Book Review of Longman's The Fear of the Lord is Wisdom

This article offers an attempt to discern the extent to which Rudolf Otto's points of view, specifically the idea of "the holy" as the mysterium tremendum, influenced scholarly opinion on the meaning and significance of the fear of God in the HB in general and in the wisdom literature in particular. It is found that Otto did indeed have a great influence on the understanding of the meaning of the fear of God, but that scholars also allowed their opinions to be guided by a competent analysis of the different nuances that the fear of God takes on in the biblical text itself. The findings lead to the conclusion that scholars should recognise both the possibilities and the limitations of Otto's views in any attempt to delineate the meaning and significance the fear of God in the HB. Journal name: Old Testament Essays Volume: 27 (2014) Issue: 1

Scriptura 111, 2012

Any attempt to come to grips with 'the fear of the Lord' as a key concept for the interpretation of Old Testament wisdom, must appreciate that it is rooted in texts that presuppose an encounter with God that can cause a variety of responses: a feeling of horror or terror; as well as reverent awe that forms the basis of the pious veneration of the Lord in the form of obedience and praise. Although statistical analysis reveals a concentration of occurrences in Deuteronomy (and the so-called Deuteronomistic History), the Psalms and Wisdom literature, it does not presuppose a clear linear development. The theological interpretation of Old Testament wisdom literature must be aware of the ongoing creative tension between order (keeping the commandments) and mystery (fearing the Lord)-as summarized in the conclusion of the Book of Ecclesiastes (12:13).

Leo Strauss defined wisdom as the highest notion conveyed in both the Bible and Greek philosophy. However, he also highlighted the divergence in the biblical and Greek claims to represent true wisdom: ‘According to the Bible, the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord; according to the Greek philosophers, the beginning of wisdom is wonder.’ If the prerequisite for biblical wisdom is theism (in particular, ‘the fear of the Lord’), then does that exclude it from philosophical discourse on the grounds of the revelation versus reason debate? As Yoram Hazony recently pointed out, theism amongst the Greek philosophers has not precluded them. This paper seeks to explore how wisdom and ‘the fear of the Lord’ can be spoken of in a philosophical context, by drawing primarily on the Book of Proverbs. Proverbs presents us with wisdom personified beyond the feminine noun חָכְמָה (‘hokmah’), enjoining the reader to love wisdom as if she were a woman and not an ideal, and thus giving us a radical sense of ‘philo-sophia’. Within the theme of ‘Human Action’, wisdom is inseparable from ‘Justice, Righteousness, Love and Awe’. She demands equity and righteous action from those who would embrace her, and in turn offers the same to all-comers – she is not the exclusive property of ‘philosopher kings’. She demands love – she must be courted and is not easily won. Wisdom is relational, and she manifests in human relations. Finally, wisdom is, at the outset, awesome – in chapter eight of Proverbs she recounts the part she played in the creation of the cosmos. Here, יִרְאָה (‘yirah’) can be seen as an awesome reverence and humbling beneath the enormity and beauty of the heavens, rather than the fear of terror. The understanding of fear as terror obviously has its place, for example, as a response to danger or, in theistic terms, a response to God’s wrath. However, it is the understanding of fear as awe which allows a philosophical discourse for theists and non-theists alike, by pointing not just to a creator but to the cosmos and life in all its forms. An awesome respect for one another, for all life, for the earth and the universe brings about the beginning of wisdom evidenced in human action.

This chapter introduces the volume by arguing that the study of biblical wisdom is in the midst of a potential paradigm shift, as interpreters are beginning to reconsider the relationship between the concept of wisdom in the Bible and the category Wisdom Literature. This offers an opportunity to explore how the two have been related in the past, in the history of Jewish and Christian interpretation, how they are connected in the present, as three competing primary approaches to Wisdom study have developed, and how they could be treated in the future, as new possibilities for understanding wisdom with insight from before and beyond the development of the Wisdom Literature category are emerging.

E-Journal of Religious and Theological Studies, 2020

The focus of this paper is basically, on the concept of the fear of God in the wisdom literature. A cursory look reveals it is a unifying factor a principle of wisdom and steps or curriculum to wisdom. Content analysis of the wisdom literature is done, and it revealed that the fear of God is to hate evil or turn away from evil and lead a blameless life. Some of the benefits are long life, security, confidence and hope during the time of crisis. In literature the concept is arranged first in Proverbs as the foundation of wisdom, embodiment of wisdom in Job and conclusion of life in Qoheleth. The pedagogical steps of acquiring wisdom through the fear of God will equip every Ghanaian learner with the matured conscience of knowing what is right and being delighted to do it.

This paper seeks to examine the connection between the understanding of the fear of the Lord in Wisdom Literature and in the writings of C.S. Lewis. The paper concludes that Lewis' understanding of the numinous is another way of understanding the term fear of the Lord in Wisdom Literature.

Riddles and Revelations: Explorations into the Relationship between Wisdom and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Mark J. Boda, Russel L. Meek, and Rusty Osborne. LHBOTS. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, forthcoming 2018.

While endorsing the overall project of this volume, I raise in this essay two significant questions about how this relationship between Wisdom and Prophecy should be explored. First, is the term “Wisdom” as a designation for a category of biblical books more of a hindrance than a help? Von Rad first asked this question in 1970, as he wondered whether the term “disguises what stands behind it rather than depicts it properly.” Recently, the questions about the viability of “Wisdom” as a category are beginning to mount, as Sneed’s recent edited volume, Is There a Wisdom Tradition? (2015) makes evident. The vague, arbitrary, and subjective category may indeed be a mask that distorts the meaning of its contents. Worse than that, the level of abstraction from the text at which the genre seeks to unify these diverse books invites scholars to import their modern presuppositions into their interpretation. It seems unlikely that the Israelites would have grouped texts together because they demonstrated individualism, humanism, empiricism, rationalism, universalism, or secularism. That list of purported Wisdom traits sounds a lot more like a conception of wisdom from the modern age, more specifically the nineteenth century, which, suspiciously enough, is when we first encounter the Wisdom Literature genre we have today (Bruch 1851). “Wisdom Literature,” as Crenshaw (1976) has observed, indeed often stands “as a mirror image of the scholar painting her portrait.” The second question that must be considered when exploring Wisdom’s relationship with Prophecy is whether form criticism is the best starting place for this comparison? As a method, form criticism has recently begun to encounter its own pressing questions (see, e.g., Sweeney and Ben Zvi 2003, Weeks 2013). Whybray (1982) argued thirty years ago that the lack of a clear definition of Wisdom has hindered discussion of its relationship to Prophecy, and that problem is only greater today. Instead of simply building on the widespread and yet questionable presupposition of a separate Wisdom genre, this project could be an excellent way to test some of the common form-critical conclusions about the nature of that purported genre and its relationship with the rest of the Hebrew Bible. But this testing will be most effective if it does not presuppose its conclusion, but instead treats the so-called wisdom books as individual texts before it groups them as “Wisdom,” if it does so at all. By comparing the contents of Wisdom with a number of prophetic texts, this project has the potential to break through the genre boundaries that have previously limited their interpretation. By beginning with form criticism, however, it might only perpetuate Wisdom as mask and mirror by exchanging a consciously intertextual comparison of individual texts for the comparison of two genres abstracted from the texts, and, even worse, the “movements” then abstracted from those genres.