The Sword and the Stylus: An Introduction to Wisdom in the Age of Empires.

• Author: Snell, Daniel
• Position: Book review

The Sword and the Stylus: An Introduction to Wisdom in the Age of Empires. By LEO G. PERDUE. Grand Rapids, Michigan: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS, 2008. Pp. 228. $38 (paper).

In this volume, the distinguished wisdom scholar Leo Perdue presents the major Biblical and post-Biblical wisdom books in the historical context of the early empires in which Jews lived. In an initial chapter Perdue argues that the wisdom compositions have been wrongly seen as timeless; the compositions should be put in their chronological periods and analyzed from the point of view of the developments and problems of those periods.

He begins with a study of the Book of Proverbs, arguing that it should be placed in the divided kingdom period, 925-586 B.C.E., even though it mentions Solomon, a slightly earlier king. He suggests that "a royal school" was the setting at least of 25:1-29:27.

The third chapter places the book of Job in the Neo-Babylonian Empire, 605-539 B.C.E. But Job takes place in what is now the wilderness of Jordan and the edge of Arabia. This was an area of interest to the last king, Nabonidus, but Perdue does not make much of this connection. Instead he argues that Job was composed either in the (Neo-Babylonian?) royal administration or the school. But other observers have seen Job as a product of a patriarchal agricultural society, far from king and court. Interested in views of creation, Perdue cites Babylonian parallels to Job from the Creation Epic, but does not discuss the righteous sufferer compositions, which are only briefly mentioned.

Chapter 4 is devoted to "Wisdom during the Persian Empire: The Wisdom Psalms." If Psalms was the hymn book of the Second Temple, then it makes sense that the earlier of them should have been composed at this time. But it is hard to see that the wisdom psalms really reflect that period, as Perdue tacitly admits when he adduces other wisdom psalms including Ben Sira and Proverbs 3 and 8. He inserts a list of wisdom terms that show up in Psalms, a feature not too useful for beginning students.

Chapter 5 examines Qoheleth, Ecclesiastes, as a product of the Ptolemaic Empire, the period after Alexander when the Greek rulers of Egypt dominated Palestine, 305-198 B.C.E. Perdue sets the author in a Hellenistic world, though he admits it is unclear how much he knew about Greek culture or philosophy. Qoheleth belonged to a culture open to skepticism, and Perdue sees the book as related to the Egyptian grave autobiographies and...