SOCIOLOGICAL-STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINTS UPON
WISDOM: THE SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL MATRIX OF
PROVERBS 15:28-22:16
By
Brian Watson Kovacs
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, PH.D., 1978
© Brian Watson Kovacs, 1978
Used with permission
Digitized by Dr. Ted Hildebrandt and Dr. Perry Phillips,
Gordon College, 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 that much 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 my Committee, 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
iv
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.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
PREFACE iiii
LIST OF TABLES vii
Procedure
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION 1
Background 1
Procedure 13
II. THE DEFINITION OF WISDOM 31
III. A WISDOM TYPOLOGY 105
IV. HE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK OF PROVERBS 246
V. THE SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL MATRIX OF
PROVERBS 15:28-22:16 317
Introduction 317
Space 322
Time 475
VI. CONCLUSION 516
APPENDIX 519
SELECTEb BIBLIOGRAPHY 580
LIST OF TABLES
Table Page
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. Antithesis 534
8. Sayings Dealing with Yahweh 535
9. Architecture of Proverbs 15:28-22:16 538
10. Royal Sayings 540
11. Twb-mn Sayings 540
12. Twb Sayings (Word "Twb" Appears, Irrespec-
tive of Form) 541
13. Admonition or Vetitive Form 541
14. Propriety Sayings 542
15. Wisdom Terms 543
16. Elements of Wisdom 546
17. Lb Sayings 549
18. Ignorance 549
19. Folly 550
vii
Table Page
20. Discipline 550
21. 'Instruction' Sayings: Mwsr 551
22. Speech 551
23. Irony 552
24. Friend/Neighbor Sayings 552
25. Law Courts 553
26. Elements of Evil and Folly 554
27. Simple Retribution: Without Yahweh's
Agency 558
28. Gulf Between Wisdom and Folly 558
29. Adversity Sayings 559
30. Altruism 559
31. Noblesse Oblige 560
32. Wealth 560
33. The Powerful 561
34. Poverty 561
35. Hisd Sayings 561
36. Wisdom Standard of Values: Implied "Higher
Standard 562
37. Status Quo 562
38. Slave Sayings 563
39. Intentionality 563
40. Miscellaneous Special Concepts 540
41. Familistic Sayings 564
42. Contagion 565
viii
Table Page
43. Vulnerability 567
44. 'Way' Sayings: Drk 568
45. Observation (Form) 568
46. Descriptions 569
47. Pragmatic Sayings 569
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. Animals 573
55. War Sayings 573
56. (Rhetorical) Questions 573
57. Attitude 574
58. Light/Lamp Sayings 574
59. 'Spirit' Sayings: Rwhi 575
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
ix
Table Page
66. Sayings Involving "Fate" 578
67. Future 579
68. Sickness 579
x
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 of 1ife is tempered with a certain irony. It often
exhibits a humanistic concern. Together, the sayings en-
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 coined the 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
1
2
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.1 The 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; social organization 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 and Gadamer,
3
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 research is 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 in particular.1
Northwestern University Studies 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-
4
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 we can 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, or the effects of 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: <