Wealth and Poverty in the Instruction of Amenemope and the Hebrew Proverbs.

• Author: Fox, Michael V.

By HAROLD C. WASHINGTON. Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series, no. 142. Atlanta: SCHOLARS PRESS, 1994. Pp. xi + 242. $29.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Washington seeks to illuminate Amenemope's and Proverbs' treatment of the issues of wealth and poverty by setting them in their socio-economic contexts.

Washington dates Amenemope to the twentieth dynasty (1186-1069 B.C.). He describes Amenemope's period as an age of corruption and economic dislocations. These conditions, he believes, underlie and explain Amenemope's emphasis on the avoidance of dishonesty, his recognition of unpredictability of the divine will in allocating wealth, and his assertion of the superiority of poverty to riches, if the latter is accompanied with vexation. In this period, Washington argues, there were no schools for training scribes. The t n sb, usually translated "school," was merely a section of a building used for other purposes rather than "a distinct institution where instruction occurred" (p. 35).

The shaky socio-economic conditions of the late Ramessid period motivated Amenemope to dissolve the old principle of the "act-consequence relation," which Washington characterizes as the "primitive moral dogma that one who 'does good' will do well" (p. 96). This dogma validated the authority of the ruling class by teaching that the prosperous and powerful must necessarily be virtuous, and thus it "puts the poor in their place and keeps them there" (pp. 99 f.). In its stead, Amenemope introduced the principle that "the divine will is arbitrary and unaccountable" (p. 101).

Washington dates the final redaction of Proverbs to the Achaemenid period (ch. six) and traces the development of wisdom by comparing folk sayings with scribal wisdom. The criterion for identifying proverbs (and even half-proverbs, e.g., Prov 15:15a) as folk sayings is that their themes "appear with regularity in folk culture" (p. 179), particularly African. For example, the theme of the social isolation of the poor indicates that Prov 14:20, 19:4, and 19:7 are folk wisdom, as does the theme of laziness in 24:21, 33-34, and 10:4 (p. 184).

With regard to attitudes toward wealth and poverty, Washington finds a nice paradox: it is folk wisdom that describes poverty in "objective" statements of fact (thereby giving vent to frustration at social conditions), whereas it is scribal wisdom, with its international background and its associations with the higher social classes, that enjoins care...