Bible Review

Dell, Shaking a Fist at God: Understanding Suffering Through the Book of Job (New York: [Harper Collins] Fount paperbacks, 1995).

Creation has generally been regarded as a late development in Israelite thought, coming into full union with the salvation history only at the time of Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–66), as the Exile was reaching its close, about 550–539 B.C. However, the perception of God as creator can be found in the earliest Wisdom literature, suggesting that creation faith may have been a more formative influence from early times.

See Dell, The Book of Job, for the suggestion that Job may have been produced by a group of “skeptics” on the edge of the Wisdom enterprise.

William McKane, Proverbs (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970).

A suggestion made by Ronald E. Clements in Wisdom in Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992).

R. Norman Whybray, “The Structure and Composition of Proverbs 22:17–24:22, ” in Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Michael D. Goulder, ed. S.E. Porter, P. Joyce and D.E. Orton (Leiden: Brill, 1994).

See Stuart Weeks, Early Israelite Wisdom (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994): “The biblical and epigraphic evidence adduced for schools seems very weak indeed and can certainly not support any hypothesis of an integrated school system” (p. 153).

Many of the instructions of Proverbs 1–9 contain admonitions from father or mother to son, suggesting a family context, but those of the school persuasion thought that father and son probably referred to teacher and pupil in the school context.

Notably Eric W. Heaton, Solomon’s New Men (New York: Pica Press, 1974).