Wisdom and Law in the Old Testament: The Ordering of Life in Israel and Early Judaism

Beginning with the so-called Wisdom Writings, particularly the Book of Proverbs, Blenkinsopp reexamines the ethical teaching of the sages of Israel and the complex ideas supporting it. He shows how, when Jerusalem fell in the sixth century B.C., dissonance between this theoretical framework and experience gave rise to grave religious problems concerning the nature of Israel's God and his relation with his people, and considers how these problems were treated in the literature, especially in Job and Ecclesiastes. Tracing the development of Israel's legal tradition from its origins in the tribal structure, Blenkinsopp illuminates the points of contact between this tradition and the ethical teaching of the sages.