the law collection in Deuteronomy (4:44 and 31:9), marking it, and not the Covenant Code or the Holiness legislation, as the one in question.4 We can also see this in Deuteronomy 4:5–8. Verse 8 refers to the Torah that Moses is about to give (נתן, participle) to the Israelites—the book of Deuteronomy, delivered in Moab—while verse 5 refers to the laws and rules that Moses already taught them (למדתי, qatal form) at Sinai and throughout the wilderness in the books of Exodus–Numbers. While the laws and rules are identified in the usual way in verse 5 (חקים ומשפטים), verse 8 specifies that the laws Moses is about to deliver are the righteous ones (חקים ומשפטים צדיקם). It seems that we are to give preference to Deuteronomy over the Torah that came before it in narrative time.

Yet there is also a sense in which yesterday’s Torah and today’s Torah are the same Torah. The verb למדתי in Deuteronomy 4:5 can be read as past tense (“I taught”) or performative (“I hereby teach”), making it possible to read this verse as a reference to the previous laws and/or the ones about to be given.5 Deuteronomy 1:5 also frames Moses’s activity in Deuteronomy as explaining the law that has already been given, not offering a new set of laws, despite the many obvious differences between Deuteronomy and the collections that precede it.6 So, while there is certainly a sense in which we are being encouraged to privilege Deuteronomy, we are also being prompted to look at it in a particular way, as part of God’s covenant with Israel at Sinai, not as an addendum or an alternative to it. There is no simple way to dismiss old versions of the Torah in favor of new ones because old and new are now irretrievably mixed, as voices in conversation with one another in a single Torah with a complicated literary history.

In fact, we are specifically enjoined not to subtract from it (Deuteronomy 4:2). We must take it as a whole, for better or worse. Yet how do we tell the better from the worse? Deuteronomy 4, which is widely understood to be part of a sapiential revision to the book, offers a solution to this problem.7 To pursue righteousness under these circumstances requires us to relate to the entire Torah—both the laws that came before and the ones we are about to read—in a wise, discerning, and knowledgeable way, by actively considering which are righteous and which are not, as well as how to interpret and apply them in ways that are righteous.8

Reading Torah Wisely

The challenge of navigating the Pentateuch’s multiple voices is not unlike the challenges involved in reading the compilations of sayings we call “wisdom literature.” The Hezekian collection, for example, is framed by reflection on kingship, but the bulk of it meanders through various topics and often contains ambiguities and contradictions, as well as puzzling imagery and language play. This is not a problem; it is how such collections are meant to work. Reading them is about how the sayings engage us in critical thought and creative play as much as it is about assimilating content.9 The poetry of Proverbs, as Anne Stewart has shown, “makes an important contribution to the way in which the book seeks to shape character,” not only building intellectual capacity but also appealing to “emotions, motivations, desires, and imagination” in the formation of the self.10 Compilations of sayings like those in Proverbs teach values such as righteousness overtly, but the myriad indeterminacies involved also force one to think about what is righteous and how to tell.

The tasks of assimilating the content of instruction (torah) and cultivating skill (wisdom) are constantly bound together in Proverbs. We can, for example, learn how not to behave from the clearly organized set of examples laid out in Proverbs 26. As Fox notes, “[t]he essence of folly is lack of good judgment, with consequent distortions in moral and practical choices.”11 The cause of poor judgment is what differentiates the dolt (vv. 1–12), the sluggard (vv. 13–16), and the quarrelsome person (vv. 17–28). Yet even as we take in that content, we might also be prompted to think about their foils, drawing on our experience to fill in the positive models and flesh out a primer on how to behave. We might even find some of these foils elsewhere in the collection. The person who relies on the sweetness of a friend’s counsel (27:9), for example, might strike us as a foil for the dolt, whose overconfidence and self-indulgence prove a stumbling block. This skill is modeled in the righteous-wicked pairings in Proverbs 28–29, which also prom0te virtues such as generosity, integrity, industriousness, and moderation.

Sometimes we must work harder for the knowledge, by relating disparate sayings across the collection that have similar content, which may prompt thought about how they relate. The idea that we should let others praise us instead of boasting in Proverbs 27:2 might be a general principle that is actuated in a particular context in 25:5–6, which instructs its reader not to maneuver for position in the court but wait to be invited. A tour through several other sayings that prompt reflection on when it is (im)prudent to intervene in a given situation—whether someone else’s quarrel (26:17), someone else’s self-defeating behavior (26:27), or someone else experiencing the consequences of their own actions (28:17)—could yield the insight that one ought to think carefully about when and how to get involved, to reflect on the possible consequences before opening one’s mouth, and then exercise good judgment.

Contradictions ask us to exercise (and further cultivate) our capacity for good judgment.12 The aphorisms in Proverbs 26:4–5 offer conflicting advice on how to deal with a dolt. Is it best to avoid stooping to their level, lest one become like them? Or should one answer them in a way that exposes their foolishness and deflates their oversized sense of self? There is no guidance on how to decide which of these is right, so, being aware of the different possibilities, we must cultivate a capacity to judge for ourselves in any given situation.13 The act of reading itself helps us cultivate the knowledge and intellectual skill that constitute wisdom.14

The challenge of discerning which laws in the Pentateuch are righteous is rather like the need to navigate the conflicting advice for how to deal with a dolt in Proverbs 26:4–5. That realization gives us a new way to understand the sapiential passages in Deuteronomy. They do not tell us who wrote it (sages) or what kind of literature it is (wisdom literature). They tell us how to read it—namely, as though it were a wisdom book, in order to develop values and cultivate the skills needed to navigate our way successfully not just through life but through the text.

This is a generic shift. The literary history of the wilderness narrative as I have tracked it involves a series of genre transformations, from fictional biography, to royal annal, to tragedy, to political rhetoric, and now to instructional literature—in addition, of course, to law, legend, myth, poetry, and other forms. In drawing attention to this new generic influence, I do not mean to imply that we should classify the Torah (or any part of it) as wisdom literature, which would collapse important distinctions between these corpuses. Genre is about much more than classification; it activates constraints and possibilities for interpretation.15 The Torah (and even the book of Deuteronomy itself) is, in any case, far too generically complex to shoehorn into a single category. As the text is revised and new genres come into play, the old ones do not go away. We simply have additional sets of interpretive orientations to take into account as we read.

The infusion of sapiential language does not involve importing a new mode of knowing, one that is foreign to the Torah by its nature, nor is it an effort to subordinate wisdom to torah (or the other way around).16 Wisdom and torah have gone hand in hand all along. Isaiah contends with the royal counselors who are wise in their own eyes not because they exercise wisdom instead of torah but because they exclude a crucial category of instruction from their deliberations. In what is now the Torah, Moses shows us time and again that divine instruction must be interpreted and applied wisely, with skill and strategy and cunning, in the interest of the people’s success and well-being. Divine instruction is never meant to be passively received, at least not until the scribes with the deceitful pen manipulate it for their own purposes, writing in ways that twist what they were meant to faithfully (albeit not slavishly) transmit.

These scribes, who may have provoked Jeremiah’s ire, sought to secure obedience not through the kind of understanding Moses seeks to cultivate through his teaching of torah in the Passover or manna narratives but by provoking a visceral reaction to the threat of punishment or the promise of reward. The exercise of wisdom in this version of the Torah—a half-wisdom, consisting of sharply refined skill but questionable virtue—is limited to Israel’s leadership, while the people are encouraged to abandon their cognitive faculties and their values and accept rule by disgust and fear. The sapiential language in Deuteronomy comes to restore the kind of interaction with divine instruction that Moses exemplifies throughout (most of) the Torah. Its pedagogy motivates the people to faithful obedience out of love rather than fear, out of learning rather than disgust.17 It cultivates a habitus that restores righteousness as a value and reactivates the cognitive skill and good judgment that is embraced in wisdom discourse.

Wisdom in the Wilderness

These reading instructions are not limited to Deuteronomy. They are also laid out in a metanarrative that spans (at least) the entire wilderness narrative, which is framed by key episodes that evoke wisdom. Abuse of torah is symbolized at the very beginning of the wilderness narrative at Marah (Exodus 15:22–27), where the water is “bitter,” or impotable. Fresh running water symbolizes good leadership, while bitter water is what results when a leader manages divine gifts, including torah, in a way that has the potential to make society sick. The bitter water is healed, or made potable, when Moses throws a wooden stick in it: ויורהו יהוה עץ (v. 25). Like the water, the stick is symbolic, but doubly so, as it represents both Aaron’s wooden staff (cf. Numbers 17:23–26 (ET 17:8–11]), which is being discarded, and torah itself, which is now being taught directly by Moses, with no mediation from Aaron.

This short and enigmatic story takes active effort to decipher, as well as depth of knowledge gained from reading back and forth across the entire corpus, not unlike the way one would read a collection of proverbs. The story itself asks us to exercise the very skills we need to read the rest of the Torah, or at least to do so wisely. Should the stick (עץ) that Moses throws into the water—the torah he teaches—make us think of Proverbs 3:18 and its image of wisdom as a tree (עץ) of life that brings flourishing to all who grasp it, we might be encouraged that reading the Torah like a wisdom book is indeed the intended strategy.18

The Marah episode presents healing what is broken and embittered as part of God’s very nature: “I, the LORD, am your physician” (Exodus 15:26). This medical analogy has a parallel in the Greek wisdom tradition, where the philosopher is construed as a doctor and philosophy, or love of wisdom, as a practice of healing “the most painful problems of human life,” both individual and social.19 We meet Israel’s divine physician again near the end of the wilderness narrative, where the people are bitten by snakes, and God instructs Moses to craft a bronze serpent, place it on a pole, and have the people look at it in order to be healed (Numbers 21:4–9).

This a curious remedy if we take the episode at face value as a story about injury by animal bite, but here again we are called upon to make sense of symbolism by drawing on broad knowledge of the Torah. The snake is a symbol of sovereignty, one that represents both the the tyrranical leadership of Egypt (where kingship is represented by the uraeus) and the leadership of the wise and obedient Moses, whose shepherd’s staff (also a symbol of kingship) becomes a snake in a demonstration that his leadership is the equal of Pharaoh’s (Exodus 4:1–5). God does not step in to magically cure the social disease that ails them as tyrrany is now exercised in their own ranks by a priest (whose staff also turns into a snake in Exodus 7:8–12). Rather, he prescribes a remedy that the Israelites themselves must actuate, by studiously contemplating the snake, or reflecting on the uses and abuses of sovereignty, both of which are exemplified in the Torah. “The righteous are extricated by knowledge” (Proverbs 11:9)—this proverb, according to Fox, “does not say that God intervenes to deliver the righteous miraculously but…assumes that the righteous, being wise, have the mental resources to get themselves out of trouble.”20

The idea that one should read the Torah as one would read a wisdom book is only part of the corrective strategy. It has become clear that the opportunity to add words to the Torah is also an opportunity to abuse it, and this issue is addressed in a revision to the quail episode, which responds to the abuse of sovereignty in Aaron’s version of the wilderness narrative by reimagining the very structure of political leadership. The Hezekian collection of sayings may shape a sense of self that is subordinate to the king, but the quail episode empowers seventy elders to lead. They are given a share of Moses’s spirit and proceed to prophesy, after which ולא יספו (Numbers 11:25). Those who want to take this episode as an etiology for an ongoing prophetic office translate this expression as “they did not stop,” while others render it “they did not continue,” understanding it as a single act of ecstatic prophecy that legitimates their political rule. Yet it can also mean “they did not add,” which puts the seventy elders in compliance with the charge in Deuteronomy 4:2 and 13:1 to embrace everything God commands but not to add to it. Abuse of divine instruction stops here. This episode complements the appointment of wise, discerning, and knowledgeable leaders from among the people (Deuteronomy 1:9–18).21 Wisdom is no longer the unique purview of the sovereign, as it is for the king in Proverbs 25:2–3 or Solomon in 1 Kings 3:9, 12, but can be shared by all who engage with torah in the spirit of Moses.22

The character of Moses is also repaired in this version of the wilderness narrative, reshaped as a model for and encourager of the wise interaction with torah expected of Israel’s leaders. When the Israelites accuse Moses at the sea (Exodus 14) of leading them to their deaths, Moses chooses to engage their fear rather than defend himself, just as he does in the manna episode. To turn their fear into trust, he realizes, will require them to see for themselves a way out of their predicament—namely, to exercise wisdom. So he does not detail for them what is going to happen, but he does give them a framework for understanding it correctly when it does: “Witness the act of salvation that the LORD will perform for you today”—an act of salvation, not doom, performed by God, not Moses. He acknowledges their fear and neutralizes the threat: “Although you see the Egyptians today, you will never see them again.” And he encourages them to remain situated and quiet, to wait and watch, creating space for a transformation within them that will allow them to see their situation rightly and, in the end, restore the trust that has been so badly broken. These shifts in Moses’s character illustrate the idea in Proverbs 8:12 (“I, Wisdom, inhabit cunning”) that wisdom, as Michael Legaspi has noted, is not simply an alternative to wickedness but “appears to assimilate some of its characteristic traits and to annex the powers that make it attractive.”23 Wisdom apprehends the corrosive use of words, salvages the raw skill, and repurposes it for good. In this sense it indeed has healing properties, and the tree of life is an apt representation of it.24

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.

  1. Because I focus on the complaint episodes in Angela Roskop Erisman, The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2025), I do not track this revision comprehensively through the wilderness narrative (never mind into the book of Genesis), but it does include a revision to the early chapters of Numbers (which I discuss, 118–26). It would also include various texts that maneuver Aaron into a position of power, including (but not limited to) Aaron’s role as mediator of torah between Moses and the Israelites (Exodus 4:10–16), Aaron’s staff (Exodus 7:1–13), and the idea that it is Aaron who strikes the Nile (Exodus 7:19). ↩︎
  2. So, e.g., Stephen A. Geller, “Fiery Wisdom: Logos and Lexis in Deuteronomy 4,” Prooftexts 14, no. 2 (1994): 103–39; Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10–31, Anchor Yale Bible 18B (Yale University Press, 2009), 953; and Reinhard Müller, “The Blinded Eyes of the Wise: Sapiential Tradition and Mosaic Commandment in Deut 16:19–20,” in Wisdom and Torah: The Reception of “Torah” in the Wisdom Literature of the Second Temple Period, ed. Bernd U. Schipper and D. Andrew Teeter, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 163 (Brill, 2013), 28–30. ↩︎
  3. Nor are the Laws of Hammurabi, as some have proposed; see Georg Braulik, “Weisheit, Gottesnähe und Gesetz—zum Kerygma von Deuteronomium 4,5–8,” in Studien zur Theologie des Deuteronomiums, Stuttgarter Biblische Aufsatzbände 2 (Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1988), 53–93, translated as Georg Braulik, “Wisdom, Divine Presence and Law: Reflections on the Kerygma of Deut 4:5–8,” in The Theology of Deuteronomy: Collected Essays of Georg Braulik, O.S.B., trans. Ulrika Lindblad (BIBAL, 1994), 1–25, and Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1–11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 5 (Doubleday, 1991), 202. ↩︎
  4. See discussion of this framing in Jean-Pierre Sonnet, The Book within the Book: Writing in Deuteronomy, Biblical Interpretation Series 14 (Brill, 1997), 246–50. ↩︎
  5. Paul Joüon, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, trans. Takemitsu Muraoka, 2 vols., Subsidia Biblica 14 (Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1993), §112 c and f, respectively. For this reading, see, e.g., Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1–11, 201. Karin Finsterbusch, Weisung für Israel. Studien zu religiösen Lehren und Lernen im Deuteronomium und in seinem Umfeld, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 44 (Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 150 objects to the performative reading because Moses does not actually start teaching the law until Deuteronomy 6:1, so its presence here is premature, but this concern is mitigated by the likelihood that Deuteronomy 4 is a later addition, effectively a new introduction designed to preempt the one in Deuteronomy 6. Thomas Krüger, “Law and Wisdom according to Deut 4:5–8,” in Wisdom and Torah: The Reception of “Torah” in the Wisdom Literature of the Second Temple Period, ed. Bernd U. Schipper and D. Andrew Teeter, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 163 (Brill, 2013), 37 n. 7 also objects to the performative reading because “I hereby teach statutes and laws” is different than “I hereby give you the land” (נתתי לפניכם את הארץ, Deuteronomy 1:8), where the point of the performative is that the gift has legal force now, even before the land is actually occupied; it does not make sense to say that the law is hereby taught, even before Moses starts teaching it. This is a fair point if one takes the law in question to be only Deuteronomy, but it is moot if this is an effort to merge the law that is about to be taught with the law that already has been taught in order to cultivate the idea that they are all part of a single covenant despite their differences. ↩︎
  6. Eckart Otto, “Mose, der erste Schriftgelehrte. Deuteronomium 1,5 in der Fabel des Pentateuch,” in L’Ecrit et l’Esprit. Etudes d’histoire du texte et de théologie biblique en hommage à Adrian Schenker, ed. Dieter Böhler et al., Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 214 (Academic Press and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 273–84. A different meaning, “to establish legal authority” (based on Akk. bâru), is proposed by Georg Braulik and Norbert Lohfink, “Deuteronomium 1,5 באר את־התורה: ‘Er verlieh dieser Tora rechstskraft,’” in Textarbeit. Studien zu Texten und ihrer Rezeption aus dem Alten Testament und der Umwelt Israels, ed. Klaus Kiesow and Thomas Meurer, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 294 (Ugarit-Verlag, 2003), 35–51. Perhaps both senses are at play here, given that the texts in question merge Deuteronomy with what came before, presenting it not as a second law but as tantamount to the same law, and (re)establish the integrity of the entire law after it has been abused. ↩︎
  7. On the integration of wisdom and Torah here, see Jean Malfroy, “Sagesse et loi dans le Deuteronome. Etudes,” Vetus Testamentum 15, no. 1 (1965): 49–65. For the idea that the emphasis on teaching implied by למדתי is a sapiential development concentrated in Deuteronomy 4 and other places that involve the ethical teaching of children (Deuteronomy 6:1–7; 11:18–19; 31:12–13, 19), see, e.g., Krüger, “Law and Wisdom,” 43. There is broad agreement that Deuteronomy 4 is an intervention between the historical prologue in chapters 1–3 and the Decalogue in chapter 5, although not about the unity of chapter 4 itself. The vacillation between plural and singular address (Numeruswechsel) has led to various proposals for development within the chapter, although most scholars now view it as a rhetorical and thematic unity; see discussion of the problem (with key bibliography) in Knut Holter, “Literary Critical Studies of Deut 4: Some Criteriologial Remarks,” Biblische Notizen 81 (1996): 91–103 and Nathan MacDonald, “The Literary Criticism and Rhetorical Logic of Deuteronomy I–IV,” Vetus Testamentum 56, no. 2 (2006): 203–24. For our purposes here, it does not really matter whether the revision consists only of the sapiential language in verses 5–8, which are an isolated addition according to Dietrich Knapp, Deuteronomium 4. Literarische Analyse und theologische Interpretation, Göttinger Theologische Arbeiten 35 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 62–67, or the entire chapter, although I am inclined to the latter, among other reasons because the wisdom approach signalled in verses 5–8 is necessitated by the idea that one should not subtract (verse 2), even from a morally problematic text. ↩︎
  8. Thomas Krüger, “Gesetz und Weisheit im Pentateuch,” in Auf den Spuren der schriftgelehrten Weisen. Festschrift für Johannes Marböck anlässlich seiner Emeritierung, ed. Irmtraud Fischer et al. (de Gruyter, 2003), 6 comes close to this is in his sense that Deuteronomy 4:5–8 require judges to exercise wisdom when they interpret and apply the law; what he does not recognize is the possibility that some laws might themselves be problematic. Also helpful is the idea that “Law presents us with the paradigm and Wisdom is concerned with the question of how we apply it”; see Jonathan P. Burnside, “Law and Wisdom Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wisdom and the Bible, ed. Will Kynes (Oxford University Press, 2021), 435. ↩︎
  9. Christopher B. Ansberry, “Proverbs,” in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Wisdom Literature, ed. Katharine J. Dell et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 137–61. ↩︎
  10. Anne W. Stewart, Poetic Ethics in Proverbs: Wisdom Literature and the Shaping of the Moral Self (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 3–4. See also, e.g., John Mark Thompson, The Form and Function of Proverbs in Ancient Israel, Studia Judaica 1 (Mouton, 1974); James G. Williams, “The Power of Form: A Study of Biblical Proverbs,” in Gnomic Wisdom, ed. John Dominic Crossan, Semeia 17 (Scholars Press, 1980), 35–58; and William P. Brown, “The Pedagogy of Proverbs 10:1–31:9,” in Character and Scripture: Moral Formation, Community, and Biblical Interpretation, ed. William P. Brown (Eerdmans, 2002), 150–82. ↩︎
  11. Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1–9, Anchor Bible 18A (Doubleday, 2000), 38. ↩︎
  12. On the pedagogical value of contradictions, specifically, see Peter T. H. Hatton, Contradictions in the Book of Proverbs: The Deep Waters of Counsel, Society for Old Testament Study Monographs (Ashgate, 2008). ↩︎
  13. The contradiction in these verses is cited in b. Shabbat 30b as a reason to suppress the book of Proverbs from the canon. Kenneth G. Hoglund, “The Fool and the Wise in Dialogue,” in The Listening Heart: Essays in Wisdom and the Psalms in Honor of Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., ed. Kenneth G. Hoglund et al., Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 58 (JSOT Press, 1987), 161–80 tries to make sense of this ambiguity in a structural reading of Proverbs 26, which is a step in the right direction, but I would prefer to see the conflict as a juxtaposition that provokes critical reflection on when each strategy might be productive and the ability to weigh benefits against risks. Indeed, the gemara resolves the contradiction (and presumably saves the book of Proverbs) by noting that the case is “not difficult” (לא קשׁיא): each aphorism applies to a different type of situation. ↩︎
  14. It is important, however, to note the tension in Proverbs between moral reasoning as a “thinking process” that is cultivated by interaction with the literature and the strict hierarchy and sometimes harshly disciplinary character in the teacher-student relationship implied in the book; see Samuel E. Balentine, “Proverbs,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wisdom and the Bible, ed. Will Kynes (Oxford University Press, 2021), 505–7. ↩︎
  15. John Frow, Genre, New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2006). ↩︎
  16. Bernd U. Schipper, Proverbs 1–15, trans. Stephen Germany, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2019) and Schipper, Hermeneutics of Torah: Proverbs 2, Deuteronomy, and the Composition of Proverbs 1–9, Ancient Israel and Its Literature 43 (SBL Press, 2021) points to a relationship between Deuteronomy and Proverbs 1–9, which he frames as a dynamic, competitive interplay between torah (or Torah) and wisdom, understood in a more traditional sense as a fixed literary corpus of divine revelation and experiential knowledge, respectively. As should be apparent from my discussion, I am inclined to see more coordination than competition in this relationship. This may have implications for the literary histories of both Deuteronomy and Proverbs 1–9, but working these out is far beyond the scope of this series of articles. ↩︎
  17. For the emphasis on moral formation in the frame of Deuteronomy, see Dominik Markl, “Deuteronomy’s Frameworks in Service of the Law (Deut 1–11; 26–34),” in Deuteronomium—Tora für eine neue Generation, ed. Georg Fischer et al., Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die altorientalische und biblische Rechtsgeschichte 17 (Harrassowitz, 2011), 271–83. William McKane, Prophets and Wise Men, Studies in Biblical Theology (Alec R. Allenson, 1965), 102–12 points to the wisdom language in Deuteronomy as the thing that, in Jeremiah’s view, makes the Torah into a lie, but his rationale for this (the problem is that it is an academic exercise, undertaken at a time when society was falling apart) is no more convincing than the explanations he critiques. McKane is right to focus on the importation of wisdom language into the Torah, but it is the solution to the problem, not the problem itself. ↩︎
  18. It is impossible to prove that this allusion is an effort to draw the book of Proverbs and the Torah into mutual conversation with one another, but, with Daniel Boyarin, “Inner Biblical Ambiguity, Intertextuality and the Dialectic of Midrash: The Waters of Marah,” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 29–48, I am inclined to read it this way, especially because the frame of Proverbs often pairs תורה with מצוה in a way that evokes especially (but not only) Deuteronomy (see Proverbs 3:1; 6:20, 23; 7:2), whereas this pairing does not appear in the Hezekian corpus. ↩︎
  19. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2009), 3. Although dominant in the Hellenistic period, use of this analogy is attested at least as early as the fifth century BCE. ↩︎
  20. Fox, Proverbs 10–31, 534. ↩︎
  21. There is debate about whether Deuteronomy 1:9–18 is dependent on Exodus 18, Numbers 11, or both. Some are inclined to see Numbers 11 as later; see esp. Reinhard Achenbach, Die Vollendung der Tora. Studien zur Redaktionsgeschichte des Numeribuches im Kontext von Hexateuch und Pentateuch, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die altorientalische und biblische Rechtsgeschichte 3 (Harrassowitz, 2003), 219–66. I am inclined to see a close relationship with the section of Numbers 11 that is concerned with the seventy elders, particularly because it is in these two texts that Moses complains about his burden; see Marc Zvi Brettler, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel (Routledge, 1995), 65–70. Yet I would see Deuteronomy 1 not as dependent on Numbers 11 but as part of the same version of the text. This is not the only time the same scribe created a narrative in Numbers and its retrospective in Deuteronomy; for another, see Angela Roskop Erisman, “Transjordan in Deuteronomy: The Promised Land and the Formation of the Pentateuch,” Journal of Biblical Literature 132, no. 4 (2013): 769–89. ↩︎
  22. As noted by Müller, “Blinded Eyes,” 24, who (rightly, in my view) takes this as a “democratization of the king’s ability to judge in 1 Kings 3.” ↩︎
  23. Michael C. Legaspi, Wisdom in Classical and Biblical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018), 62. ↩︎
  24. On the tree as symbol for health and well-being, see Ralph Marcus, “The Tree of Life in Proverbs,” Journal of Biblical Literature 62, no. 2 (1943): 117–20. ↩︎

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