Wisdom Literature in Mesopotamia and Israel.

• Author: Lenzi, Alan
• Position: Book review

Wisdom Literature in Mesopotamia and Israel. Edited by RICHARD J. CLIFFORD. SBL Symposium Series, vol. 36. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2007. Pp. xiii + 116. $19.95 (paper).

This volume originated in a symposium at the 2004 Society of Biblical Literature national meeting. After a brief editorial introduction to the various anthologies related to Mesopoiamian and biblical wisdom literature, the book contains seven essays in four parts.

Part one, "The Context of Wisdom in Mesopotamia." contains thematically related essays by Paul-Alain Beaulieu and Karel van der Toorn. Beaulieti's essay concisely describes the social and intellectual selling of Mesopotamia wisdom literature as it developed historically. According to Beaulieu, the king was the focal point of wisdom and the closely related antediluvian knowledge in pre-Kassite times; lie was a culture bearer and responsible for ensuring harmony with the gods. By the end of the second millennium, how ever, kingship gave way to scholarship as the primary vehicle of wisdom. Royal advisers--diviners, lamenters, and exorcists--became the bearers of wisdom and antediluvian knowledge and the mediators between humans and gods. Beaulieu argues correctly that our notion of "wisdom literature" in this later period must be expanded to include textual corpora related to divination, lamentation, exorcism, and astrology. This essay is essential reading for understanding Mesopotamian wisdom literature.

Beaulieu's ideas mesh well with van der Toorn's main contention: in late-second-millennium texts ''experience as the soil of wisdom gave way to revelation as its ultimate source" (p. 21), Wisdom became a secret of the gods. He demonstrates this first, through a comparison of the OB and SB versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the latter of which shows an emphasis on antediluvian wisdom and its revelation as a secret of the gods. Brief appeals to the secret scholarly corpora as antediluvian wisdom (e.g., exorcism, astrology, and divination) and to the comparisons of kings with Adapa in historical inscriptions support this idea. In the last few pages van der Toorn rightly asserts that wisdom became a secret due to the prominence of writing, the standardization of important cuneiform works, and the exclusivism of the scribal profession. But the traditional divinatory notion that the gods wrote their secret will on the livers of animals must also have played a significant role in adapting secrecy to scribal...