Sociological-Structural Constraints Upon

SOCIOLOGICAL-STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINTS UPON

WISDOM: THE SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL MATRIX OF

PROVERBS 15:28-22:16

Brian Watson Kovacs

VANDERBILTUNIVERSITY, PH.D., 1978

Used with permission

Digitized by Dr. Ted Hildebrandt and Dr. Perry Phillips,

GordonCollege, 2007

PREFACE

This dissertation represents an attempt at

synthesis—and closure—to an intellectual odyssey that

has lasted nearly fifteen years. It combines disparate

elements, which may ultimately prove incommensurable. Its

conclusion has been much delayed, causing pain and frus-

tratin not only to me but to those who thought they saw

something of value in it and in the lines of inquiry sug-

gested by it. Time has made it a more thorough and mature

document, especially the analysis of Proverbs IIb itself,

though at the cost of some inconsistency and, loss of

clarity. Parts of this work were written at various times

over an eight-year period. Ideas change. Approaches

change. The writer who finished this work is far different

from the one who started it. From it,however, has de-

veloped a conception of interdisciplinary research and

teaching that may justify its deferral. Such integration

means thatmuch impinges on what is actually said here that

cannot be dealt with adequately or at length. I have

faced the difficult choice of whether or not to cite my

other work. For one whose career and research are less

integrative, the choice is easy. Humility usually wins out.

I doubt the humility, however, of failing to mention what

iiii

is an inherent part of the formulative process. So, I

choose to cite myself, at the risk of seeming arrogant,

to clarify the synthesis which this work represents.

I wish that I could do justice to the encourage-

ment and support that I have received over so many years

in producing this dissertation. To mention some people is

to do injustice to others by leaving them out. I am

fortunate to have such good and caring friends, whose coun-

sel and whose friendship I value above all else in the

world. Jim Crenshaw has been friend, colleague and teacher.

I know that I am a mystery to him and that that mystery is

more grief than glory. His guidance and influence pervade

this work and the life that is represented through it.

Phil Hyatt ordered me to create a synthesis in my disserta-

tion.1 hope some measure of what he sought can be found

here. John Gammie offered insight and encouragement when

the vision seemed to have been lost. Norman Gottwald pro-

vided a superb critique of the theses underlying the chapter

on Proverbs IIb. The Dempster Graduate Fellowship under-

wrote travel and research for some of the work on this

dissertation. To myCommittee, working under duress—

Walter Harrelson, Dan Patte, Doug Knight, Howard Harrod—

I offer my thanks and condolences. Gene Floyd made sense

of the senseless and converted it into typed manuscript, for

which thanks are hardly adequate recognition. Many other

people should see themselves and their influence among

these pages; that friendship is beyond value or mere men-

tion. For all of them, this work at last is finished.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

PREFACEiiii

LIST OF TABLESvii

Procedure

Chapter

1.INTRODUCTION 1

Background 1

Procedure13

II. THE DEFINITION OF WISDOM31

III. A WISDOM TYPOLOGY105

IV. HE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK OF PROVERBS246

V. THE SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL MATRIX OF

PROVERBS 15:28-22:16317

Introduction317

Space322

Time475

VI. CONCLUSION516

APPENDIX 519

SELECTEb BIBLIOGRAPHY 580

LIST OF TABLES

TablePage

1. Terms for "Wisdom," "Understanding,"

"Knowledge" . 520

2. Terms Relating to Folly or Ignorance 521

3. Additional Technical Wisdom Terms 522

4. Additional Technical Wisdom Terms

Peculiar to Proverbs 10 ff 523

5. The Semantic Field of Wisdom (Adapted

from Fohrer's Analysis) 524

6. Characteristics of Wisdom, Late Wisdom

and Myth (Adapted from H. H. Schmid)527

7. Antithesis534

8. Sayings Dealing with Yahweh 535

9. Architecture of Proverbs 15:28-22:16538

10. Royal Sayings540

11.Twb-mn Sayings540

12. TwbSayings(Word "Twb" Appears, Irrespec-

tive of Form)541

13. Admonition or Vetitive Form 541

14. Propriety Sayings542

15. Wisdom Terms 543

16. Elements of Wisdom546

17. Lb Sayings549

18. Ignorance 549

19. Folly 550

vii

TablePage

20. Discipline 550

21. 'Instruction' Sayings: Mwsr551

22.Speech551

23. Irony 552

24. Friend/Neighbor Sayings 552

25. Law Courts553

26. Elements of Evil and Folly 554

27. Simple Retribution: Without Yahweh's

Agency558

28.Gulf Between Wisdom and Folly 558

29. AdversitySayings559

30.Altruism559

31. Noblesse Oblige 560

32. Wealth560

33. The Powerful561

34. Poverty561

35. Hisd Sayings561

36. Wisdom Standard of Values: Implied "Higher

Standard562

37. Status Quo562

38. Slave Sayings563

39. Intentionality563

40. Miscellaneous Special Concepts540

41. Familistic Sayings564

42. Contagion565

viii

TablePage

43. Vulnerability 567

44. 'Way' Sayings: Drk568

45. Observation (Form) 568

46. Descriptions 569

47. Pragmatic Sayings569

48. Teaching 570

49. The Righteous 570

50. Purpose/End of the Wicked 571

51. Weights-Measures-Scales 571

52. 'Abomination' Sayings: Twcbh 572

53. Naturalistic Savings [Or, Neo-

Naturalistic] 572

54. Animals573

55. War Sayings 573

56. (Rhetorical) Questions573

57. Attitude 574

58. Light/Lamp Sayings 574

59. 'Spirit' Sayings: Rwhi575

60. Correction, Admonition 575

61. Tradition 576

62. Npš: Sayings 576

63. Yr't-yhwh Sayings 577

64. Life Sayings 577

65. Death Sayings 578

TablePage

66. Sayings Involving "Fate" 578

67. Future579

68. Sickness 579

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Background

As both literature and philosophy of life, the

Hebrew mashal holds a powerful elective affinity for the

Modern reader. Its seeming assurance about the means and

ends of1ife is tempered with a certain irony. It often

exhibits a humanistic concern. Together, the sayingsen-

capsulate and hold up to view features of human experience

that transcend a separation of considerable physical,

temporal, social and cultural space. Superficially, their

settings and their objectives seem to require no elaborate

translation. Literatures and philosophies arising from

entirely different social and historical settings may have

a special saliency, as it were an "elective affinity," for

a particular group at some specific time in its social

history.1 Such is the case, I suggest, in our (hermeneutic)

1Max Weber originally coinedthe term Wahlver-

wandtschaften--"elective affinities"--as sociological term-

inus technicus in the articulation of his theoretical

approach to the study of religion's development as social

ideology. He appropriated the word from the title of a

lesser-known novel of Goethe's. In his usage, it refers to

the dialectic relationship that exists between social

re-discovery of wisdom and wisdom literature.

Because the original setting is no longer relevant

in such affinities and because the new social application

invests these works and ideas with quite different meanings

and emphases, the literary historian must be scrupulous to

avoid anachronism which arises from attributing historical

validity to saliences that are in fact creatures of his

own time. The biblical scholar of this wisdom finds him-

self or herself today operating under just such prudential

admonitions. Certainly, intellectual understanding is

hermeneutic, indeed it may even be normative.1The scholar

structure and its legitimating ideology: each alters the

other in systematic, if not determined, ways. The explana-

tions that groups develop to interpret their social reality,

which are often derived through historical processes from

the cultural stuff of other peoples at other times and

places, have a basic compatibility with the social organiza-

tion which values, preserves and transmits them. This com-

patibility increases with time. Ideas change social struc-

ture; socialorganization alters its legitimating interpre-

tive system over time. Thus, all ideology is hermeneutic.

Elective affinities--the interactions between groups and

their interpretive realities--become powerful but creative

social forces. Weber's archetypal case is laid out in his

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.

Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958);

and his "The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,"

in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed. and

with an introduction by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 129-56. See

also his Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive

Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittig, trans.

Ephraim Fischoff et al., 3 vols. (New York: Bedminster Press,

1968), 2:447-529, 583-90.

1Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation

Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger andGadamer,

must somehow strive to manipulate this tool of our under-

standing without being in turn controlled or manipulated by

it more than some hermeneutically essential minimum.

Literary historical researchis a cumulative and approxi-

mative science. As all our scholarly implements become

more sophisticated, as our application of them is refined,

issues we believe to have settled must be raised, debated

and answered again. We observe this kind of flux in current

studies of wisdom in general and of the mashal collections

of Proverbs inparticular.1

Northwestern UniversityStudies in Phenomenology and Existen-

tial Philosophy, ed. John Wild. (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-

versity Press, 1969), pp. 12-32. See also Hans-Georg

Gadamer, Truth and Method, A Continuum Book (New York: Sea-

bury Press 1975); and Karl Löwith, Nature, History and

Existentialism, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History,

ed. with a Critical Introduction by Arnold Levison, Northwestern

University Studies in Phenomenology and Existen-

tial Philosophy, ed. John Wild (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-

versity Press,1966).

1James L. Crenshaw surveys this development in his

introduction to an important collection of essays reflect-

ing research into wisdom and the directions it has taken in

the last generation or so of scholarship, "Prolegomenon,"

in Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom, The Library of Bib-

lical Studies, ed. Harry M. Orlinsky (New York: KTAV Pub-

lishing House, 1976), pp. 1-60. See also his article

"Wisdom in the Old Testament," in The Interpreter's Dic-

tionary of the Bible: Supplementary Volume (Nashville:

Abingdon, 1976), pp. 952-56. In the same volume, see

Ronald J. Williams, "Wisdom in the Ancient Near East," pp.

949-52; and Hans G. Conzelmann, "Wisdom in the New Testa-

ment," pp. 956-60. Also, James L. Crenshaw, "Wisdom," in

Old Testament Form Criticism, ed. John H. Hayes, Trinity

University Monograph Series in Religion, vol. 2, ed. John H.

Hayes (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1974), pp.

225-64; Gerhard von Rad, Weisheit in Israel (Neukirchen-

All historical criticism of literature requires the

operating assumption that a work somehow, in form or con-

tent or motif, betrays and conveys the setting within which

it was constructed into its present form, however composite.

In a complex work, if wecan isolate the earlier constituent

elements, we may be able to discern important aspects of

its socio-historical development, as well as the lineaments

of its literary history. Individual works may resist such

analysis, perhaps because they are too brief, their lan-

guage too ambiguous, orthe effectsof later redaction too

gross; but, to reject this working assumption is ultimately

to deny the possibility of doing meaningful study of lit-

erary works as the stuff of social and intellectual history.

How we retrieve this history is a question, of methodology.

If we accept, albeit with some generosity the implications

of affinities as hermeneutic, we may admit that different

methodologies will be effective with different elements or

aspects of this history. There is a congeniality--affinity

--of methodology and material, as well as of social struc-

ture and ideology. Indeed, we may need to be methodologi-

cally eclectic if we are to deal adequately with this

Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1970): On this concept of in-

terpretation as it applies to the development of exegesis,

see Georg Fohrer, et al., Exegese des Alten Testaments:

Einführung in die Methodik, Uni-Taschenbücher, vol. 267

(Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1973), pp. 9-30.

history at all.1

The problem of setting resembles in its implica-

tions the aesthetic issue of intention, though the Biblical

scholar seldom has the opportunity to raise the latter, and

often then only by indirection. What may at first seem to

be a marginal change in setting can have considerable in-

fluence on the interpretation to be given to a work. The

"what-it-meant" side of hermeneutic's dialectic of analysis

includes not only the bare meaning of the words used, but

who communicatedthroughthem (i.e., their social location)

and how they were used. We can be frustrated by knowing

what the words say without knowing what they said: what

they meant in thatsocialand historical context.2 The

phenomenologically-informed researcher sees the problem of

setting divided into two poles of investigation.

First, within whatobjective social order did this

literature arise and acquire its meaning? We seek a his-

tory of the society’s institutions with their system and

1Fohrer, et al., pp. 9-30,148-71.

2Hans-Georg Gadamer, "On the Scope and Function of

Hermeneutic Reflection," trans. G. B. Hess and R. E. Palmer,

Continuum 8 (1970):77-95; and his Philosophical Hermeneutics,

trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1976). See also, Paul Ricoeur, History

and Truth, trans. with an Introduction by Charles A.

Kelbley, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology

and Existential Philosophy, ed. John Wild (Evanston: North-

western University Press, 1965).

order projected against the comparative background of the

histories and institutions of neighboring societies. This

aspect of meaning also includes the question what standing

the works and theirauthors both held and acquired within

the community. Thus, the question of canon finally is

relevant to the objective meaning of a work.1

Second, how did the writer(s) perceive and struc-

ture the experiential world to achieve that understanding

which he attempted to communicate in his work? Here we are

concerned withthe subjective pole of meaning. Awork be-

speaks the worldviews of its authors and editors. Where

the literary history is convoluted and the internal con-

struction of the work has become complex and interwoven,

the search for consistent and intelligible world-views can

become quite demanding. Here again, the danger is that the

researcher's ideas of "intelligible" or "consistent" which

are his cultural and personal perceptions of rationality

may be imposed onthe work. Since the wise seem to have

been attempting to organize and interpret the realm of

1Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Intro-

duction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorothy Cairns (The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), cp. 56-88; Alfred Schutz, The

Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and

Frederick Lehnert, Northwestern Studies in Phenomenology

and Existential Philosophy, ed. John Wild (Evanston: North-

western University Press, 1967), pp. 1-44; Peter L. Berger

and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality:

A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.:

Doubleday & Co., 1966), pp. 45-85.

experience in order to cope with it more intelligently and

successfully, the danger of anachronistic rationality is

far more immediate than its opposite: accepting any con-

tradiction or inconsistency, even to the controversion of

common sense, on the appeal to cultural difference or even

the oriental mind soi-disant.1

This second pole of analysis is especially important.

In order to comprehend a work adequately, we need to under-

stand it as itself a hermeneutic act: an attempt to give

coherent meaning to experience. A literary work reflects

both subjectivity and objectivity. It results from the in-

teraction of the author(s)'s subjectivity and "objective"

experience perceived through traditionally-defined. objec-

tive social reality given an objective literary form. For

a time, biblical criticism attempted to deal with the sub-

jective dimension of hermeneutic by psychologizing biblical

writers asthey were then historically understood. As

authors became schools, as biblical works unveiled their

complex composite character to researchers, psychological

1Husserl,Cartesian Meditations, pp. 89-151; and

his Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy

as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of Euro-

pean Man, trans. and with an introduction by Quentin Lauer,

Academy Library of Harper Torchbooks (New York: Harper

Row, 1965), pp. 188-89; Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social

World, pp. 102-7, 144-76; Berger and Luckmann, Social Con-

struction of Reality, pp. 135-73; Peter L. Berger and Thomas

Luckmann, "Sociology of Religion and Sociology of Knowledge,"

Sociology and Social Research: An International Journal 47

(July 1963):417-27.

analysis of biblical literature became untenable in most

cases. Subjective analysis, however, was often discarded

with psychologizing.

Literature is virtually the only historical arti-

fact which provides the scholar access to the subjectivity,

the mind or minds, of people in their historical matrix.

What it meant to be a person of such-and-such an ancient

social world is accessible, if at all, only through litera-

ture. Moreover, the only vehicle we have to accomplish

that reconstruction is our own individual subjectivities as

literary and social historians. The objective literary

artifact becomes the tool through which to project that co-

herent understanding which a particular layer or segment of

the workreflects. The objective document is the con-

ceptual product of a subjectivity.

Since we can approach the work only through our in-

dividual consciousnesses,unnormed by access to any other,

our interpretation of the document and our projection of its

meanings are biased by our own hermeneutic of our own

reality, however much it may be the informed and structured

product of a process of social learning. The phenomenolo-

gist argues that certain standardized procedures can con-

trol, but not eliminate, this bias. To omit any attempt to

project the subjective hermeneutic pole is to omit one of

the most important social, historical and theological con-

tributions of this literature. Socially accepted

interpretations of the world arise from the interactions

of individual consciousnesses, socially in-formed, with

socially-defined experiences. Meaning is both subjective

and objective.1

We are both the beneficiaries and the slaves of

the western distinction between faith and reason. We

recognize the need to ask how dedication to understanding

relates to the religious faith of a people, while we are

therefore compelled to investigate an issue that people, or

lEdmund Husserl clearly states the problem in The

Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy:

An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. and

an introduction by David Carr, NorthwesternUniversity

Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, ed.

John Wild (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

He develops a subjective analytic in The Phenomenology of

Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans.