Early Israelite Wisdom.

• Author: Fox, Michael V.

Although the title Early Israelite Wisdom suggests an introduction or survey of this topic, the book is actually a critique of various theories about wisdom literature with only a few constructive insights. Weeks's purpose is to challenge what he dubs "assured results" of wisdom scholarship. In fact, the views he challenges - largely products of the nineteen-fifties and sixties and rather musty by now - are far from being entrenched and universally accepted. Most have already been effectively criticized. These theories are, however, of a stature that justifies even now a sensible and judicious assessment such as Weeks offers.

Weeks first cautions against a simplistic importation of data from foreign wisdom in order to understand Israelite wisdom (chapter one), though it is not clear who he believes is still doing this. At the same time, Weeks avoids a simplistic rejection of foreign influences. Israelite wisdom, in Weeks's fine formulation, "almost certainly lies within an undirected network of specific influences across a large area and a long period" (p. 8). He emphasizes the importance of reckoning with native Israelite originality and reshaping of borrowed themes. Few would disagree.

Weeks's most original contribution comes in "Context in the Sayings Collections" (chapter two). Weeks employs "nearest-neighbour analysis" to ascertain the scope of sub-collections and to discover the redactor's principles of arrangement. He searches for instances of "thematic linking," "verbal linking," and "literal thinking" (e.g., adjacent lines starting with the same letter), then charts the linkages (without defining the concept). He compares the frequencies of linkages in each chapter, although the medieval chapter division has no significance for the book's redactional phases. Among his various findings he notes that over 58% of the 375 sayings in Prov. 10:1-22:16 are joined to an adjacent saying by verbal, literal, or thematic links, with a greater concentration of these in chapters 10-14. But is 58% a lot or a little or normal? There is a vast number of possible "linkages," and since Proverbs treats a limited number of themes using a stylized, hence restricted, vocabulary, even a random distribution of the proverbs would produce a fair number of linkages. To be sure, some chapters (especially 10 and 11), show a higher frequency of linkages, but some variation in average frequencies is inevitable. Though Weeks amasses statistics, he does not weigh...