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The first part of this chapter introduces the possibility that the writers of the Old Testament came from an Israeli school tradition – as opposed to being a group of ‘wise men’ with a ‘wisdom tradition’, or even from a ‘Wisdom Movement’. The idea is often doubted on the grounds that there is no unambiguous reference to a school in Israel until Ben Sira’s ‘house of instruction’, which flourished in Jerusalem in the early years of the second century bc, and is mentioned in Ecclesiastes. The working hypothesis of this book is that it ought not to be difficult to identify a core of Old Testament writings, which, by their subject matter, literary form and delight in language, reveal what their authors encountered at school, and can be reviewed in the expectation that features in them that are often overlooked will become apparent, and give an awareness of the impressive continuity of Israel’s school tradition. The school tradition will be found to have distinctive features: it is distinct from popular religion and the view of divine–human relations embodied in the cult; it is engaged in the teaching of a moral and reasonable faith; it provides a clue to the activity in Israel of a less parochial type of theologian; it also helps to explain the obscure transmission of Israel’s literature through the centuries, and illuminates the way in which received tradition was reshaped and reinterpreted by a succession of scholarly editors. The last part of the chapter starts the exploration of the school tradition with an examination of Ben Sira’s school in Jerusalem.

This chapter analyses the ‘wisdom’ and school traditions in the Old Testament books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, as shown by the instructions that they both give on various matters. Although the two books differ radically in various respects, a comparison between them shows that they give a range of common advice, and also exhibit a similarity in their use of literary genres. Comparisons are also drawn between Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and various much earlier Egyptian school instruction manuals. Many quotations are included to illustrate the points being made.

This chapter looks at various aspects of belief and behaviour in the Old Testament, as reflected in the school tradition. It starts with an analysis of the discourse of Elihu in Job – six chapters added late to the book of Job that were made by an angry young man, a teacher who thought that Job had made himself out to be more righteous than God. The next section of the chapter looks at God and goodness, a teaching based on the way that things ought to be, and used for encouragement and warning in the orthodox school tradition. The following section discusses God and the natural order from the viewpoint of the Israeli school tradition, looking at examples from Proverbs, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Job, Ecclesiastes and Deuteronomy. The last section presents final reflections on the school tradition.

An examination is made of the narrative skills of the Jerusalem school tradition in the stories of the Old Testament. The illustrations include the stories of Joseph, Daniel, Ruth, Rebecca, Adam and Eve, David, and numerous other examples are also given. Comparisons are drawn with various earlier stories from Egyptian school-books. The last part of the chapter looks at the style of Solomon’s Song of Songs, which uses the literary genre to which the Arabic term wasf (meaning extravagant metaphorical language) has been ascribed.

The method of investigation adopted in this book is to see how the diverse literary skills of Israel’s authors, in both poetry and prose, bear witness to their educational background. It is argued that their knowledge of the school-books of Egypt and their use of didactic language and literary forms are explicable only in terms of their training in professional, established and stable institutions. Although there are little specific factual data about Israel’s schools as institutions, a great volume of suggestive evidence has been supplied by archaeologists working in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Syria, and some of this is described; there are also recent finds from two southern military outposts on the edge of the Judaean desert that may provide evidence for a Hebrew school in the eighth century BC, and there is incontrovertible evidence for schools in Hebrew kingdoms from the Siloam Tunnel inscription and the Lachish Letters. There are also scattered references to reading and writing, and various bits of evidence suggesting education in the books of the Old Testament itself, not to mention the editorial process that has been revealed by biblical scholarship. Other topics addressed in the chapter are the evidence for libraries in Israel, its close educational, literary and cultural relationship with Egypt, and evidence for cultivation of the art of speaking.

The presuppositions of the comfortable outlook – ‘God’s in his heaven: All’s right with the world’ – had been questioned from time to time over the centuries, but Job and Ecclesiastes are the only major works in the Old Testament deliberately undertaken to articulate the doubt and debate then current in the Israeli schools. They are generally thought to come from the fifth or fourth and third centuries BC respectively, but there is no evidence to support the speculation that it was at this period that the age-old conflict between the theories of the theologians and the facts of life became more than usually acute. The two parts of the chapter look first at doubt, disaster, despair and pessimism in Job and then at the same attitudes in Ecclesiastes, and in doing so make comparisons between the two books. The Egyptian and Babylonian precedents to passages in Job suggest that its author is writing within a convention well established in the circles of schoolmen of the Ancient Near East, rather than presenting actual experiences, and the sustained protest of Job’s speeches challenges the two principal (and contradictory) dogmas that had become fossilized in the Israeli school tradition: ‘God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform’, and ‘God’s way in the world is not in the least mysterious and may be traced in the prosperity of the righteous and the suffering of the wicked’. Any interpretation of Ecclesiastes, who like Job was a literary stylist, must give due weight to the fact that he was a teacher, but the application of doleful description in the body of the work is discriminating, and probably represents his thought.

It has not been a part of this study to argue the case for the existence of schools in Ancient Israel. From the outset, their work has been taken for granted and the aim has been to demonstrate how this would throw new light on much of the literature of the Old Testament, and provide an explanation for its growth and transmission. The exploration of Israel’s school tradition started out with tentative criteria, adopting the method of reviewing a fairly wide range of Old Testament literature in the hope of finding a distinctive literary stance and style. The selection of the literature to be reviewed has not been entirely arbitrary: it began with those works long recognized as being in some degree ‘intellectual’ and conventionally ascribed to a hypothetical ‘wisdom tradition’; the selection was then extended to include writings which, though not explicitly ‘intellectual’, exhibit features reflecting an educated literary background: the texts that have come to be represented as the product of an imagined ‘Wisdom Movement’; two other groups of texts were then added on the grounds of their general similarity. From this approach a school tradition has emerged that stands apart from a number of the writings of the post-exilic period (such as the books of Chronicles, Leviticus and Numbers), and is fundamentally different from the instruction of the seminary in being moral and intellectual, rather than professionally religious and institutional.

The first part of this chapter examines the school tradition in the literary style of the teachings of the prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Book of the Twelve (the minor prophets) – which were compiled by editors in Jerusalem at various stages during the centuries following return from the Babylonian exile. Examples are also given from other Old Testament books (Judith, Proverbs, Samuel, Job, Psalms, Ecclesiastes) where the same subject matter is being covered. The second part of the chapter examines books of the teachers, the schoolmen who rallied to the cause of Jeremiah, and are called here the Deuteronomists; their works include Deuteronomy itself, the prose narratives in Jeremiah, and the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. The school setting of these teachers is clearly reflected in their style. Once again examples are given from other Old Testament books (Isaiah, Proverbs, Psalms, Ezra, Exodus, Samuel, Kings, Micah) where the same subject matter is being covered.