Wisdom in Classical and Biblical Tradition 0190885122, 9780190885120

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1. Homer and the Wisdom of the Hero
2. Wisdom and Knowledge in the Hebrew Bible
3. Job the True Sage
4. Piety and Wisdom in Socrates
5. A Nation of Philosophers
6. The School of Solomon
7. An End to Wisdom
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Ancient Sources
Index

Citation preview

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Wisdom in Classical and Biblical Tradition

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Wisdom in Classical and Biblical Tradition

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MICHAEL C. LEGASPI

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. Unless otherwise indicated, scriptural quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​088512–​0 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

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For Lois Crist (1918–​2016) In memory of an exceedingly wise woman

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Contents

Preface  Note on Transliteration  Introduction 

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1. Homer and the Wisdom of the Hero 

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2. Wisdom and Knowledge in the Hebrew Bible 

46

3. Job the True Sage 

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4. Piety and Wisdom in Socrates 

109

5. A Nation of Philosophers 

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6. The School of Solomon 

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7. An End to Wisdom 

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Conclusion 

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Notes 

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Bibliography 

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Index of Ancient Sources

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Index

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Preface

What kind of person presumes to write about wisdom? Those who have read the Tao Te Ching are familiar with Lao-​tzu’s admonition about talkers. In the translation of Stephen Mitchell: “those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know.” If this is correct, then a good sign that someone does not actually know what wisdom is is that he or she is willing to talk (or write) about it. A second warning from a very different source suggests that the attempt to sound the depths of wisdom may be dangerous as well as useless. St. John Climacus compares a “slave of the passions” who pursues theology to a person who is about to drown; as he says: “it is not safe to swim in one’s clothes.” In producing a book about wisdom, I have grown in my appreciation for these two sentiments—​not enough to abandon the project but enough to realize that it falls far short of its subject. This book is not the work of a philosopher or theologian, nor even, in a strict sense, the work of a historian. It is not an especially timely work, one called forth, as it were, by current trends or contemporary exigencies. In an important sense, wisdom is timeless: if it is real and necessary, then it is always so. In the ten years plus that I have spent thinking about wisdom, much has changed in the world. Yet, to judge from the perspective of wisdom and its ancient advocates (who themselves lived through tumultuous times), a great deal also remains the same. This work, then, is not a direct foray into the substance of wisdom or a study of wisdom conceived in response to particular events. It is, instead, the fruit of an attempt to understand the complicated and contested legacy of ancient tradition in modern culture. To the extent that tradition is not simply an inert repository of cultural materials but a dialogue that was very much alive, a “place of understanding” from which politics, art, science, philosophy, literature, and religion as we know them are ultimately derived, it is fitting to understand it in terms of its deepest thoughts, its broadest reaches, and its highest ambitions. In other words, it is fitting to inquire into its wisdom.

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Preface

I did not get very far in this endeavor before realizing that the traditional pursuit of wisdom took its distinctive shape, to a great degree, from ideas and perspectives identified with classical and biblical texts. Though the pairing of classical and biblical is a familiar one, a common trope in the study of Western civilization, it nevertheless bears asking why the two were held together over time in the way that they were. It may have been a historical accident, but it was not a historical necessity. A new look at old texts that have gone into the making of this remarkable synthesis shows that there is more to the pairing than simple, culturally expedient correlation. There is a deep affinity between the two, a tensive and dynamic relation that resists easy characterization. To describe them as opposites in a binary relation or as twins sharing a single view of the world would be to misrepresent what is certainly a richer and more complicated reality. I believe it is better to construe the relation dialectically and to try to hear in a fresh way some of the voices that animated the ancient conversation. Accordingly, the book aims more at thematic exposition than critical analysis (though the latter is, to some extent, unavoidable). The goal here is not to offer an apology for classical and biblical tradition as much as to understand its beginnings and in doing so to shed light on its spectral presence in modern culture. Related to this goal is the belief that it is possible (and valuable) to understand the tradition in terms of certain moral, intellectual, and religious aspirations. Others are surely more qualified than I am to describe the social, political, and material conditions for the development of a classical-​biblical cultural synthesis in late antiquity. Instead of pursuing that kind of history, I  have sought to present the tradition, one might say, ideologically—​that is, in terms of what important texts and figures tell us about distinctive ways of looking at the world. Whether or not this is itself a wise undertaking, it is nevertheless the goal of this book. I first began looking into wisdom some years ago as a researcher for the Defining Wisdom project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and hosted at the University of Chicago. I  gratefully acknowledge the support of this initiative and the opportunity to think with others about the concept of wisdom and its contemporary relevance. More recently, I benefited from support from Eric Hayot and the Center for Humanities and Information at Penn State University. They too have my sincere thanks. The University provided me with time and resources to work on the manuscript at various points over the last three years. I thank the College of Liberal Arts, the Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and the Jewish Studies Program at Penn State for making my work possible. I  would also like to thank Penn State colleagues for their help with various aspects of this project.

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Mark Munn took an interest in my work and cotaught a course with me on wisdom in the ancient world, an experience that proved very helpful. Aaron Rubin generously provided help with philological and linguistic questions, despite a cordial and refreshing indifference to the formal study of wisdom. I thank Daniel Falk, Jonathan Brockopp, Mark Sentesy, Christopher Moore, and John Jasso for their collegiality and help in thinking about many things pertaining to the study of wisdom. Colleagues at other institutions have also provided help, encouragement, and opportunities to discuss and present aspects of this work. I thank Ann Blair, Rusty Reno, Walter Moberly, Janet Soskice, Will Kynes, Jennie Grillo, Michael Azar, and Darren Sarisky, as well as Gabriele Boccaccini and the Enoch Seminar. I owe my interest in the book of Job largely to Peter Machinist and the opportunity to serve as a teaching fellow for his legendary course on Job and the Joban tradition at Harvard. For this formative experience and much more, he has my deepest gratitude. Tom Hodgson contributed more to this study than he knows. Four years at his side taught me much about goodness, knowledge, and intellectual midwifery. He is living proof that Socratic wisdom exists today. I would also like to thank Cynthia Read at Oxford University Press once again for interest in and support of this work. The anonymous readers whom she found for the manuscript provided me with many helpful criticisms and suggestions, which I have incorporated into the present version. They too have my thanks. Finally, I  would like to thank my family. I  am grateful to my parents, Luciano and Candelaria Legaspi, and to my father-​in-​law and mother-​in-​ law, Bryan and Becci Crist, for unfailing love and innumerable kindnesses. Though research and writing exert a constant pull on my time and energies, I  hope my children know that I  would rather be with them than at my desk. They are a constant source of joy and satisfaction. The four of them correspond (perhaps not coincidentally) to my fourfold definition of wisdom: Josiah who considers the cosmic, Olivia whose work gives form to the metaphysical, Ana who embodies the ethical, and Cato who thrives on the social. They have my love and gratitude. My wife, Abby, has seen this entire project grow from a fleeting thought in 2007 to a fleeting volume many years later. I thank her for her patience, encouragement, love, and support throughout this period and in the many happy years leading up to it. She has done me the great honor of believing in me and in my work. Through Abby I came to know and admire her grandmother, Lois Crist, whose long and beautiful life remains a stronger testimony to wisdom than anything I will ever do or write. This book is dedicated, with love and appreciation, to her memory. May it be eternal.

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Note on Transliteration

In transliterating Hebrew words, I have used the standard English equivalents for most consonants (for example, b for ‫ב‬, g for ‫ג‬, d for ‫ד‬, etc.). For letters without clear English equivalents, I have used the following: ʾ for ‫א‬, ʿ for ‫ע‬, ḥ for ‫ח‬, ṭ for ‫ט‬, ṣ for ‫צ‬, ś for ‫שׂ‬, š for ‫שׁ‬. For ‫ו‬, I have used v rather than w to reflect the common pronunciation. For the sake of simplicity, I have not distinguished among short vowels, long vowels, and vowels spelled with matres lectionis; so, for example, ʾoyeb rather than ʾōyēb for ‫איב‬. Vocal schwa is rendered as e. I have ignored quiescent alephs: so roš, rather than roʾš for ‫ראש‬. Finally, I have not marke d spirantized versions of the so-​called begadkefat letters; thus, for example, ḥokmah rather than ḥokhmah or ḥoḵmah; yapeh rather than yafeh or yap̄ eh; and hebel rather than hevel or heḇel. In transliterating Greek consonants, I have used ph for φ, th for θ, x for ξ, and ch for χ. I have also distinguished ε (e) from η (ē) and ο (o) from ω (ō) with the use of a macron over the vowel. The Greek vowel υ is rendered with y (for example, ὑπέρ/​hyper), except in diphthongs, where it is rendered with u (for example, θεοῦ/​theou).

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Introduction Even though there is no answer to the question, “Why is our culture what it is?” it is unlikely that we can delete the question from our minds. —​L eszek Kołakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial

Let them keep this word “wisdom” to themselves. Every-​ body is irritated by it; no one understands what it means. —​cicero, On Friendship §5

Put simply, this is a book about wisdom. It is an inquiry into the beginnings of a particular way of thinking about life in the world. Seen in terms of wisdom, the world is not a meaningless array of disconnected things but something that is understood and experienced as an ordered reality. Everything is related to everything else such that “all” can be named in the singular: the cosmos, the world, the universe. What makes wisdom a difficult thing, however, is that the scope and nature of this totality are elusive. We have a difficult time articulating what unites the disparate realms of human concern that correspond to aspects of life in the world. We find it hard to say, for example, what exactly holds intellectual insight and moral commitment together, what (if anything) ties the pursuit of individual happiness to forms of religious satisfaction, and what consequences scientific knowledge of the world ought to have for specific ethical deliberations. Given this uncertainty, it is not surprising that wisdom is a word very often held in construct with nouns having to do with seeking: thus, the “search for wisdom,” the “quest for wisdom,” or the “pursuit of wisdom.” Wisdom in the Western intellectual tradition contains two elements. It includes the belief that life in the world is, in some sense, a meaningful totality. That the word “wisdom” has taken on a somewhat antique, musty air in modern culture is perhaps one index of the decline in our collective

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ability and willingness to articulate the wholeness of understanding to which wisdom classically aspires. Yet whether wisdom is named or not, the contemporary search for meaningful connection between deeply held beliefs and hard-​won knowledge, or between questions of social and political order and fundamental moral commitments, indicates that something of the old quest for wisdom is still with us. Whether one considers the allure that a “theory of everything” has for modern physicists, or whether one regards William Butler Yeats’s dark premonition that the cultural “centre cannot hold,” one sees that the specter of unitary thinking haunts the modern moral and scientific imaginations. Second, wisdom as we commonly conceive it concerns action as well as belief. It is animated specifically by the notion that life’s meaning can be sought and (at least partially) discerned by humans who pursue it correctly. Once gained, wisdom functions as a guide for living well and preserving the good life over time. It is thus not surprising that modern environmental movements, for example, have found wisdom language to be congenial to the cultivation and promotion of “sustainable” forms of life. Despite the fact that wisdom remains an influential cultural component, we are uncertain about what it is and how it works. We are unsure, too, whether (or to what extent) advocating a coherent intellectual-​ethical program—​a particular path to wisdom—​might be incompatible with contemporary religious, cultural, and philosophical pluralisms. As the epigraph from Cicero shows, uncertainty, perplexity, and even an aversion to wisdom are not specifically modern attitudes. Doubts and questions surrounding wisdom are not entirely new. In order to shed light on these and other questions, it is necessary to see that wisdom has a history. To a great degree, our notions of wisdom are inherited ones, imprinted, as it were, by earlier attempts to frame the pursuits of knowledge, goodness, and happiness as a single, unitary endeavor. Historical perspective brings wisdom into view as a cultural attitude that is intellectually fruitful and ethically compelling; yet it also shows that the pursuit of wisdom, for all of its appeal, was also attended by many of the epistemological and moral difficulties familiar to contemporary wisdom-​seekers. This book, then, is a study of wisdom that offers precisely this sort of historical perspective. It begins with the recognition that the roots of modern culture lie in ancient soil and, more specifically, in the dialectical relation between the legacies of ancient Greek civilization on the one hand and theological perspectives based on the Jewish and Christian scriptures on the other. Later periods—​the late antique, medieval, and early modern—​attest to the

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Introduction

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fact that, despite essential differences, Greek philosophy and biblical interpretation formed a lasting cultural synthesis. Part of what made this synthesis possible was a shared outlook, a common aspiration toward wholeness of understanding that refuses to separate knowledge from goodness, piety from prosperity, virtue from happiness, cosmos from polis, divine authority from human responsibility. As that which names this wholeness, wisdom features prominently in both classical and biblical literatures as an ultimate good. If the “classical” and the “biblical” are indeed the “twin pillars” of Western culture as is commonly claimed, then wisdom is the subject and inspiration of the relief sculpture on the great frieze supported by the two. This book considers the basic elements of the composition we find there; it proposes to examine texts and figures that mark out its most salient features. In doing so, this book enters a long-​standing conversation about various aspects of the classical-​biblical dialectic in Western culture. In many of the older treatments, the dialectic is characterized as an essentially competitive one. One of the more famous examples of this attitude is Matthew Arnold’s essay Culture and Anarchy, which appeared in 1869. Arnold writes of “Hebraism” and “Hellenism,” noting that they represent two fundamental human orientations and yet have the same “final aim,” namely, “man’s perfection or salvation.”1 What interests Arnold, though, is the fact that they present two alternative ways to reach this end. Arnold’s essay is an ode to the redemptive powers of Hellenism, its ability to embrace the full range of human abilities and thereby overcome the coarseness and narrowness of a society oriented primarily toward moral duty and a Hebraic “strictness of conscience.” With its love of reason and beauty, its “sweetness and light,” Hellenism perfects Hebraism by investing life “with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy.”2 Arnold’s essay is a work of cultural criticism for which “Hebraism” and “Hellenism” were useful rhetorical devices, but even scholarly treatments have been animated by a sense that the classical and the biblical stood in a competitive relation to one another. Two works bearing the same title, Christianity and Classical Culture, illustrate the point.3 The first, a masterful study of the first four centuries of the Common Era by Charles Norris Cochrane (1957), is a historical account of the vicissitudes of the Christian church under Roman rule and in the decades following the conversion of Constantine. For Cochrane, the rise of the Roman Empire is essentially a prelude to the triumph of the church. The empire that Augustus built is answered—​and surpassed—​by the kingdom that Augustine proclaims. The second is a work based on the Gifford Lectures presented by Jaroslav Pelikan at Aberdeen (1993). Responding to the observation that the “Christian

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East” has no Augustine of its own, no singular “theological-​philosophical genius” of virtuosic rank in the fourth century, Pelikan proposes to treat the Cappadocian fathers as an eastern analogue to Augustine.4 And just as Cochrane’s Augustine clinches the triumph of Christianity over pagan Rome, the Cappadocians carry off a successful transformation, a “metamorphosis” of natural theology in the Greek philosophical tradition. The rivalry of Christianity and classical culture, though more muted in Pelikan’s work, is nevertheless structurally significant. In other works, however, one observes a rather different orientation. One striking feature of some of the more recent treatments is the emphasis placed not on a rivalry between the two but on what the two have in common. Attention paid to concepts, vocabulary, and perspectives in both classical and biblical sources brings them into view as distinctive voices, certainly, but also as voices within a single, shared cultural discourse. Why similarities have become salient in this way is difficult to say, but it may have something to do with our cultural position. Just as neighboring objects seem closer and more similar to one another the farther one moves away from them, so too do the ancient components of Western thought seem to us closer to one another and more alike the more distant we, as denizens of late-​or post-​modern culture, find ourselves from them. The pairing of classical and biblical is no longer fraught in the way that it was for those who viewed the two-​sided tradition as presenting, in some sense, a set of live intellectual-​ethical options. In older discussions of the classical and the biblical, as I have suggested, authors were much more sensitive to the contest of traditions, such that the choice between them seemed to be the central matter of concern. But some of the more recent treatments suggest that the significant contrast lies not between the classical and the biblical but between the classical-​biblical and the modern. For Christine Hayes, author of What’s Divine about Divine Law?, the classical and the biblical, taken together, structure and furnish an intellectual “inheritance” at the foundation of modern, Western debates concerning the nature and purpose of law.5 At the center of this inheritance is what Hayes characterizes as an opposition between a Greek conception of divine law—​ rational, truthful, universal, unchanging—​and the biblical understanding of divine law as something rooted in God’s will, subject to written form, and “expressed in history rather than nature.”6 Over the course of the book, Hayes provides a rich and detailed map of “discourses” that address features of divine and human law in Greek, Roman, and biblical sources. Using these discourses as points of reference, Hayes explains how essential differences among Jewish interpreters like Philo, Paul, and the rabbis are ultimately intelligible in terms

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Introduction

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of the ways that each individual or group, aware of classical discourses, articulated the divinity or humanity of the Mosaic Torah. If one takes Hayes’s firm distinction between classical and biblical attitudes toward law in heuristic rather than strictly historical (or historiographic) terms, then the book offers, I believe, valuable insight into the ways that bearers of the biblical tradition exploited and responded to the tensive, binary character of law in the ancient world. The result, in each case, is a creative understanding of biblical law that not only is intelligible in “classical” categories but, as Hayes shows, is capable of challenging the very categories themselves. In this way, Hayes’s work opens a window on the internal dynamics of the classical-​biblical tradition, through which parallel modern debates may also be fruitfully regarded. Though Hayes indeed poses a distinction between the classical and the biblical, she does so, specifically, in view of the fact that modern debates about law form the counterpart or continuation of a coherent, ancient discussion of law. Recent works by Dariusz Karłowicz and Yoram Hazony argue in a similar vein that classical and the biblical authors are better understood in dialogue with one another, as participants in a common conversation rather than as representatives of irreconcilable personalities. In Socrates and Other Saints, Karłowicz argues that, despite reputations as champions of faith, Christian apologists like Tertullian never repudiated reason. They may have criticized philosophy, but “the relationship of Christianity to philosophy, and its relation to reason, are two entirely different things.”7 And provided one understands philosophy expansively, in Pierre Hadot’s sense, as a way of life rather than just a system of beliefs, one sees that pagan philosophers and their Christian counterparts relied on both faith and reason. Both groups insisted on the “need for conversion and spiritual transformation,” and both sought ways to order “lives, desires, habits, and limitations so that the act of conversion [would] last” and become a “stable disposition” of body and spirit.8 The classical and the biblical thus aim at the same thing, albeit in different ways. By titling his book The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Hazony signals his claim that the Hebrew Bible deserves to be read in the way that ancient Greek texts are typically read: as works addressing the human capacity for reason rather than as a revelation that offers “miraculous knowledge” and “requires the suspension of the normal operation of our mental faculties.”9 In a programmatic, wide-​ranging analysis of texts in the Hebrew Bible, Hazony argues that a putative reason-​revelation distinction is alien to the Hebrew Bible (but, he argues, one nevertheless appropriate to the attitudes of Christians like Paul and Tertullian) and that the Hebrew scriptures should therefore be taken seriously as an internally diverse anthology engaging perennial questions in ethics,

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political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. Hazony is not so much concerned to articulate a single and singular perspective (the philosophy of the Hebrew Bible) as to vindicate the Hebrew Bible’s character as an assemblage of genuinely philosophical writings (the philosophy contained in the Hebrew Bible). According to Hazony, the polarities that we use to organize the foundational texts of Western culture—​revelation versus reason, faith versus reason, religious versus secular—​have prevented the Hebrew Bible from receiving its due as a serious contributor to our intellectual heritage. In this way, Hazony, like Karłowicz, attempts to soften the line between the classical and the biblical by assimilating the biblical, in important ways, to what we traditionally identify and prize within the classical. For Rémi Brague, the coherence of ancient thought is not discerned primarily in its continuity with modern culture; its coherence is seen rather in its capacity to offer an alternative to it. In his stimulating book The Wisdom of the World, Brague turns to classical and biblical sources.10 He explicates their shared interest in cosmology in order to demonstrate the impoverishment of modern moral thought, which has severed the connection between human experience of the world and the wisdom by which humans live. To the ancients, the connection was strong and generative; to moderns, the nature both of the world and of human situatedness within it bears no connection to human moral aspiration. Brague charts the development of ancient and medieval understandings of the cosmos and the crucial roles that various cosmologies played in larger ethical and intellectual programs. Brague identifies in ancient thought four distinct ways of relating a particular cosmology to the wisdom by which humans, in light of this cosmology, are obligated to conduct their lives: the Platonic, the atomistic, the Abrahamic, and the Gnostic. Despite the fact that the four differ from one another in essential ways, Brague maintains that they “form a system” in which “the intrinsic ontological value of the world” is the touchstone for ethics and philosophical anthropology.11 This is, for Brague, an important observation precisely because modern culture, by contrast, draws no connection between moral philosophy and cosmic understanding; thus, “an entire aspect of man—​namely, his presence in the world—​ remains lacking in ethical relevance  .  .  .  we can no longer determine what relationship there is between ethics and the fact that man is in the world.”12 Brague argues that modern refusal to acknowledge a “given” world ultimately dehumanizes us, giving rise at various points to an “outrageous idealism,” to perilous revolutionary and totalitarian schemes that consider natural limits to be “unbearable,” and to moral philosophy that turns human beings into denuded, Kantian rational agents or bare instances of Heideggerian Dasein.13

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Introduction

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In offering a “wisdom of the world,” Brague argues, the ancients offered a wisdom that, in being more worldly, was, at the same time, more human as well. Of the works surveyed here, this book is most similar to Brague’s. Though it does not lay special emphasis on cosmology in the way that Brague’s work does, it resembles Brague’s in marking a contrast between the holism of ancient wisdom and the atomisms of modern thought. Some, however, may argue that the attempt to place the classical and the biblical together under a single “ancient” umbrella is wrongheaded. One recent work, for example, argues against a synthetic understanding of ancient schools of thought.14 Whereas Brague sees a fruitful contrast between ancient and modern thought, Kavin Rowe is provoked by a different (though related) disjunction, one that ultimately prompts him to reject as futile all attempts to synthesize the classical and the biblical. In doing so, Rowe takes a highly principled stand not only against classical-​biblical commonality as such but also against a mode of scholarship, rooted in the Enlightenment, that places commonalities (and differences) within the framework of an objective, progressively expanding, encyclopedic knowledge of human cultures. According to Rowe, who relies here on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, the modern encyclopedic endeavor reflects the conceit that individuals who possess “the translucifying power of scholarly reason” can produce general knowledge about ancient religions and philosophies while abstaining from the conflicts about which they write.15 Despite the fact that the positivistic model of scholarly objectivity on which encyclopedic inquiry is based has long since been discredited, Rowe argues, scholars continue to treat ancient cultures, philosophies, and religions as sources of data to fill out purportedly universal categories. What this approach to the ancient world fails to recognize is that particular practices and beliefs coinhere within distinctive forms of life, according to distinctive, historically situated rationalities. In sharp contrast to encyclopedic inquiry, then, Rowe endorses a form of understanding that acknowledges the deep incommensurability of ways of life, respecting them as “rival traditions” that make exclusive claims on people’s loyalties. Each tradition is “an existentially structuring pattern, a trajectory of living the one and only life we can live in the midst of time.”16 One does not understand traditions, then, by eliciting from them formal answers to generic questions that one poses to them second-​or third-​ hand. Traditions are wagers that one chooses to make with one’s “one and only life.” To the extent that Christianity, for example, demands one’s whole life, it is the one who wagers Christianly who understands what the Christian wager is, what it ultimately involves.

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By speaking of early Christianity and stoicism as rival traditions in this specific sense, Rowe does justice to a key feature of many religions or philosophies in the ancient world: namely, the exclusive claim to truth. Rowe’s argument ought to give pause to anyone seeking to arrange ancient traditions on a smorgasbord for modern intellectual or cultural consumption. For when traditions appear in that setting or in that form, they do so only as scholarly objects and not, as proponents of the tradition insist they are, serious calls to change one’s life. Because scholarly analysis does not engage Stoicism or Christianity as a summons to a different kind of life, it runs, in a sense, perpendicular to them. Scholars create from living traditions lifeless facsimiles that are useful, perhaps, in the modern project of cultural replenishment but unhelpful in coming to terms with traditions as they understand and present themselves. As Rowe demonstrates, the knowledge that one gains from them apart from personal commitment is not enhanced by “objectivity” but rather distorted by it. This is because the disengaged knower is forced to make sense of things that are fully intelligible only and precisely when one is existentially engaged with that tradition. As Stephen Prickett has astutely noted, “to study any tradition is inevitably to place oneself in relation to it.”17 In my judgment, Rowe is correct to criticize studies of ancient religion or philosophy that take for granted what the ancients themselves denied: namely, that knowledge may be separated from life. To the extent that lived traditions unify all that we associate with them, any attempt to isolate elements of traditions and equate them with other things (in order to argue for historical influence, for example, or to demonstrate a certain conceptual identity) risks distortion and superficiality. As cogent as Rowe’s criticism is on this score, matters become more difficult when we consider what, in Rowe’s treatment, counts as a tradition. Following MacIntyre, Rowe defines a tradition (or tradition of inquiry) as a “morally grained, historically situated rationality, a way of asking and answering questions that is inescapably tied to the inculcation of habits in the life of the knower and to the community that originates and stewards the craft of inquiry through time.” Christianity and Stoicism, he adds, qualify as “traditions” in this sense.18 The trouble comes in specifying the scope of a tradition so defined. With some two thousand years of history and over two billion living adherents, Christianity, for example, surely contains within it forms of life that have functioned or continue to function as discrete, irreducible traditions. The long history of Christian conflict and division today and in the past bears witness to this. To point this out is not to deny that Christianity counts as a tradition but to raise the possibility that the concept of tradition is, so to speak, scalable; it is to suggest that traditions may exist

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Introduction

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within larger traditionary configurations. Put differently, to use the lens of “tradition,” one must still decide at what level of magnification, wide-​angle, close-​up, or something in between, to focus the lens. Employed at a certain distance—​in Rowe’s case, certain parts of the Roman Empire in the decades spanning the first and second centuries—​the lens of tradition indeed brings Christianity and Stoicism into focus as “rivals.” But it is possible, in my view, to “zoom out” and discern the parameters of a larger tradition that includes, among other things, the study, preservation, and intensive reading of both classical and biblical texts over several centuries. Western intellectual culture from Socrates to Aquinas, as both MacIntyre and Rowe allow, constituted a tradition.19 From the late antique to the early modern period, Western societies played host to a classical-​biblical tradition of inquiry that was indeed morally grained, historically situated, tied to personal virtue, identified with intellectual craft, and carefully stewarded over time.20 Though it is beyond the scope of this book to chart the later history of this tradition, it will suffice to note that cultural ideals connected to the study of old texts retain at least a vestigial presence in the modern academy.21 It is the persistence of this Western intellectual tradition, I believe, that makes it possible to understand the classical and the biblical in meaningful relation to one another. It is also what enables Rowe, a Christian, to write insightfully and reliably about Stoicism. If tradition indeed worked in the inflexible and atomistic way that Rowe argues it does, he would have nothing valuable to say about Stoicism. Consistency demands this conclusion, and Rowe indeed offers the startling confession that he is “unable to understand certain Stoic things—​perhaps even central patterns of reasoning” because he is “a Christian who reads as a Christian.”22 Yet, in spite of this intellectually honest concession, it is clear that Rowe understands Stoicism well enough at least to discuss it as a rival tradition to Christianity (or else the central argument of his book fails). It is precisely because modern scholarship is part of a tradition that bears the imprint of sustained engagement with the classical and the biblical together that Rowe and others are able to address contemporary questions to ancient texts in this way. The tradition in view in this book, then, is one at the roots of Western intellectual culture. It is a two-​sided tradition staked on Greek civilization on the one hand and Judaism and Christianity on the other. That there are, in fact, more than two “sides” or traditionary streams within the larger set of developments designated by the term “Western thought” or “Western culture” is, I think, obvious. “Two-​sidedness,” then, is not a bare factual description of texts from the ancient Mediterranean world but a specific, deliberate

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way of organizing them. The terms I  use here to indicate two-​sidedness, namely, “classical” and “biblical,” are not neutral, self-​evident designations. Rather, they are words that reflect long and complex processes of canon formation and cultural consolidation that stretch from Greece’s classical period to the era of the Hellenistic kingdoms and into the Roman imperial age, late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and beyond. To a significant degree, the meanings of “classical” and “biblical” remain fluid, problematic, and opaque even today.23 It also bears remembering that the dualism arises primarily from the “Jerusalem” side of Tertullian’s Athens-​Jerusalem binary. That is, the dualism reflects the perspective of early Jews and Christians, for whom pagan writings constituted a kind of problematic, theological “other” outside the bounds of God’s covenantal dealings with Israel and (secondarily) with the lowly and despised people who first received the Christian message.24 The dialectic, first visible in the writings of (Alexandrian) Hellenistic Jews like Aristobulus, Philo, and the author of the Letter of Aristeas, took on a new form in the work of second-​ century Christian apologists like Tertullian and Justin Martyr. It featured prominently in the thought of Augustine in the fourth century and was formalized into a classical-​biblical educational program by Boethius in the declining days of the western Roman Empire. A slightly later figure, Cassiodorus, famously referred in 580 to the combination of classical learning and Christian theology as a single “braid” woven from ancient tradition.25 Guy Stroumsa offers a similar image when he refers to the intertwining of biblical writings (the Old and New Testaments) and the remnants of Greek and Latin culture in late antiquity as a “double helix” at the core of “European medieval and early modern culture.”26 That there is sufficient historical warrant for speaking of a “classical and biblical tradition” is, I hope, clear. To the extent that it is indeed a tradition, Rowe’s observations concerning the incommensurability of traditions are pertinent. A tradition, he argues, is a whole-​life proposition, an entire “pattern of being in the world” that is “to be taken whole or not at all.”27 What Rowe does not explain is how he (or MacIntyre) has come to understand that this is in fact what a tradition is. If there is indeed no Archimedean point from which to describe cultural phenomena in encyclopedic fashion, no single, self-​ evident rationality by which to understand life and thought, then all analytic categories—​including the category of “tradition”—​must come from somewhere. In other words, Rowe’s concept of tradition is not a given. I propose that Rowe’s way of thinking about Christianity and Stoicism as traditions is itself the product of tradition. More specifically, it is a way of thinking about human ethical and intellectual life that has come down to us as a legacy, very

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specifically, of the two-​sided classical-​biblical discourse. To study the history of Greek philosophy or the rich variety of Judaisms in the Second Temple period is to understand that there were a number of competing proposals for how people ought to live their lives. Yet it is also to see that what allows discrete ways of life to rival or compete with one another is that each vies to occupy the same existential space in the life of the individual and the community. Proposals are incommensurable. The important point here, though, is that the incommensurability of proposals presupposes formal similarity (a common shape) at the same time that it manifests material differences (disagreements about how to fill the shape in). To see one’s whole life as a response to a whole-​life proposition and to live according to an irreducible set of beliefs, practices, and dispositions that corresponds to one’s rightful place in the world—​these are customary expectations that give traditions within the larger classical and biblical tradition their basic form. This is where wisdom comes in. In seeking to identify the correct “pattern of being in the world” or the ideal “trajectory of living the one and only life we can live,” classical and biblical authors did not aim at “tradition.” They aimed at wisdom. Wisdom thus names the coherence by which human life is best lived. Accordingly, this book has two central aims. The first is to explain in formal terms what wisdom is. As I have intimated, what makes wisdom difficult to analyze is its scope. Though it involves matters of practical judgment affecting the life of the individual and the social sphere, it has also been identified with an understanding of the world and of ultimate realities that frame, direct, and give meaning to human thought and action. In addition to knowing what to do, the wise person also knows why a specific course of action ultimately makes moral and rational sense, why it “fits” the particular world that we inhabit. What I propose, then, is to explain how, in its traditional form, wisdom was understood to unify and govern a variety of endeavors: intellectual, social, and ethical. Put in slightly different terms, wisdom is a program for human flourishing that is ordered to a holistic, authoritative account of reality in its metaphysical, cosmic, political, and ethical dimensions. Equipped with a four-​dimensional account of the form of wisdom, I pursue a second aim: to examine, in a substantive way, figures and texts that have yielded and shaped the traditional understanding of wisdom. To the extent that this book offers something distinctive, it does so by using this formal description of wisdom to illuminate the discourse at the heart of the classical-​biblical dialectic in Western culture. Homer, the subject of c­ hapter  1, is the starting point. The writings of Homer were an important source of wisdom in antiquity. This chapter

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examines books 1 and 2 of the Iliad and significant portions of the Odyssey with a view to understanding how the epics’ presentation of heroes ultimately portrays wisdom as something by which character, intellect, and piety are coordinated to yield a worthy, satisfying form of life. In c­ hapter 2, I turn to the Hebrew Bible. Alongside the Homeric corpus, the Hebrew Bible must be counted as a foundational anthology in the history of wisdom. This chapter looks specifically at Genesis 1–​3, select portions of Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes in order to show how wisdom in the Bible is explicated as a guide to life that, in light of historical and existential realities, replaces knowledge as the most appropriate form of human understanding. Chapter 3 takes up the book of Job. This chapter offers a fresh reading of Job, arguing that personal integrity (Heb. tummah) and cosmic “fit” are crucial to the book’s distinctive pres­ entation of wisdom. What emerges from this reading of Job is a profound vindication of piety, subjectivity, and personhood as components of wisdom. Socrates, the greatest exemplar of wisdom in classical antiquity, is the subject of ­chapter  4. This chapter examines a selection of Platonic dialogues (Ion, Euthyphro, Apology, Gorgias) and argues that the famous “negative” understanding of wisdom identified with Socrates (i.e., wisdom is knowing that one does not know) should be understood with reference to Socrates’s particular notion of piety, such that wisdom is staked (as in Job’s case) on a form of integrity that allows humans to withstand insuperable deficiencies in knowledge. Chapter  5 begins with a concise summary of wisdom as presented in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Their influential writings on wisdom connected it to knowledge and virtue in ways that biblical writings did not, yet, as this chapter shows, their emphasis on wisdom as a form of ruling knowledge encouraged later figures like Theophrastus and Hecataeus of Abdera to “nationalize” wisdom, to treat it as something that belongs not only to individuals but also to cultures, societies, and groups of people such as the Jews. Chapter  6 turns to Hellenistic Jewish writings. Jewish writers appropriated the Greek wisdom discourse in new attempts to explain and commend the Jewish way of life. This chapter examines the fragmentary writings of Aristobulus and what became the period’s most influential text, the Wisdom of Solomon. It argues (against certain scholarly opinions) that Aristobulus and the author of the Wisdom of Solomon did not “Hellenize” Judaism by making it “universal”; they claimed instead that Judaism was the fulfillment of Greek attitudes already attuned to the pious and nationally particular character of wisdom. Chapter 7 turns, finally, to Christian tradition and the texts of the New Testament. In contrast to familiar treatments of New Testament wisdom that focus on attempts by New Testament authors

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to portray Jesus as the embodiment of wisdom, this chapter focuses on the prominence of the newly formed Christian collective as the venue for a kind of antiwisdom that unifies human and divine life in ways that are opposed but analogous to earlier classical and biblical versions of wisdom. The conclusion draws together the various portraits of wisdom presented in the book’s seven main chapters, revisits the distinction between classical and biblical, and considers briefly the modern legacy of wisdom’s textual foundations. Classical and biblical authors attempted to coordinate wisdom’s four realms of concern. That they did this in diverse ways virtually goes without saying. The book surveys a range of wisdom accounts arising from foundational texts that extend in time from the period of Homer to the destruction of the Second Temple. Surveys of this type must strike a balance between schematization and exposition. When overdone, schematization creates frameworks or taxonomies marked by artificiality and oversimplification. On the other hand, some schematization is necessary to prevent the exposition of texts from degenerating into a pointless restatement of their contents. In addition to the fourfold definition of wisdom provided above, the book attends to a set of common themes that give wisdom in classical and biblical tradition a distinctive shape: (1) holism, or the refusal to isolate knowledge from life; (2) personhood as an achievement marked by integrity, self-​mastery, rationality, and responsibility; (3) metaphysical vulnerability as the inescapable condition out of which wisdom arises; (4) wisdom as a counterpart to knowledge, especially when knowledge is unavailable; (5) wisdom as something that is socially distributed and nationally particular; (6) happiness or blessedness as the aim of a wise life; and (7) the central importance of piety to wisdom. Though I  have applied a formal definition of wisdom to both classical and biblical texts and noted some themes common to both, I do not seek to harmonize them. That is, I do not mean to say that both sides of the tradition ultimately converge on a single, substantive account of wisdom. Nor am I  arguing that one can pare away superficial differences and arrive at a single essential wisdom at the core of classical and biblical texts. Rowe’s points about the incommensurability of discrete traditions are well taken. For instance, with reference to the theme of “piety” noted above, it is important to respect the fact that the same word can denote different things for different authors. Theos meant something quite different to Paul and to Aristotle. The fact that they both use this word does not mean that one is safe in identifying Aristotle’s conception of divinity (or piety) with Paul’s. On the other hand, the use of similar (Greek) vocabulary—​not only with respect to God but also to a larger set of philosophical considerations related to wisdom—​is not a

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trivial phenomenon. Though I believe that harmonization is wrongheaded, I maintain that the distinctive and incommensurable forms of life that make up the larger “classical and biblical” category can nevertheless be lived by adherents in ways that evince shared, formal characteristics: in this case, the identification of wisdom with knowledge of what properly belongs to the divine realm. Moreover, the historical career of these “braided” traditions shows that they were often upheld and preserved self-​consciously, that is, in full awareness of a similar but different “other.” This awareness is the source of a creative tension that is resolved in ways that ultimately furnish the materials of the classical and biblical tradition. The themes listed above are not found equally or in all chapters; others not listed above also emerge within specific discussions. In this book, I have adopted an approach that tilts more toward the expositional than the schematic. Though I have sought to keep the formal characteristics and thematic elements of wisdom in constant view, I also thought it important and necessary to allow the overall thrust of ancient works to shape an understanding of their contributions to the broader classical-​biblical wisdom discourse. My method, then, has been to select texts and figures that have been influential in the development of wisdom thought and then to discuss these in ways that evince their central themes, rather than attend narrowly to features that correspond to a preconceived notion of what does and does not belong to wisdom. Though tightly controlled forms of analysis can be valuable, there is also something to be said for a more capacious, expositional approach that trusts the reader to see important connections. In the case of something as large and labile as wisdom, an expositional approach that respects the rich and diverse backgrounds for ancient portrayals of wisdom seemed appropriate. The durable, synthetic character of wisdom as something that belongs, in modern retrospective, both to “Athens” and to “Jerusalem” warrants a very specific type of treatment. Academic convention generally requires scholars to restrict their work to specialized topics. Such a narrowing facilitates thoroughness and comprehensiveness. In this case, though, the cost of restricting a study of wisdom to a smaller range of materials is a loss of the broader perspective demanded by wisdom itself. To understand how one text portrays wisdom, it is necessary to recreate the larger context in which such a portrait became culturally useful. To focus only on “Athens” or only on “Jerusalem” would be to reproduce existing approaches and miss the dynamism, the two-​ sidedness, inherent in Western culture’s distinctive pursuit of wisdom. For this reason, this book is a deliberately capacious inquiry into the topic of wisdom. Though it attends to terminological issues involved in discussions of

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wisdom, it is not merely a lexicographic study, one organized around a particular wisdom word or set of words. The noun sophia (or sophiē), for example, appears only once in Homer’s epics (Il. 15.412) and not at all in the Gospel of John or in the Greek version of Genesis 1–​3. Yet there is no denying the importance of these texts for the study of wisdom in Western thought. Thus, the range of materials necessary to a study of this sort cannot be determined by the use of specific terms. This book also does not adopt a form-​critical or literary-​critical approach. It does not explicate in formal terms the sapiential properties of Homeric epic or Platonic dialogue. Nor does it examine wisdom in connection with purported genres like the so-​called Wisdom literature of the ancient Near East. As is well known, such studies have grown numerous enough to constitute a large subfield of biblical studies. As Will Kynes has persuasively demonstrated, however, even after more than a century of research into the “Wisdom literature” of Israel and its Near Eastern neighbors, the category remains circular and ill-​defined.28 To understand how and why this is so, one must understand the modern study of biblical “Wisdom literature” in terms of its own story.29 The nineteenth-​century turn to ancient Near Eastern sources for examples and parallels of biblical “wisdom texts” was, in some ways, an extension of a comparative project that has its roots in early modern classical-​biblical erudition; in other ways, though, it was a replacement for it. As the goal of this book is to “hear” biblical writings in dialogue with classical ones, it does not consult or reproduce the kind of ancient Near Eastern contextualizations that have occupied modern specialists in Wisdom literature. Though this book draws on the work of classicists and biblical scholars, it does not approach wisdom as a specific lexeme, literary genre, or scribal institution, but rather as a program for life. In light of the convergence of the classical and the biblical in Western culture, it is crucial to keep in view the unity that arose from diversity. What the book offers, then, is a balanced presentation of ancient wisdom as generating a discourse at once internally variegated and formally coherent. It was this combination of sameness and difference that yielded the dynamic, at times unstable, account of wisdom that was renovated in the early modern period, reconstructed in the Enlightenment, and radically reevaluated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By understanding traditional wisdom appropriately, we are able to see in later figures the enduring shape of antiquity’s distinctive, classical-​biblical pursuit of wisdom—​from the scholastics of the medieval period to polymaths in the Republic of Letters. Attention to the legacy of wisdom also captures something important, I  believe, about later developments connected to, for example, the Enlightenment, the rise

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of Romanticism, and the parsimonious program of analytic philosophy, to name only a few. And what, finally, is Nietzsche if not a sage shaped by his encounter with the mainsprings of classical and biblical tradition? Though the modern story is not part of the account offered in this book, the modern fate of wisdom serves as a background for this attempt to revisit its beginnings. It takes its bearings from the way in which ancient texts characterized wisdom and contributed thereby to a cultural discourse that transcended discrete literary genres and extended well beyond the biblical period. It aims to show how wisdom was presented in a variety of foundational texts. In this respect, this study is more akin to a philosophical or intellectual-​historical examination of wisdom—​one that is backgrounded by the centrality of wisdom to a specific, deeply persistent cultural attitude. It is offered in the hope that a new look at some old texts will be useful, not in rehabilitating wisdom (no one book can do this) but rather in showing why, even after a long and troubled history, wisdom has proven so difficult to leave behind.

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Homer and the Wisdom of the Hero Homer has done his best to make men into gods and gods into men. —​P eri Hypsous 9.7

In the world of Homer, heroes die and gods do not. This is, by itself, an important fact. Death makes human tragedies real and sufferings profound. It intensifies joy and grief alike, making the brevity of human life a thing both pitiable and enviable. The gods, though, lead very different lives: as a rule, deathless; in human terms, exalted; and, as we have now come to say, “Olympian.” But the gods of Homer are not merely humans with indefinite lifespans. They also differ from humans in two important respects:  knowl­ edge and power. They are superior beings who belong to a superior realm. From their “higher” position, the gods see and affect human life in ways that humans cannot, and in a manner that humans, for the most part, struggle even to understand. The presence of the gods as powerful personalities and sources of knowledge who live above the fray of human life but who nevertheless take an interest in it must be the starting point for any examination of wisdom and knowledge in the Homeric epics. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the gods appear to be everywhere, intervening in affairs in a variety of ways: sending the odd bolt from the blue, kicking up winds and storms at sea, altering states of mind, helping heroic offspring in the heat of battle, or, indeed, taking the field themselves to fight with men. They are essential to what takes place in the poems, sharing the story with heroic figures and influencing events by their favor and disfavor, affection and anger, compassion and disdain. Important as they are to the narrative, they are perhaps even more crucial to understanding Homer’s moral and metaphysical universe, what might be called the “symbolic world” of the epics. The question here is not simply who the gods are or what they do, but rather how they fit into a larger conception of the world. What significance does Homer’s hierarchic conception of

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being have for the moral and intellectual dimensions of the epics—​questions concerning knowledge, wisdom, and the quest to lead a worthy life? If it seems inappropriate to address such questions to a primitive bard, then it should be remembered that Homer acquired a reputation very early on as a figure of great wisdom and authority. For the ancients, he was not merely, in Albert Lord’s famous formulation, a “singer of tales.” In book 10 of the Republic, Plato acknowledges Homer’s reputation as the “poet who educated Greece” and agrees that he is preeminent among poets and tragedians (606e–​ 607a). Homer’s greatness was due in part to the primacy and scope of his achievement: to make the unknown gods known. According to Herodotus, Homer and Hesiod are to be credited with overcoming (somehow) a vast collective ignorance and conveying the names, genealogies, and characteristics of the gods (Hist. 2.53–​54). It is not surprising, then, that Homer was regarded not only as “The Poet” but also, in time, as “The Theologian” (ho theologos).1 Given Homer’s cultural significance—​his position as a theological authority and the creator of what became the foundational text of Greek culture—​it is also not surprising that his two great poems have invited comparison with the Bible.2 Though the parallel works at a general level to indicate their status as authoritative texts that were continually transmitted by groups who revered them, it also yields another, more specific similarity. Both superseded other traditional materials and underwent long processes of codification and canonization that reflected changing cultural and political contexts. As a result, the Bible and the Homeric corpus became, in Margalit Finkelberg’s apt phrase, examples of a “manifold text, which carried within itself both the original message and its re-​interpretation in the vein of later values.”3 And if Homer is compared specifically to the Christian Bible, then we may note the ultimate emergence, in both cases, of a bifurcated corpus, a two-​tiered arrangement in which the second part is self-​consciously a continuation of the first. What “continuation” means, exactly, and whether it includes more dynamic notions of development, dialectic, or canonical pressure, are questions well beyond the scope of this study. It will suffice here to note that Homer’s “manifold text” is at once a singularity belonging to “Homer” (however the “true Homer” is construed) and a duality in which Achilles and Odysseus, wrath and wandering, war and the return from war yield epics with distinctive themes and theological outlooks. In what follows, I will examine knowledge and the hierarchical way that it is created and distributed in the world of Homer. An examination of the “will of Zeus” in the opening books of the Iliad indicates that knowledge and power lie with the gods. When it comes to power, humans are subordinate;

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when it comes to knowledge, they are consumers rather than producers. For this reason, the human field of action is staked not on knowledge and power but on character and choice within a much more limited span. This, in turn, brings wisdom into focus as the ability to understand and inhabit prudently one’s allotted share. For the “swift-​footed Achilles,” who runs swiftly to his death, it is a brief and glorious life, one granted metaphysical depth by the stake that the gods have in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. For the “much suffering Odysseus,” the demands of justice, carefully enforced by the gods, give his wanderings a certain moral intelligibility even as they bring out his distinctive character and form of heroism. As their stories show, to be wise is to maintain a life of balance and self-​mastery within a space circumscribed by social, characterological, and metaphysical limits.

The Will of Zeus When it comes to describing the gods, Homer does not scruple to portray them in human terms, to speak vividly of the injuries they sustain in combat and, as the author of Peri Hypsous (traditionally Longinus) notes, their “quarrels, vengeance, tears, imprisonment, and all their manifold passions.” Thus, the ancient critic observes that Homer “has done his best to make the men in the Iliad gods and the gods men” (Peri Hypsous 9.7). The parsing of the divine realm into male and female personalities with distinctive names, histories, roles, and agendas is certainly Homer’s boldest and most fundamental anthropomorphism. According to M. I. Finley, the likening of divine lives to human ones formed the basis for a kind of Homeric humanism, by which humans gained the confidence to rise above worship of natural forces, make gods in their image, and so take pride in their humanity.4 But the similarities that gods and humans share as embodied, rational, and passionate beings also accomplish something else. They dramatize the disparities that set the two orders of being apart from one another. Patroklos and Ares, for example, receive the same death stroke, a spear thrust into the “depth of the belly” (“neiaton es keneōna”; Il. 18.821; 5.857)—​Ares at the hands of Diomedes (and Athena) and Patroklos at the hands of Hektor. Ares, on being stabbed this way, goes off, sulking, to Olympus and complains to Zeus about the goddess. After chiding Ares, Zeus softens toward him and dispatches Paiëon the healer to help him. Ares’s wound closes as quickly as milk curdles in fig juice; he bathes and takes his Olympian seat beside Zeus, “rejoicing in the glory of his strength” (Il. 5.902–​906). Patroklos, on being hit, simply falls dead to the ground. Anthropomorphism is a versatile Homeric strategy that makes the

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gods familiar and accessible, allowing them to function as characters in a narrative. But it also estranges the gods and makes them a foil to heroic life that shows what the life of the hero is not: in this case, immortal. Humans are living beings; so are gods. But the life of a god is of a higher order. Thus, where human lives are shortened by death, the life of a god must be indefinitely long. By a kind of theological deduction, then, the gods cannot sustain fatal injuries. It is left to Homer’s imagination to show how such an injury in the case of a god is, instead of being fatal, comically trivial. When it comes to knowledge, however, matters are more difficult. The same kind of deduction will not work. It is clear in Homer that humans and gods alike are rational beings capable of speech, thought, perception, and voluntary action. Because gods are superior, though, they must possess faculties of a higher order. As the poet says on two different occasions:  “always the mind [noos] of Zeus is stronger than a man’s mind” (Il. 16.688; 17.176). If the human mind is limited, then it seems the mind of a god is unlimited. The god, or totality of gods, must possess unlimited knowledge; they must be omniscient. Menelaos expresses this view when he confesses, simply, that “gods know everything” (“theoi de te panta isasin”; Od. 4.379, 468). Rather than take the statement of Menelaos as a kind of straightforward Homeric dogma of divine omniscience, though, it is perhaps better to understand the statement of Menelaos as an example of the way that heroes in the epics perceive the great disparity between the gods and themselves. The knowledge of the gods so far exceeds the knowledge of humans that it seems, from “below,” to be total and immense. But in the “upper register” of the epics, where divine intrigues are played out (alliances, rivalries, jealousies, love affairs), the gods do not know all things. Homer’s tales of the gods would not work as dramatic stories if they did. In these passages, it is clear that divine knowl­ edge is constituted in much the same way that human knowledge is: on the basis of experience, inference, and verbal communication. The divine field of knowledge, though larger in scope, is thus homologous with the human, as it includes memory of past events, is subject to limitations of attention and distance, and is open to change and revision. Knowledge responds to and is based on experience. An empiricist bias is embedded in the language. “To know” something in Greek is quite literally “to have seen” it, for the common verb for knowing (oida) is actually the verb “to see” (eidō) in the perfect tense.5 Knowledge as an intellectual ability to apprehend that which is objectively real—​Plato’s developed sense of epistēmē—​does not enter into the epics. And when epistēmē does appear, as it does in verbal form (epistasthai), it designates the skill or physical ability necessary to do a particular thing.6 Trojan horses,

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for example, “know” (epistamenoi) how to run fast over the plain in pursuit and withdrawal (Il. 5.222). For Homer, then, knowledge is rooted in experience, whether the knower is human or divine. This similarity, however, must not be allowed either to annul important differences in human and divine knowledge or to obscure the dynamic relation between them. One way to explore this relation is to chart its significance in a crucial section of the Homeric corpus, books 1 and 2 of the Iliad.7 The importance of these books cannot be overstated, as they indicate the major themes of the epic, introduce principal characters, sketch the background, set the action of the story in motion, and skillfully initiate the reader/​hearer into the two-​tiered Homeric universe. As a plague threatens the Greek camp, Achilles calls on the prophet Kalchas to disclose the reason for the plague. When it is revealed that the cause is Agamemnon’s refusal to return the captive Chryseis to her father, a priest of Apollo, Agamemnon agrees to return her, but only on the condition that he be permitted to take Achilles’s war prize, Briseis, to compensate for his loss of honor. The demand kindles the wrath of Achilles. For the sake of the Greeks, Achilles releases Briseis to Agamemnon but vows to stay out of the fighting and asks his mother, the goddess Thetis, to turn the tide of war against Agamemnon in his absence. Thetis then supplicates Zeus, who agrees to her request and, in the divine council, overcomes Hera’s opposition to the plan. In order to prompt Agamemnon to continue the war without Achilles, Zeus sends Agamemnon a dream in which he assures him of victory. In a somewhat strange twist, Agamemnon then gathers the armies and tests them by telling them that the time has come to give up on the war and go home. Though the soldiers are eager to do just that, Odysseus convinces the soldiers to stay and fight. They gather on the plain of Skamandros, and the Trojans, led by Hektor, muster outside the walls of Troy. By the end of book 2, then, both Greeks and Trojans are prepared to fight. The stage is set for events to unfold along the lines that the poet has skillfully laid down. The perspective in these books alternates between the realm of the gods and the world of the heroes. This duality of perspective is also apparent in the opening of book 1, which highlights the wrath of Achilles and its disastrous consequences for the Greek armies. Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished

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since that time when first there stood in division of conflict Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus. (1.1–​7) As these lines make clear, the dramatic story of Achilles’s “wrath,” rooted in complex interpersonal conflict, is subsumed under a divine drama:  the shaping of the “will of Zeus.” There are at least three ways to understand what is meant by this phrase. According to one tradition, witnessed in a scholion but not mentioned explicitly in the Iliad, Zeus used the Trojan War to thin the ranks of humanity, for “Earth, being weighed down by the multitude of people, there being no piety among humankind, asked Zeus to be relieved of the burden.”8 The scholiast goes on to point out that war in this case was an alternative to destroying burdensome and impious humans by storm or flood—​an option taken by deities in Genesis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Sumerian tale of Atrahasis. To judge from Homer, the “war strategy” was certainly effective in killing off heroes. And the special concern of the Iliad—​the role of Achilles’s wrath in engendering an even greater loss of life—​is certainly consistent with the idea that Zeus’s primary goal was to depopulate the Earth. But this goal is too general to be of any use in explaining the specific actions and decrees of Zeus in the epics. A  second possibility is that the will of Zeus refers to a general understanding, voiced by a few characters (Kalchas, 2.323–​329; Nestor, 2.350–​353; Agamemnon, 4.163–​168), that the will of Zeus is to punish Paris (and fellow Trojans) for violating laws of hospitality and abducting Helen.9 This option is consistent with the way the Greek heroes in the epics understand their mission; it also comports with the ultimate fall of Troy, an event known to Homer’s audience but beyond the scope of the Iliad. Yet the proem and the immediate context of Iliad 1.5 make no mention of the punishment of Troy. The poet notes instead the suffering, devastation, and pain that the Greeks experience while a wrathful Achilles stays out of the fighting. In this way, Greek loss of life is ultimately a reflex of what the gods, led by Zeus, have decreed. In the death of the Greek heroes—​the sundering of “strong souls” (iphthimous psychas) from strong bodies—​“the will of Zeus was accomplished” (“dios d’eteleieto boule”; 1.3, 5). A third option, then, is to see the will of Zeus in more specific terms, as leading to a Greek catastrophe traceable to the wrath of Achilles and his conflict with Agamemnon. The will of Zeus, as it takes shape in books 1 and 2, is not a timeless judgment, an inexorable natural law, or a changeless principle that determines events wholly from the outside. It is, instead, one possible response to a specific set of conditions. Described at the level of

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the gods, the decree of Zeus is contingent rather than necessary. As Laura Slatkin has explained in her insightful study of Thetis, the mother of Achilles is essential to understanding the actions of Zeus in the Iliad.10 Drawing on extra-​Iliadic traditions about Thetis, especially those found in Pindar and Aeschylus, Slatkin supplies the crucial backstory both to the request that Thetis makes of Zeus and to Zeus’s remarkable willingness to grant it. As Achilles points out in book 1, Zeus is indebted to Thetis. For she is the one immortal who can claim to have saved Zeus, warding off “destruction” from him and setting him free from “shackles” (1.396–​404). The episode to which Achilles alludes here is connected to another fact about Thetis, namely that she did not accept willingly her union with the mortal Peleus. Instead, she was, as she says obliquely, made to “endure mortal marriage” against her will (18.433). Pindar (Isthmian 8)  explains that Zeus and Poseidon both long ago desired to wed Thetis but that Themis, who is associated with the preservation of law, custom, and good order, intervened. Themis informed the gods of a prophecy according to which Thetis was destined to bear a son greater than his father. She then suggested that Thetis be wed to a mortal so that her offspring would pose no threat to the gods. Thetis complied and bore to Peleus a semidivine but mortal son, Achilles. In executing the plan of Themis, Thetis neutralized the prophecy, averted an intergenerational succession battle among the gods, and preserved the existing Olympian order.11 In this way, Thetis saved Zeus. For all this, though, Thetis tells Achilles that she is not certain that Zeus will grant her request to restore the honor of Achilles (1.420). When Thetis reaches Olympos and makes her request, Zeus himself is uncertain about what to do. Though willing to heed Thetis, he is reluctant to anger Hera by granting Thetis’s request (1.518–​519). While Zeus sits in silent deliberation, Thetis urges Zeus a second time: Bend your head and promise me to accomplish this thing, or else refuse it, you have nothing to fear, that I may know by how much I am the most dishonoured [atimotatē] of all gods. (1.514–​516) It belongs to Zeus to decide the matter. If he decides to “bend his head” in agreement, then his will not only will be clear to Thetis, it will also become divine policy and human reality. In a clear allusion to her own story, Thetis reminds Zeus that he has “nothing to fear.” The threat to Zeus or Poseidon once posed by the prospect of a “son stronger than his father” has already

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been neutralized. Thetis has already suffered for their sake, both in enduring the marriage to Peleus and in becoming the mother of a mighty son who must soon die. For this reason, Zeus’s decision is free and uncoerced. Adopting the position of the suppliant, Thetis acknowledges that she has no power over Zeus. She appeals to him on the basis of honor: if Zeus refuses, then Thetis will know that she is the “most dishonoured of all gods.” The fact that Thetis as preserver of “cosmic equilibrium” deserves honor is clear.12 Another goddess who threatened the cosmic equilibrium, Demeter, was granted her request and honored among the gods by Zeus.13 Where Demeter had leverage over the gods, though, Thetis has none. Any decision by Zeus to honor Achilles rests fundamentally on a decision to honor Thetis for what she has already done. In this way, Zeus’s decision is conditioned by the past. The will of Zeus, in other words, has a history. Yet even after Zeus nods his assent to Thetis’s request, the matter is not quite settled. He must still face his fellow Olympians. When Zeus enters the divine council at the end of book 1, the gods all acknowledge his supremacy and rise to greet him. At this point Zeus has already nodded his assent to Thetis; his own agenda, as it were, is set. What remains are further actions that will engender the cooperation of the other gods. When it appears that Zeus intends to restart the war in book 1, questions arise. Opposition to Zeus’s will comes, in this case, from Hera, who complains of Zeus’s plan to destroy her beloved Greeks. Hera is cowed into submission, however, when Zeus tells her to “sit down in silence” and threatens her with violence (1.565–​567).14 At the end of book 3, both armies have agreed to let Paris and Menelaos determine the outcome of the war in single combat. Faced with the possibility that Menelaos’s clear but incomplete victory over Paris will bring an end to the war, Zeus is forced to devise a way to restart the fighting. In book 4, Zeus succeeds in engendering the cooperation of Hera to continue the war. Knowing that she hates the Trojans even more than she loves the Greeks, he observes that the duel between Paris and Menelaos may result in a peaceful resolution of the war, with Troy left standing and Helen restored to Menelaos (4.18–​19). Hera takes the bait and pleads for the opportunity to finish the destruction of Troy. Zeus agrees but makes it seem as though it is a gracious concession rather than a skillful ploy: though he loves Troy, he will allow Hera to orchestrate its fall. Through this apparent compromise, Zeus has cleverly won the support of Hera and the other gods. As Hera says to Zeus: “come then, in this thing let us both give way to each other, I to you, you to me, and so the rest of the immortal gods will follow” (4.62–​64). Then Hera, not Zeus, calls for the resumption of hostilities. The war goes on.

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What is at stake in our understanding of the will of Zeus? What is its connection to the theme of knowledge? In the world of Homer, a great deal depends on the gods. Taken together, their interests and purposes, loves and resentments, words and actions constitute a set of “givens” that constrain and, to a certain degree, determine human life. From the point of view of the heroes, the will of the gods is the most significant object of knowledge. It is, of course, not the only object of knowledge, but it is the highest and most consequential, encompassing as it does the great and extraordinary events that define the times, characterize an era. To identify these events with divine personalities as Homer does is to take a step toward claiming that large-​ scale events (war, in this case, and, at the close of the Odyssey, peace) are, if not quite knowable, then at least dramatically intelligible. It is not the case that things simply happen, that events occur blindly in an absurd universe. Instead, great events have metaphysical depth. This profound aspect of life may not be reducible to laws or principles for Homer, but it can certainly be accessed through poetic language and stories about the gods. The closest the poet comes to unifying or essentializing the totality of things that shape the course of events is to subsume them under the “will of Zeus.” Yet, as I have shown, this will is not a flat or fatalistic concept.15 Though the will of Zeus is decided in the meeting with Thetis in book 1, it does not, from that point on, stand on its own as an accomplished reality. It continues to depend on the ability of Zeus both to intimidate and silence those opposed to it and to influence cunningly those who are directly involved. The ruling Fates who govern the lives of heroes and the actions of the Olympians are not, in Homer, identical to a fate that determines divine or human action from the outside. Instead they are tied up with the personalities and interests of the gods, at times conflicting but ultimately united in the decree of Zeus, a free and omnipotent being. What books 1 and 2 show is that the will of Zeus is a constructed or created reality. We are made to see its creation in the events that lead from the plaguing of the camp to the dishonoring of Achilles, from the sufferings of Thetis to the destruction of the Greek army. And as things unfold, the will of Zeus responds to changing circumstances and relies on cunning and creativity. So the highest or ultimate form of knowledge in the epics—​the thing for which gods and humans alike must account, the great given with which they must always reckon—​is not a fixed, static truth but insight into a dynamic reality with its own dramatic coherence. For heroes and Olympians alike, knowledge consists in the recognition of Zeus’s will, character, and creative power; for Zeus, though, knowledge quite simply is power.

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Knowledge and Character It is a relatively simple matter for the gods to ascertain ruling knowledge. They are told directly what the will of Zeus requires in a particular case, or they create it themselves by intervening directly in human affairs. Take, for example, Apollo in book 1. The action effectively begins when Chryses, priest of Apollo, goes to Agamemnon with a large ransom for his daughter Chryseis. When Agamemnon contemptuously sends Chryses away, the priest asks Apollo to loose his arrows against the Greeks. This event precedes what is later revealed to be the “will of Zeus,” and so the decision whether to heed Chryses or not rests with Apollo alone. When Apollo unleashes a plague on the Greeks in direct response to the prayer of Chryses, his intent and his action, taken together, constitute a fact, a thing that can be known. The situation of the Greeks is thus accurately described by the statement that “the plague presently afflicting the Greeks is the work of Apollo, who is acting on behalf of Chryses, a priest contemptuously spurned by Agamemnon.” To have full knowledge of the situation, one must understand what is happening to the Greeks in precisely these terms. To offer any other explanation would be to display a lack of adequate knowledge. It is likely that many in the camp, especially those who urged Agamemnon to return Chryseis out of respect for Chryses, guessed correctly the cause of the plague, but no explicit mention is made of this. Instead, Achilles calls an assembly and recommends that the Greeks find out from “some holy man, some prophet” why “Phoibos Apollo is so angry” (1.62, 64). Achilles knows enough to recognize the handiwork of Apollo but nevertheless seeks a full, public account of Apollo’s motivation. This, of course, would expose Agamemnon, which is why it is significant that Achilles and not some other hero—​Nestor or Odysseus, for example—​ proposes the inquiry. Nestor is too deferential toward Agamemnon (1.277–​ 281), and Odysseus seems often to function as Agamemnon’s lieutenant (1.311; 2.185–​187). Only Achilles possesses the strength and independence to challenge Agamemnon. Even before the dispute begins, then, there is already an implicit opposition between Achilles and Agamemnon. When Kalchas the seer steps forward to reveal the full truth about the plague, he does so as a representative of the divine realm, a devotee of Apollo, one who knows “the things that were, the things to come and the things past.” (1.70) Not only does he know the background of Chryses as a sacrosanct figure (“the things past”) and the offense against Chryses by Agamemnon (“the things that were”), he also knows that Apollo will relent if Chryseis is returned (“the things to

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come”). Achilles is not interested merely in indulging his own curiosity or in analyzing the situation. He appeals to the divine realm for knowledge, aware that this knowledge, once revealed, will do something, create a new situation. This is clear from the fact that Achilles stands ready to protect Kalchas from Agamemnon if the need arises. The kind of knowledge at issue here is a knowledge of the divine will that enters the human situation and evokes characteristic responses. From the moment that it is requested, knowledge is ethically charged. In initiating this inquiry, then, Achilles is not attempting to remediate ignorance; he is, rather, staging an intervention. Kalchas lays the blame on Agamemnon and explains that Apollo will withdraw the plague if the girl is returned and an appropriate sacrifice is rendered. The prophecy immediately precipitates a crisis, a point of decision about what to do next. In the ensuing conflict, Achilles and Agamemnon come into clearer focus as individuals. Agamemnon is haughty; Achilles is wrathful. Both are jealous for their honor. The knowledge sought by Achilles and introduced by Kalchas is the means by which character is made known. Books 1 and 2 develop this further. Achilles and Agamemnon embody the heroic ideals of virtue or excellence (aretē) and honor (timē). According to Nestor, Achilles was taught by his father always to strive for aretē and to excel all others (“aien aristeuein kai hypeirochon emmenai allon”; 11.783, 6.208). This bit of advice, which has been adopted as a motto by educators down through the ages, captures well the heroic ethos.16 In the first instance, aretē refers to martial attributes: strength, skill, and valor. But Homer’s conception of excellence also includes the ability to speak well and persuasively, to offer sound advice, and to prevail in deliberations. A person of excellence is mighty in war and mighty in counsel. As Phoinix, tutor of Achilles, says, he sought to make the hero both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds (9.443). This conception of excellence is fundamentally competitive. Aretē is recognized as such when it is demonstrated in contests and proven in war. It is essential to the hero, however, that this recognition take a visible, public form. He must receive timē from others, not only in the form of customary respect and verbal acclamation but also in the form of gifts (geras).17 Honor, then, is concrete and quantifiable. The conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon is not simply a dispute over Briseis but a dispute over Briseis as war prize, Briseis as a badge of honor. Agamemnon insists on taking her precisely to demonstrate his greater status, his superiority over Achilles (1.184–​187). And Achilles resists because Briseis represents the honor paid to him by his peers. Achilles did not take Briseis unto himself; he received her. She was, as he says, “a gift of the sons of the Achaians,” given to him in recognition of the fact that he “laboured

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much” in war (1.162). Achilles’s intent is not to deprive Agamemnon of honor, for he is willing to compensate Agamemnon with more booty, with geras befitting his station, as soon as additional plunder becomes available (1. 122–​ 129). What he resents is Agamemnon’s attempt to restore honor to himself by stripping Achilles of his. Agamemnon and Achilles are not at all unusual for wanting to excel others in displaying virtue and winning honor. These are heroic ideals rather than personal qualities. As ultimate goods—​things considered good in themselves—​ virtue and honor are pursued by all the Homeric heroes. Though these goods explain a great deal about the heroes’ motives, choices, and actions, they do not explain everything. Another important theme in books 1 and 2 is the role that knowledge plays in the heroic quest for honor. What comes into view in these books, once again, is knowledge conceived as an understanding of the gods and their particular dispositions. Because the heroes are subordinate to the gods and subject to their will, the most vital form of knowledge in a world saturated by divine presence is theological knowledge. As I have shown, Kalchas’s revelation concerning Apollo set the story in motion and initiated the conflict over honor. When Hera sees that Achilles is ready to kill Agamemnon over the insult to his honor, she sends Athena to “keep down his anger” (1.192). To keep Achilles in check, Athena appears to him and him only while he is in the midst of the assembly. She tells Achilles that he will not remain dishonored forever; instead, his honor will be tripled: “some day three times over such shining gifts shall be given you/by reason of this outrage. Hold your hand then, and obey us” (1.213–​214). Achilles spares Agamemnon at that moment, then, not because he no longer cares about his honor but because the goddess has promised him a better way to gain it. If Achilles listens to Hera and Athena now, he reasons, then the gods will look favorably on him later (1.218). Athena does not explain in detail how his honor will be tripled, but Achilles knows at least one part of the plan: honor will come to him when Agamemnon and the other Greeks suffer in his absence. This is what he tells Agamemnon (1.239–​244). Yet he cannot be sure that the war will go badly enough without him to make his words come true. Following the assembly, then, Achilles supplicates his mother, Thetis, asking her to secure Zeus’s help in turning the war against the Greeks while Achilles stays out of it. Thetis cannot guarantee that Zeus will grant her request, but Achilles, as I have shown, has good reason to believe that she will be successful. Thetis instructs him to remain by his ships (1.421), and he keeps this counsel unwaveringly until Thetis herself tells him, after the death of Patroklos, to reconcile with Agamemnon and arm himself for battle (19.28–​36).

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Knowledge plays a rather different role in the case of Agamemnon. Instead of receiving reliable knowledge directly from the gods as Achilles does, Agamemnon is deceived and manipulated by indirect means. With Achilles on the sidelines, Agamemnon must decide how to proceed without his best warrior, the one whom Nestor called “a great bulwark of battle over all the Achaians” (1.284). Somewhat unexpectedly, though, we find Agamemnon untroubled at the beginning of book 2, at peace with his decision to alienate Achilles, and enveloped in “immortal slumber” (ambrosios hypnos) such as the gods enjoy (2.19). Ironically, the greatest immortal, Zeus, is unable to sleep. Achilles has withdrawn from the fight, but in order for the plan of Zeus to advance, Agamemnon and the Greeks must be compelled to resume the fighting without him. Pondering how best to bring this about, Zeus decides to capitalize on the fact that Agamemnon is sleeping soundly while he (Zeus) is not. Zeus sends a dream or, more accurately, “evil Dream” (oulon oneiron; 2.6), to Agamemnon, promising him certain and imminent victory.18 Agamemnon wakes and swings into action. The strategy apparently goes awry, however, when Agamemnon decides to test the courage of the army by telling them that he was told in a dream to abandon the war. To the false knowledge conveyed by Dream, Agamemnon adds yet more. In a somewhat comic scene, the armies respond to the test by running away from the plain rather than toward it. They rush to the ships so quickly that they leave a cartoonish cloud of dust in the air (2.150–​151).19 It falls to others to prevent the army from abandoning the war and sailing home. Inspired by Athena, Odysseus stops the exodus to the ships, reassembles the army, and instills fighting courage. Though the test seems like a near catastrophe, it was apparently the plan all along. For Agamemnon, anticipating the stampede to the ships, told the leaders beforehand to take positions and restrain the men with orders (2.75), which is precisely what Odysseus did. When Odysseus rallied the armies, he did so with Agamemnon’s scepter in hand. In this convoluted way, the will of Agamemnon and, more important, the will of Zeus were accomplished. The contrast between the two illustrates, once again, the role of knowl­ edge in bringing out character. In responding to instructions from Athena and Thetis, Achilles is earnest, high-​hearted, and respectful of the gods. Agamemnon, for his part, comes across as devious, greedy, and eager to blame Zeus. But these early episodes highlight another important feature of knowledge. In the Homeric economy of knowledge, humans are consumers, not producers. Their knowledge environment is fragile and impoverished. Occupying a fundamentally passive position with respect to knowledge, the heroes possess only a limited ability to effect their wills in the world

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and bring about outcomes consistent with their intentions. This situation is due, as I have shown, to the role of the gods in determining great events. But it is also a result of the fact that humans themselves are subject to what Homer calls atē (“delusion, infatuation”). Atē is a temporary state of mind in which sufferers act rashly or irrationally. As E. R. Dodds wrote in his classic study, “it is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity; and, like all insanity, it is ascribed, not to physiological or psychological causes, but to an external ‘daemonic’ agency.”20 The atē of Agamemnon, for example, compelled him to strip Achilles of honor and take Briseis. Though, in the moment, the seizure seemed just, Agamemnon is able, in retrospect, to recognize that it was a bad thing to do. Actions committed under the influence of atē are felt, moreover, to result from an inexplicable deviation from what one, thinking and acting clearly, would normally do—​not quite like saying “the devil made me do it” but something close. Before sending the embassy to Achilles in book 9, Agamemnon acknowledges the irresistible influence of atē on his actions (9.115–​119). And when he is finally reconciled to Achilles in book 19, he refers to atē in order to exculpate himself: This is the word the Achaians have spoken often against me and found fault with me in it, yet I am not responsible but Zeus is, and Destiny, and Erinys the mist-​walking who in assembly caught my heart in the savage delusion [agrion atēn] on that day I myself stripped from him the prize of Achilleus. Yet what could I do? It is the god who accomplishes all things. Delusion [Atē] is the elder daughter of Zeus, the accursed who deludes all; her feet are delicate and they step not on the firm earth, but she walks in the air above men’s heads and leads them astray. She has entangled others before me. (85–​94) Agamemnon is not to blame: Zeus, Destiny (Moira), Erinys, and Atē are. In his eagerness to locate the source of the disastrous conflict with Achilles elsewhere, Agamemnon rattles off a list of daimonic agencies, thus overshooting the mark. In speaking of causes, more is not necessarily better. Agamemnon’s explanation fails, on one level, because it “overdetermines” Agamemnon’s action.21 It protests too much. But it succeeds, on another, in characterizing the human situation. The failure to act wisely in a given instance is not simply a matter of ignorance, of knowledge denied or misrepresented to humans by the gods. The exercise of good judgment is also rendered precarious by the vagaries of human

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consciousness: dreams, passions, moods, lapses in attention, and even states of drunkenness (Od. 21291–​304). One can stray at any time, for atē “walks in the air above men’s heads.” The personification of atē in the speech of Agamemnon, however, should not obscure another fact about the temporary derangements that atē produces. Though they are felt to come upon the individual from the outside—​a force seizing Agamemnon’s heart in the assembly—​they are also (with the possible exception of wine-​induced atē) inherent in the individual. Agamemnon’s atē in book 1 is consistent with his character as a great leader jealous for his honor; it is simply an imprudent, extreme expression of it. This is also true of Achilles. The atē of Achilles does not figure into books 1 and 2, but takes center stage later in the Iliad. With the war going badly, Nestor counsels Agamemnon to appease Achilles, return Briseis, and win him back “with words of supplication and with the gifts of friendship” (Il. 9.113). Agamemnon admits fault in the earlier conflict and agrees to Nestor’s plan. The gifts that Agamemnon promises Achilles are impressive and, all agree, appropriate to Achilles’s great status. Nevertheless, Achilles rejects, unreasonably, the offer of Agamemnon, going so far as to claim indifference to any honor he might win by saving the Greeks (9.607–​ 608). Phoinix warns Achilles that if he spurns Agamemnon this time, his atē will overtake him and bring him to grief (9.512). Achilles, however, persists in his anger toward Agamemnon and refuses to join the fighting. When the battle at last reaches the ships and a Greek defeat seems imminent, Patroklos asks Achilles to let him wear Achilles’s armor, lead the Myrmidons, and drive the Trojans back. He desires to be a savior, a “light” for the Danaans (16.39). Achilles agrees but urges Patroklos to turn back once he has driven the Trojans from the ships: “let others go on fighting in the flat land” (16.96). Patroklos fights valiantly and succeeds in driving the Trojans back, but atē eventually overtakes him. Patroklos ignores Achilles’s instructions and pursues the Trojans on the plain, foolishly unaware that he draws near to his own death (16.684–​693). Just before succumbing to Hektor, Patroklos suddenly loses the ability to defend himself: “disaster [atē] caught his wits, and his shining body went nerveless” (16.805). The characterization of Patroklos’s inexplicable loss of nerve as the work of atē skillfully connects the foolhardiness of Patroklos to the stubbornness of Achilles. Achilles’s refusal to fight leads to a situation in which Patroklos, fighting in Achilles’s place, overextends himself in battle. One deluded state creates the conditions for another. Thus, in poetic terms, the atē of Achilles seems to alight on Patroklos and bring on his death.22 This, however, is not the same as saying, simply and prosaically, that Achilles is responsible for the

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death of Patroklos. The Homeric device of atē is subtler. It affirms a causal relationship between the actions of Achilles and Patroklos. It also suggests that Achilles and Patroklos both acted stupidly. But the two err in different ways and from different motives: one refuses to fight, and the other refuses to turn back. As in the case of Agamemnon, atē here “cooperates” with the personality of the individual, causing him to experience delusion in a way that is consistent with his personal traits and affinities. The anger of the quick-​ tempered Achilles becomes, under the influence of atē, a mad, implacable hatred for Agamemnon (9.312, 613–​614, 646–​647). Under the same influence, the normal heroic desire of Patroklos to emerge from the shadow of Achilles, prove his virtue, and surpass fellow heroes becomes fatal foolhardiness.23 In his study of atē, William Wyatt argues that atē is recognized by sufferers only in retrospect and is better understood, therefore, as the feeling of remorse one experiences when one realizes that one has committed a terrible error. More specifically, it is the feeling that one has erred by overindulging oneself.24 To connect atē to overindulgence is to see that it is not only, as Agamemnon suggests, a daimonic agent (“Delusion”) controlling humans from the outside but also an expression of individual character. Overindulgence in this context is the failure to live up to oneself by being too much oneself. To invoke atē is to account for error in a way that recognizes its extrinsic and intrinsic aspects. Examining the nature and effects of knowledge in books 1 and 2 of the Iliad, one sees that, for Homer, knowledge is ancillary to character. That is, what counts as knowledge (even when clouded by atē) ultimately serves to express the personality of the knower.25 This is truest of Zeus, since he is able without significant constraint to orchestrate the events and engender the realities that become what is known or, at least, what there is to know. A Homeric character who is “in the know,” then, is one who understands the will of Zeus: that Achilles will win honor at the Greeks’ expense and then die after killing Hektor; that Odysseus, in spite of Poseidon and the suitors, will eventually reach home and reclaim his patrimony. Those who doubt or disbelieve these things are, in the epics, fools who purchase their folly at a very high price. To understand the will of Zeus is to know what he has approved and forbidden, whom he likes and dislikes. There is no real use in speaking of a knowable reality, a fixed, final truth, apart from divine personality. So too with human knowledge. It never leaves entirely the orbit of character. Just as correct knowledge brings out character, so too does atē, a state of delusion particular to oneself. Knowledge acquired by heroes does not lift them into a new epistemic position from which to resolve the painful conflicts of existence; it merely dramatizes these conflicts. Achilles is told by Thetis, for example, that

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he will either fight and die at Troy and win everlasting fame or return home and endure a long, inglorious life (Il. 9.410–​416).26 Odysseus also receives privileged knowledge from Calypso: if he stays with her at Ogygia, he will enjoy a blissful immortality; but if he tries to return home, he will suffer many hardships (Od. 5.203–​213). Knowledge imparted to Achilles and Odysseus sets up choices in which character is clarified. In choosing glory and revenge, Achilles chooses the heroic path, although one rendered more tragic by the story of Thetis and the death of Patroklos. Odysseus, though, appears to be somewhat unconventional among heroes in leaving Ogygia for Ithaka and passing up the chance for immortality. Nothing says more about Odysseus’s character than this choice.27 It is not knowledge but character that ultimately shapes the lives of Homer’s heroes. According to Werner Jaeger, it is in Homer that we may see the beginnings of a great effort to understand the mysterious outworkings of personality, one that culminated centuries later in the famous maxim of Heraclitus—​“character is destiny” (“ethos anthropō daimon”).28 Were “Homer” less fond of epithets and more given to aphorisms, he may indeed have put the matter this way.

Wisdom and Suffering I turn now from Achilles and Agamemnon to the figure of Odysseus. The Odyssey is not so much a sequel or continuation of the Iliad as it is a later, distinctive adaptation of materials concerned with the aftermath of the Trojan War: the homecomings or nostoi of the heroes. It presupposes the events of the Iliad but without duplicating them.29 The opening of the poem announces its own theme. Instead of Achilles and his wrath, the poet seeks from the Muse a story of wandering and suffering: Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways [polytropon], who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea, struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions. Even so he could not save his companions, hard though he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness [atasthaliēsin], fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God, and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak, and begin our story. (Od. 1.1–​10)

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Odysseus is not named in these opening lines, but it is not difficult to recognize him. The poet describes a man of diverse skills, broad experience, and versatile character—​a combination of qualities that belongs in an unusually high degree to Odysseus. His epithets, which include the poly-​ prefix, reinforce the idea of a “manifold” man: polytropos (“man of many ways”); polymētis (“crafty”); polymechanos (“resourceful”). But the proem also points to another essential feature of Odysseus: his identity as a much-​suffering man. One of the more common epithets for him in both poems is “long-​suffering divine Odysseus” (polytlas dios Odysseus). And though the etymology is uncertain, the very name “Odysseus” may also mark him as a “son of pain” or a “man of suffering.”30 An important question in the Odyssey is how to understand the many pains, hardships, and sufferings that Odysseus endures throughout the epic. It is tempting to see Odysseus as a kind of righteous sufferer akin, perhaps, to Job or his Babylonian counterpart, the author of the Ludlul bel nemeqi. The proem places Odysseus in a morally favorable light when it presents his companions as victims of their own “recklessness” (atasthaliēsin) who perished despite his valiant attempts to save them. Farther on in book 1, in the famous “theodicy” passage, Zeus complains that humans unjustly blame the gods for their sufferings when, in fact, they “by their own recklessness [atasthaliēsin] win sorrow beyond what is given [hyper moron]” (Od. 1.34). The parade example is Aigisthos, who ignored warnings from the gods, killed Agamemnon upon his return, and married Klytaimestra, only to be cut down by Agamemnon’s son, Orestes. Aigisthos went beyond what was rightful for him to do. He acted hyper moron (1.35), and he paid a price in sorrow that was correspondingly hyper moron. Ever eager to aid Odysseus, Athena argues that Odysseus is not at all like Aigisthos. His homecoming, she says, has been delayed by a goddess even though he made the appropriate offerings to Zeus before setting out from Troy (1.60–​62). Athena suggests that Odysseus suffers in spite of his pious actions. Zeus’s response to Athena is shrewd. He ultimately approves her suggestion to bring Odysseus home, as he is well aware that Odysseus is a prolific sacrificer (1.65–​67). But he is not willing to grant that the sufferings of Odysseus are unwarranted. Zeus defends his own honor as a just ruler by pointing out that Odysseus has indeed propitiated the gods handsomely and so deserves due consideration. Yet the real reason that Odysseus cannot reach home is that Poseidon, with just cause, prevents it. Zeus reminds Athena that Odysseus blinded the eye of Polyphemos the Cyclops, the son of Poseidon. Poseidon opposes Odysseus specifically for this act. Zeus hints that Poseidon’s response is a punishment that fits the crime. Odysseus did not kill

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Polyphemos, so Poseidon, appropriately, spares Odysseus’s life: as Zeus says, Poseidon “does not kill Odysseus, yet drives him back from the land of his fathers” (1.74–​75). In taking the suggestion of Athena, Zeus does not confer on Odysseus the status of a righteous sufferer or anything of the sort. He has simply decided that Odysseus has paid his dues, both to Poseidon and to himself, and that it is time for him to go home.31 Though the proem highlights the offense of Odysseus’s crew against the sun god Helios (1.8), the gathering of the gods in book 1 points, as I have shown, to the centrality of Odysseus’s actions and his offense against Poseidon. At the time of this gathering, the poet places Poseidon far away from Olympos in the land of the Aithiopians (1.22). Since he is not there to defend his actions, it falls to Zeus to explain to Athena and the others the case against Odysseus. In doing so, Zeus mentions both the blinding of Polyphemos and his godlike stature as greatest of the Cyclopes. Though it appears that Poseidon merely bears a personal grudge against Odysseus for injuring and insulting his savage, man-​eating son, the full description of the episode later in the epic suggests that something greater was at stake. In book 9, we find Odysseus among the Phaiakians, in the hall of king Alkinoös, ready to tell his story to a great gathering of people. After describing the troubles he and his crew endured when they set out from Troy—​many caused by the foolishness of the crew (9.41–​ 61, 96–​104)—​Odysseus dwells at length on his encounter with Polyphemos. Necessity did not drive them to the cave of Polyphemos; the curiosity of Odysseus lured them there. It was only because Odysseus wanted to see what kind of people the Cyclopes were that he and a select crew left a peaceful island full of wild game and crossed the harbor to the cave of Polyphemos: The rest of you, who are my eager companions, wait here, while I, with my own ship and companions that are in it, go and find out [peirēsomai] about these people, and learn what they are, whether they are savage and violent [hybristai], and without justice or hospitable to strangers and with minds that are godly. (9.172–​176) It is easy to overlook the ethical import of this passage and to imagine that Odysseus here merely acts on an innocent desire for information or pursues an idle fancy.32 Yet it would be a mistake to think of Odysseus as a kind of cultural anthropologist eager to do some fieldwork. What Odysseus proposes to do is to find out by testing (peirao) how well the Cyclopes measure up to ethical ideals: order, justice, and piety. To appear among humans and try them in this way is the prerogative of the gods.33 What may seem to us a laudable

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(or harmless) pursuit of knowledge is better understood, in Homeric terms, as an arrogation of divine authority. The attainment of knowledge requires that Odysseus assume a godlike position with respect to the Cyclopes. Yet, ironically, it is Polyphemos who has divine parents and godlike stature, not Odysseus. To the extent that hubris is rooted in the desire to demonstrate one’s superiority over another, Odysseus’s adventure with Polyphemos is hubristic ab initio, in its very conception. In seeking to investigate the hubris of the Cyclopes, he ends up demonstrating his own. Once in the cave, Odysseus and his companions learn that Polyphemos and the Cyclopes do not fear the gods or honor the conventions of guest-​ friendship (xeinia). When Polyphemos promptly eats two of Odysseus’s men, they realize they are in a death trap. Odysseus now has the answers to his anthropological questions; facing death, he now has knowledge. The story of the men’s ingenious escape, cunningly devised by Odysseus, is well known. The scheme to intoxicate Polyphemos, blind him in his sleep, and escape while hanging upside down from the male sheep (who are not milked) is brilliant in every way. The added device of telling Polyphemos beforehand that his name is “Nobody” (ou tis) ensures that any plea for help from fellow Cyclopes becomes a sullen rejection of help. In great pain and distress, Polyphemos exclaims:  “Nobody is killing me by force or treachery!” (9.408) Before the puzzled Cyclopes outside the cave leave Polyphemos to his misery, they unwittingly indicate the theme of the story: “no one [mē tis] does you violence [biazetai]” (9.410). With this famous wordplay, Homer punctuates the victory of Odysseus’s mētis (“cunning”) over the biē (“force”) of Polyphemos. Mētis is an essential feature of Odysseus’s character.34 Though the story of Polyphemos is perhaps the best example, other feats of mētis figure importantly in the tales of the Trojan War, notably the night raid on the Thracian camp (Il. 10.332–​ 542) and the scheme to infiltrate Troy in a wooden horse (Od. 8.498–​520). These and other stories built Odysseus’s reputation as the cleverest and most cunning of all the heroes. As Telemachos reports, Odysseus has “the best mind among men for craft [mētis],” and there is “no other man among mortal men who can contend” with him (Od. 23.125–​126). Mētis is essential to Odysseus’s particular heroic excellence, his form of aretē. Intellectual curiosity might seem to be a natural accompaniment to this sort of excellence; one who relies on his wits surely has some stake in “knowing” things and applying lessons learned from experience. Yet the story of Odysseus suggests that, while mētis is essential to heroic virtue, profound knowledge and godlike understanding are not.35 Mētis is much closer to being a skill or ability than it is to being a form of knowledge. The exercise of mētis, in fact, presupposes a situation that it is indeterminate, unstable, and open-​ended, one in which knowledge as a

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form of ultimate understanding is either impossible or unavailable. To one who lives by mētis, the world is not derivable from some fixed and final reality; the goal is not to pierce or sweep aside the veil of illusion and realize a fundamental truth. The goal of mētis is not understanding but success. One who relies on mētis already has some goal in mind and now intends to reach it by cunning and deceit. According to Marcel Detienne and Jean-​Pierre Vernant, mētis takes for granted that things are in flux, shot through with contingency, but that the possessor of mētis is himself stable and resolute: [I]n order to reach his goal directly, to pursue his way without deviating from it, across a world which is fluctuating and constantly oscillating from one side to another, he must himself adopt an oblique course and make his intelligence sufficiently wiley and supple to bend in every conceivable way and his gait so ‘askew’ that he can be ready to go in any direction.36 The goal, then, is not to arrive at knowledge but to exploit changing circum­ stances, to produce a particular outcome in spite of perplexing variability. If the story of Polyphemos illustrates the mētis of Odysseus, it also illustrates his hubris. The initial bid for godlike knowledge of the Cyclopes is hubristic. Yet it is not until Odysseus escapes from the cave that the full extent of his hubris is evident. In the cave, Odysseus is placed in a humiliating position. He watches helplessly as Polyphemos eats six of his companions, and he endures imprisonment in the cave while his prestige as a leader dwindles with every passing moment. The opportunistic Odysseus, though, takes notice of small things (an olive branch lying on the floor, the male sheep in the cave rather than in the pen outside) and improvises a brilliant escape. For Odysseus to carry off the plan, though, he has to negate himself by giving up his name, his onoma klyton (9.364), on which his “honour and glory are fastened”; he has to become a “nobody.”37 Odysseus has to accept the indignity of being temporarily thought by Polyphemos a weak, small, and ineffectual person. When the plan succeeds and Odysseus and his companions reach their ship, he cannot resist the temptation to taunt Polyphemos and reassert his own status as a great hero. He takes up his heroic name once again, revealing his true identity as “Odysseus, sacker of cities,” son of Laertes, and native of Ithaka (9.504). He also extends the taunt to Poseidon himself, claiming that even he will not be able to heal the eye of Polyphemos (9.525). The taunts allow Polyphemos to pray specifically against Odysseus and to curse his homecoming, while the gratuitous insult of Poseidon foreshadows great troubles at sea. Odysseus also offends Zeus here. Odysseus’s mistake is to claim that, in being blinded,

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Polyphemos now suffers the justice of “Zeus and the rest of the gods” (9.479). By this claim, Odysseus portrays his defeat of Polyphemos as a “victory of the Olympian order,” a just punishment of Polyphemos’s gross violations of hospitality.38 But Odysseus had no right either to test or to punish any of the Cyclopes in the name of the gods. Odysseus’s triumph was, in fact, a fortunate escape from an ill-​advised adventure in which he acted entirely on his own and took vengeance on Polyphemos for his own personal humiliation. For Odysseus to claim a divine mandate in this case is hubris. But in the case of the suitors—​who devour the estate of Odysseus, hound his wife, Penelope, and plot against his son, Telemachos—​Odysseus is in fact an agent of divine justice. The suitors act with “recklessness” and, by Zeus’s logic in book 1, bring destruction on themselves. When the gods meet in council to reaffirm the plan to bring Odysseus home, Athena makes specific mention of the suitors (5.18), and Zeus affirms her plan: “Odysseus shall make his way back, and punish those others” (5.24). With the support of Zeus, Athena swings into action. Though absent from Odysseus’s early adventures, Athena plays an active role in Odysseus’s story after he has lost everything. She takes on the tasks of getting Odysseus home when he has neither ship nor crew, returning him in honor when he has lost his prizes at sea, and destroying all the suitors when he is badly outnumbered. She appears, in other words, precisely when her specialty—​ mētis—​is required.39 Odysseus arrives at Ithaka alone but with all of the gifts he received from the Phaiakians. Athena appears in the guise of a stranger, and Odysseus, ever wary, tells her a false story about who he is and where his massive treasure has come from. Taking clear delight in his knavery, Athena reveals herself and notes the special affinity between herself and Odysseus: But come, let us talk no more of this, for you and I both know sharp practice, since you are far the best of all mortal men for counsel and stories, and I among all the divinities am famous for wit and sharpness; and yet you never recognized Pallas Athene, daughter of Zeus, the one who is always standing beside you and guarding you in every endeavor. And it was I who made you loved by all the Phaiakians. And now I am here, to help you in your devising of schemes [mētis], and to hide the possessions which the haughty Phaiakians bestowed—​it was by my thought and counsel—​on you, as you started for home, and tell you all the troubles you are destined to suffer in your well-​wrought house; but you must, of necessity [anankē], endure

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all, and tell no one out of all the men and women that you have come back from your wanderings, but you must endure much grief in silence, standing and facing men in their violence [bias]. (13.296–​310) In this enjoyable scene, the trickster gets tricked. Though Odysseus thinks he is skillfully misdirecting a stranger by quickly concocting an elaborate story, it is he who labors under a false impression. He cannot tell that he is in Ithaka and that it is Athena who addresses him. Were it more competitive, it might be described as a contest of mētis. Athena does not deign to challenge Odysseus’s attempt at a ruse: she simply smiles, lays a friendly hand on him, and says, in effect, “how very like you to resort to trickery” (13.287–​295). She goes on to explain that she has been working behind the scenes all along to set up a hero’s return. Because of her machinations, the Phaiakians have now brought him to Ithaka with more booty than he could ever have taken from Troy (13.137). On this point, though, Athena is clear: though Odysseus may have won a hero’s return, he will not receive a hero’s welcome. Though he has reached home, he is, in fact, entering hostile territory. For him to regain control of his house, Odysseus will have to obey Athena. He understands that he will have to bring his own crafty nature, his mētis, under the control of Athena’s equally crafty nature, her mētis. As he says to her: “Come then, weave the design [mētis], the way I shall take my vengeance upon them” (13.386). From this point on, Odysseus obeys Athena fastidiously. The shift in Odysseus’s character from one that is proud, independent, and resourceful to one that is, apparently, slavishly obedient to a goddess may seem problematic.40 But if one sees Athena as Odysseus’s divine counterpart (13.296–​299), the goddess of mētis who stands by the hero of mētis, then the obedience of Odysseus comes into view, not as an effacement of human intellect and personality but rather as an extension of them. Though Odysseus wins through by obeying Athena’s crafty plans, it is difficult to imagine any other Homeric hero succeeding in following them in the way Odysseus does. They suit him uniquely, and so he is enlarged rather than diminished by his cooperation with Athena. Athena’s plan, moreover, involves the same elements that were part of Odysseus’s cunning escape from the cave of Polyphemos. She tells Odysseus that he will be constrained by “necessity” (anankē) in his “house.” He will find himself in a life-​and-​death situation in his own halls, just as he, hemmed in by necessity, faced imminent death in the “house” of Polyphemos. He will once again have to lay aside his identity, his great heroic name, and tell no one who he is and all that he has done. He will sink to the status of a

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“nobody,” this time in his own land. As such, he will have to bear “grief in silence,” endure the abuses of the suitors and even some of the servants in his own house, just as he suppressed his own desire for valor and bided his time in the cave of the disdainful Cyclops. And, finally, Athena tells him that he will have to stand and face violence, the biē of a numerically superior force. As in the cave of Polyphemos, Odysseus will not be able to win by force of arms alone. Once again, mētis will be required to overcome biē.41 The plan succeeds. Odysseus eventually slaughters the suitors and disloyal servants and comes, once again, to his rightful place. In the process, he is reintegrated into his own household and rejoined with Penelope after a spectacular victory. This time, however, he is in no mood to boast. In the end, Odysseus understands his return to Ithaka and his victory over the suitors, accurately, as a triumph of justice. He forbids the old nurse Eurykleia from rejoicing over the bodies of the slain suitors and deemphasizes his own role in the matter: Keep your joy in your heart, old dame: stop, do not raise up the cry. It is not piety to glory so over slain men. These were destroyed by the doom of the gods and their own hard actions, for these men paid no attention at all to any man on earth who came their way, no matter if he were base or noble. So by their own recklessness they have found a shameful death. (22.411–​417) In contrast to the taunting of Polyphemos, the words spoken by Odysseus to Eurykleia in his own hall are sober, modest, and apt. He has undergone an important change. The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’s return, but it is also the story of a ruler who returns to his city with wisdom gained from suffering and divine chastisement—​an Aegean Gilgamesh. Though Poseidon may have wanted only to punish Odysseus for insults and injuries, other gods had more constructive interests. Circe, for example, orchestrates for Odysseus a journey to the underworld, which prepares him in important ways for his homecoming. On the one hand he gains information there:  he is warned about the violent suitors and told by his own mother that Penelope and Laertes, his father, remain loyal to him and await his return. On the other hand he gains Homeric knowledge: access to privileged things that concern his character and personal fate. From departed heroes, he learns that death limits the length of one’s life but not the duration of one’s character. In death heroes remain as they were. Telamonian Aias still grieves over a lost prize, the

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armor of Achilles (12:563–​564). Achilles takes no solace in being a dignitary in Hades. He takes joy only in the fact that his son Neoptolemos is now a valiant warrior (12.488–​491, 538–​540). Odysseus learns from the pitiable shade of Agamemnon two things: that he cannot count on a good nostos (“return”), and there is no making up for a bad one. For the hero, a successful return is not an optional prelude to a blissful afterlife. Rather, the afterlife is a doleful postlude to the actual life that one has lived and the final end, good or bad, to which one has come. Finally, the prophet Tiresias tells Odysseus that when it is all over, he will need to venture far inland and sacrifice to Poseidon and the gods in order to ensure a peaceful reign; after this he will die peacefully (12.127–​134). Where Circe provides knowledge, Zeus provides discipline.42 This is evident, for example, in his treatment of Odysseus and his crew after the Polyphemos episode. When the men reach the island of Helios and are informed by Circe that they must not touch the sacred cattle there, they prudently keep away. But Zeus sends a storm, pins the ship to land, and keeps them in place with a “south wind” that prevents them from leaving the island for an entire month (12.313–​326). When provisions give out, the men slaughter the cattle and so offend Helios. Zeus does not punish them immediately but waits for them to sail away. After they reach open water, Zeus strikes the ship and kills the crew (12.415–​419). Only Odysseus survives. The cattle episode, then, was a disaster brought on by Zeus to enforce the importance of respecting the gods. The crew were casualties of a divine plan to discipline, not destroy, Odysseus. This is clear from the fact that Zeus himself rescues Odysseus from the disaster at sea. When Odysseus floats along helplessly after ship and crew are lost, it is Zeus who shields Odysseus from the monster Skylla and saves him from “sheer destruction” (12.446–​447). In this way, Zeus sets the stage for the chastened hero, now without arms or allies, to use his mētis to accomplish larger, nobler purposes.

Conclusion As great as they are, Homeric heroes are not gods. Despite the similarities and complex relations between gods and heroes, the two inhabit fundamentally separate realms. In one of the most remarkable passages in the epics, the “Shield of Achilles” (Il. 18.478–​607), Homer describes the human realm. In order to obtain new armor for Achilles, Thetis goes to Hephaistos, who readily agrees to provide it. What follows upon their conversation is not a description of the shield but rather, as Gotthold Lessing famously pointed out, an account of the “divine artificer at work upon it.”43 This passage, then, is a kind

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of creation account, an account not of the world but of the lines that mark out the spheres of human life. In the skillful work of Hephaistos, we see the exercise of a divine power implicit in all that the Homeric gods say and do: the power to see, understand, and affect human life in its totality. In the account, we see that human life is embedded in the natural world, as Hephaistos sets everything within the confines of the great oceanic river and the features of the land, sky, sea, and stars. Hephaistos’s figures are animated with exceptional care, balance, and detail. In one city, two sides go before the city elders, seated on polished stones, to seek justice in a wrongful death case. In another, a besieging army debates strategy while women, children, and old men watch nervously from the city wall. There is joy and beauty in a great dance held in a meadow and in the singing that accompanies the grape harvest, but there is also pathos in the sight of corpses dragged from a chaotic battle, the ambush of unsuspecting shepherds who are killed while playing happily on their pipes, and the spectacle of lions gulping down the blood and guts of a great ox while the herdsmen and their dogs watch helplessly. In all these scenes we are made to see human life in its various aspects and in changing conditions of weal and woe. But what is common to all these scenes is their portrayal of human beings as actors in small social dramas, their depiction of human life as a set of performances constrained by nature, custom, and contingency. There are no individuals, only people in clear roles participating in recognized activities. Even the king who is mentioned (Il. 18.550–​557) is there to heighten the sense of order and harmony that pervades a great feast on his temenos (“royal estate”). He is entirely conventional. Something else is noteworthy. Given the prominence of the gods in the epics, it is strange that the depiction of life on the Shield is largely “secular.” No one prays, makes sacrifices, or appears to be doing anything overtly religious. The only gods depicted are Ares and Athena (Il. 18.516–​519), who appear as shining, oversize figures leading the armies in the siege mentioned above. Though their presence may simply signify war in general, it also recalls, more specifically, the Trojan War and the events of the Iliad, in which the two took opposing sides.44 If the allusion is indeed specific, then we are made to see the entire epic, the great drama of gods and heroes, as yet another, strikingly ordinary instance of people simply doing what people do. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret this passage as a “critical” interlude in the poem, a moment in which the mask slips, the poet winks knowingly at his cynical audience, and a flat, disenchanted view of the world appears briefly behind Homer’s great theological edifice. The description, it must be remembered, is not attributed to the poet but to a god. For this

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reason, the “secularity” of the passage is not a reflection of the human perspective on things but of the view the gods take of the world below. The gods do not feature prominently in the depiction of human life precisely because they are involved in it. It belongs to the gods to oversee human events; for this reason, the Shield wrought by Hephaistos is more like a window than a mirror. And as the Shield makes clear, the essential feature of human life as presided over by the Olympians is order. It is not a cosmic order with inexorable laws and predetermined outcomes that override human will and personality. It is a different kind of order, and it has two aspects. On the one hand it emerges from certain fixed realities that the gods hold inviolate. The best example of this is human mortality: not even the gods can prevent a mortal from tasting death (Od. 3.268–​270). On the other hand this order is something that must be constantly negotiated and maintained. It includes, for instance, social rules that specify roles for men and women, aristocrats and commoners, bards and warriors. It is reflected in customs (themistes) that govern things like marriage, legal disputes, hospitality, and warfare. The Shield provides a large-​scale portrait of life in which humans, though constrained in certain ways, nevertheless function freely with respect to social order, both in keeping and in violating it. Against this backdrop, the dramatic events of the epics appear, in the first instance, as disruptions of order: the initial dishonoring of Chryses and Achilles by Agamemnon, the unreasonable rejection of gifts and supplications by Achilles, the recklessness of the suitors, the hubris of Odysseus, and, above all, the abduction of Helen by Paris. The disorders of the epics occasion specific divine interventions, episodes in which the gods act to restore, if not justice, then at least a measure of equilibrium: the replenishment of Achilles’s honor, the return of Hektor’s body to Priam, the glorious return of Odysseus, peace in Ithaka, and the ultimate return of Helen to Sparta. Given all this, we may describe knowledge and wisdom in Homer as separate things. Knowledge includes a basic understanding of order, a clear grasp of what is right or proper for one to do given one’s position. It also includes an awareness of one’s actual situation, relevant events in the past, and circumstances that may affect one’s ability to meet specific goals. Knowledge that exceeds these things, though, is largely unavailable and, as Odysseus finds out, unwise to pursue.45 When the poems refer to higher realities, the large-​ scale calibrations of order undertaken by the gods, they appear to impart some knowledge of them. Achilles, for example, speaks of two great urns from which Zeus pours out fortune and misfortune upon humans (Il. 24.527–​533). Zeus is said elsewhere to balance the fates of humans in a scale before deciding how to influence events (Il. 8.69, 22.209). These and similar pronouncements

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(for example, “all lies in the lap of the great gods”; Od. 16.129), though, are metaphors for ignorance rather than pieces of actual knowledge. They reflect the utter inability of humans to know, in the absence of special revelations, how the gods will rule; they express the fact that one cannot predict whether or how human plans will come to fruition. As binaries that divide the future between divine favor and disfavor, success and failure, these metaphors amount to confessions of contingency, acknowledgments of the inscrutability of the divine. Seen from an Olympian distance—​the vantage point afforded by Hephaistos—​human knowledge is ultimately a knowledge of limits. To know one’s portion in life (moira or moros), one’s share (aisa), is essential to leading a good life.46 To know oneself, on this view, is not to recognize what makes oneself a unique, distinctive individual but rather to understand and accept one’s lot in life. This is not to say, however, that there is no room in Homeric self-​knowledge for personality. Quite the contrary. As I have shown, knowledge creates situations in which the character of a particular hero is vividly expressed. But character is not the same as individuality. The heroic character or heroic temper belongs to all the heroes in the epics. While it is true that they manifest different forms of heroic excellence and so are distinguishable from one another, their ultimate claims to fame rest on the degree to which they possess excellence. All desire to be mighty in counsel, but Nestor has the distinction of being the best orator. Many posses mētis, but Odysseus is who he is because he is the most excellent in this regard. Achilles does not strive to be singular in the sense of being unique (the “one and only Achilles”); his singularity consists in his being “the best of the Achaians.” Knowledge of one’s character—​in contrast to a belief in one’s fundamental individuality—​ is an important component of Homeric wisdom. To know one’s character is to understand one’s field of action (e.g., the pursuit of kleos) and the self-​ particular way that one may operate within it (e.g., biē, mētis, boulē). Along with a respect for limits, then, knowledge of one’s character is essential to the pursuit of a worthy life. The wisdom of Homer assumes this kind of knowl­ edge, but the two are not identical, for wisdom also includes one’s response to this knowledge. To the extent that Achilles and Odysseus are exemplars of Homeric wisdom, we may say that the wise hero also possesses courage, a sturdiness of mind and heart that allows him to persist in spite of failure, opposition, and adversity. It belongs to all mortals to die, but death is not the same for all. Achilles may have complained at one point that death comes equally to the brave and the cowardly (Il. 9.318–​320), but his actions speak louder than his words. In the end, he heeds the gods, masters his wrath, and faces death as the doomed son of Thetis, the avenger of Patroklos, the savior

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of the Greek armies, and indeed the greatest of the Achaians. Odysseus leaves Ogygia and an immortal life with Calypso, knowing that his chosen path includes pain, suffering, and death. But the journey home also promises an opportunity to return to the land of his fathers, take up his rightful position, and regain his own life. In the stories of these two, Homer draws back the veil of ignorance and allows us to see the heroes as the gods see them. The hero is not simply one who lives for honor; he is a man who has held nobly his allotted share and reached his end unashamed. To be mortal is to die, but to be a hero is to die as oneself.

Summary The Homeric wisdom program highlights the role of character and choice in reaching personal fulfillment. What guides choice and supplies the criteria for a choiceworthy life are limits inherent in the social and sacred orders, which are recognized as unalterable realities (human mortality; fate), customary expectations (especially regarding honor), and certain virtues proper to heroic life (courage; cunning). Cosmic order, though taken for granted, is not an important resource for moral reasoning. Because knowledge and power ultimately reside with the gods, it belongs to humans to honor the gods with sacrifices and obedience. Heroic wisdom brings piety into view as a prudent response to metaphysical vulnerability, a basis for friendship with the gods, and a vital part of attaining true selfhood.

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Wisdom and Knowledge in the Hebrew Bible I said, “I will be wise,” but it was far from me. That which is, is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out? —​Ecclesiastes 7:23–​24

The Bible appears to take a dim view of knowledge. Examples abound in the book of Genesis. The most famous sin in the Bible, the eating of forbidden fruit by the first humans, was a bid for knowledge. Those credited with impressive innovations, including the construction of cities, animal husbandry, musical instruments, and metalworking, are marked as descendants of the murderous Cain. The builders of the Babel tower employ technical know-​how (fire-​hardened bricks!) and centralized planning to pursue an ambitious project, only to find themselves scattered and defeated by Yahweh. Those remembered as exemplary forefathers, Noah and Abraham, obeyed extraordinary divine commandments in morally perplexing, life-​and-​death situations without asking a single question, indeed without saying anything at all. Elsewhere in the Bible we find prophets denigrating the cultural practices of other nations, speaking with such vehemence about the futility of others’ moral and religious lives that any attempt to learn from or about them seems, on the prophetic view, not only useless but dangerous. Not even Babylonian astrology, so widely admired in the ancient Near East, is exempt from prophetic scorn. One of the Hebrew Bible’s greatest sages, Qohelet, possessed an exceptionally keen and questioning spirit. Yet if one reads his book, appropriately in my view, as a unitary composition, then we see a brilliant figure, drained and disheartened by the pursuit of knowledge, falling back on a traditional piety seemingly at odds with his own observations about the world. And so on. Despite the impression conveyed by these examples, the books of the Hebrew Bible are not “antiknowledge” in any simple sense. Hebrew words

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having to do with “knowledge”—​whether nouns (daʿat; less commonly deʿah or deaʿ) or verbs (yadaʿ; nodaʿ; hodiaʿ; etc.)—​derive from a commonly used root (ydʿ) and have a broad range of meanings. In the Hebrew Bible, “knowing” describes both a process by which one learns or realizes new things (to come to know) and a state in which one has already acquired new information, either through experience or communication (to be in the know). Yadaʿ is also used to describe acquaintance or familiarity with persons (see French connaître and German kennen), as well as technical know-​how (e.g., hunting; Gen 25:27) or skills (e.g., playing music; 1 Sam 16:16). One well-​known idiom involving yadaʿ refers to sexual intercourse as the act of “knowing” another (e.g., “Adam knew his wife Eve and she conceived”; Gen 4:1). This last example clarifies a broader point about yadaʿ, that “knowing” involves action and experience as well as words and perceptions. As in other languages, then, the common word for “knowledge” in Hebrew is flexible and multifaceted. In the so-​called Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, in books like Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, we find sustained reflection on all aspects of knowledge: cosmology, ethics, social morality, piety. Much of this literature is skillful, sophisticated, and erudite, the work of seasoned sages writing for learned audiences. And to a considerable extent, the writings themselves manifest a high view of knowledge. Consider, for example, the opening lines of the book of Proverbs: The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel: For learning about wisdom and instruction, for understanding words of insight, for gaining instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice, and equity; to teach shrewdness to the simple, knowledge and prudence to the young—​ let the wise also hear and gain in learning, and the discerning acquire skill, to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles. (1:1–​6) This is not simply a generic commendation of knowledge but an explicit program for obtaining it and many other things—​according to Michael Fox, a prologue that is also a “statement of purpose” for the entire book.1 To borrow an Aristotelian distinction, we find, along with virtues of character like discipline and prudence, several intellectual virtues as well. The prominence of

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these virtues in the prologue and the overall character of the book contribute to the larger judgment that Proverbs is not merely “proknowledge” but, in some fundamental sense, aimed at knowledge. As James Crenshaw puts it: “in essence, Proverbs is a search for knowledge, for the aim of the many attempts to grasp reality seems to be the acquisition of sufficient understanding about nature and human beings to enable persons to live wisely and well.”2 In describing Proverbs this way, Crenshaw emphasizes knowledge even as he recognizes its instrumentality: the point of acquiring knowledge, he writes, is “to live wisely and well.” The formidably dense prologue of Proverbs strings together a good many things: knowledge, wisdom, and all the rest. It is important, however, to avoid the temptation to overintellectualize wisdom and treat the prologue’s wisdom words essentially as synonyms for intelligence, constellations of intellectual wisdom-​ish properties, or loose approximations of an otherwise indefinable mental capacity called “wisdom.” Just as Crenshaw hints here at an ordering of wisdom and knowledge (knowledge aids wisdom), concepts found in Proverbs and elsewhere must be teased apart. Their specific concerns and relations must be accurately delineated. What emerges from this effort is an ordered, hierarchical understanding of wisdom as a mediating concept, one that bridges the difference between a higher divine knowledge and a lower, provisional form of human understanding. The goal here is to understand what counts as knowledge and to understand its relation to the human sphere, the human field of action—​in other words, the part of life that belongs to wisdom. In this chapter, I will explicate the relation between knowledge and wisdom by looking at three key biblical texts: Gen 1–​3, the book of Proverbs, and the book of Ecclesiastes. By embedding human life in a cosmic order, Gen 1 and Proverbs set out the conditions for human knowledge and recognition of creational order; they point to the seamless connection of the metaphysical to the cosmological and the ethical. Yet they are balanced by a further recognition of human limitations in Gen 2–​3 and Ecclesiastes, where metaphysical vulnerability, as in Homer’s epics, is integrated into an understanding of wisdom as something quite distinct from knowledge.

The First Knowers Biblical critics used to speak with some confidence about the combination of two discrete sources in the “primeval history of Genesis” (Gen 1–​11).3 On the one hand the Priestly source (P) was identified with the initial creation story (1:1–​2:4a), genealogies, dietary laws, and a version of the flood

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story. A  pronounced interest in cultic matters such as purity, sacrifice, and temporal order was thought to characterize P materials. On the other hand the Yahwist ( J) was credited with a second creation account (2:4b–​25); the stories of human expulsion from the garden of Eden (3:1–​24), the murder of Abel by Cain, and the tower of Babel; and a separate tale of the flood. Some styled J as a kind of narrative theologian, more worldly and naturalistic in outlook and more sensitive to the existential realities of sin.4 In this way, critical analysis recognized a dialectic within the primeval history of Genesis. Instead of a single narrative troubled by doublets and inconsistencies, it yielded a composite text with two distinct perspectives on the beginnings of the natural world, human moral consciousness, social arrangements, and cultural difference. In one, we observe the primacy and durability of a divinely constituted order. In the other, we are made to see, among other things, the difficulties that beset Yahweh and human beings within this order. The tension between the two is a fruitful one, useful especially in characterizing the strangeness and complexity of the human predicament. Whether one traces variabilities within Genesis to preexisting literary sources or to fragmentary traditions, one may discern in the final form of Gen 1–​3 a two-​part sequence: the creation of the conditions of knowledge (P) and the failure of humans to secure flourishing life through knowledge ( J). To this sequence I now turn. Genesis 1 begins with the simple statement that “God created the heavens and the earth.” Importantly, though, the text identifies God’s act of creation with a “beginning” (Heb. rešit). Some modern English translations suggest an absolute temporal beginning; for example, the Authorized Version: “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The Tanakh of the Jewish Publication Society, however, describes a relative temporal beginning: “when God began to create heaven and earth  .  .  .”5 In these translations, creation is connected either to a definite point that initiates time itself or to one already preceded by some measure of time. A  third option, however, would be to understand rešit not in the sense of a temporal beginning but rather as a substantive description of the way God created the world. Though rešit (from roš “head”) often refers to temporal beginnings (e.g., the beginnings of regnal periods; Jer 26:1, 27:1, 28:1), it also refers, elsewhere in the Pentateuch, to “first fruits” brought as offerings to the altar (Exod 23:19, 34:26; Lev 2:12; etc.). Most relevant here is the sense of rešit as that which takes priority, enjoys pride of place. It is in this sense that Prov 1:7 commends “fear of Yahweh” as the rešit of wisdom, the thing that precedes wisdom logically and temporally. Proverbs 4:7 marks a different rešit for wisdom: “the beginning of wisdom is

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this: Get wisdom.” In this somewhat startling formulation, the principal part of wisdom-​seeking is said (tautologically) to be wisdom-​seeking. That is, the acquisition of wisdom is, in principle, a matter of taking initiative to become wise; it cannot be left to chance inspiration or passive expectation. In both proverbs, the rešit of wisdom is not so much a moment in time as a conceptual necessity; it indicates a basic truth about wisdom, a first principle. Ancient interpreters of Genesis also understood rešit in Gen 1:1 as having to do with the “way” and not simply the “when” of God’s creative activity, an indication that the creation took place according to plan or principle. Take for example the well-​known rabbinic statement that the creation conformed to the Torah: “God looked into the Torah and created the world.”6 The prologue to John’s gospel points to the divine “word” (logos) that was with God “in the beginning” (“en archē”). The logos is not static but dynamically active: through the logos all things come into being ( John 1:1–​3). For Christians and Jews, the logos and the Torah (respectively) reflect something fundamental about the world’s rešit, the nature of the created order. Readers of the Latin Bible also perceived the resonance of creation “in the beginning.” Augustine, for example, was uncertain whether the literal sense of in principio was “in the beginning of time or in the principle.”7 There is a single voice and a single creative will throughout the P account, one Maker following a premeditated sequence: first of light, space, and land on three successive, enumerated days; then, on a second, closely correlated triad of days, of luminaries that govern time, animals that inhabit specific domains, and plants that reliably reproduce their own kinds.8 It is, in short, a well-​organized world. Though complex, the order is not baroque; though multifaceted, it is not intimidating. The Priestly writer describes a world that is amenable to the ordering processes of reason. God’s creative activity follows a structure; it consists, to a significant degree, in separating (1:4, 6, 7, 14, 18), naming (1:5, 8, 10), and assigning functions to things (1:6, 11, 14, 15, 20, 24, 26, 29, 30). One of the most salient features of the account is the prominence of divine fiat, the use of speech to call things into being. Created things are one with their names, such that there is no gap between sign and signified, no room for worry about the indeterminacy and arbitrariness of language, and no lingering Platonic fear of ontological diminishment. The created order is not only rational; it is also hospitable. It is a safe environment for life. In many ancient cosmogonies, the world as we know it is the result of theomachy or battles undertaken by gods against one another or the forces of death and chaos. While it is plausible and perhaps even likely that theomachic Babylonian and Canaanite creation myths inform the biblical account at some

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deeply submerged level, the God of Genesis does not enforce his creative will against foes of any kind. He does not fight in order to create; he simply speaks his will into existence. Nevertheless, the Genesis account does suggest that, in ordering the world, God established supremacy over forces hostile to life. At God’s command, watery chaos and a dark formless void (1:2) give way to the divine wind and to the preternatural light of the One Day (1:5). The dragons (tanninim) that menace civilization in Babylonian myths and other portions of the Bible appear in Genesis as normal sea creatures (1:21).9 Plants, animals, land formations, oceans, and celestial bodies are all assigned suitable domains. In Gen 1, the “war” against chaos is not bloody and heroic but rather bloodless and prosaic. The result of these efforts is an ordered cosmos capable of sustaining a variety of creatures and life forms. This is the judgment, I believe, that is captured by the repeated pronouncement of God that various aspects of creation are “good” (ṭob): the separation of land and sea (1:10); trees and plants that reproduce their own kind (1:12); the establishment of a greater light (sun) and lesser light (moon) to govern day and night (1:18); fish and birds that multiply in kind (1:21); land animals that reproduce in kind (1:25); the whole divine order seen in toto (1:31). All is characterized by a certain fittingness of relation, location, and reproduction. Of all created things, only humans are made “in the image” of God (1:26). Precisely what it means for humans to bear the image of God is a contested question. It will suffice here to note that immediately following the mention of divine likeness and image, God prescribes for humans a ruling position in the world: “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth” (Gen 1:26). Therefore, the bearing of the imago Dei involves, at a minimum, the ability and responsibility of humans to rule over fellow creatures. But rule how and to what end? The language of Gen 1:26–​27 evokes royal imagery. In ancient Near Eastern societies, the king was considered the “image” (ṣelem) or “likeness” (demut) of the deity that appointed him and was therefore authorized to rule and subdue the territory of the god.10 Humans, then, function not as absolute rulers but as God’s vice regents or “plenipotentiary representatives” on earth.11 Though the exercise of delegated authority assumes a certain amount of discretionary power, the viceroyal role is ultimately an extension of the limited, subordinated role of human beings. When humans enter the scene, rather belatedly in the unfolding stages of creation, they take a very definite place in a cosmic order that is fully prior to and independent of themselves. The dominion granted to them includes creaturely realms (sea, air, land) with their

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own ecological and zoological integrity. The world in which they are installed is not a singularity centered on human life but a totality in which humans play a carefully circumscribed role. In all of this, the P account describes an order compatible with human intellection, one that makes the world a proper object of human knowledge. What counts as knowledge here is an understanding of the world as an ordered reality, a cosmos that emerges from divine speech, in which cause and effect, form and matter, description and reality, knowledge and power are aptly coordinated. Though divine knowledge is identifiable with divine power, human knowledge is derivative, associated not with power but responsibility. The commands to let humans have dominion over discrete creaturely realms (Gen 1:26) and to “subdue” the earth (Gen 1:28) presuppose a certain practical knowledge. It is a form of ruling knowl­ edge that corresponds, necessarily, to what is ruled and a reflection, therefore, of what has already been created. Though installed as rulers, humans nevertheless remain embedded in the creation. As if to emphasize the point, the text states that they are to feed on plants and trees just as the birds and beasts do (Gen 1:29–​30). The situation portrayed in Gen 2–​3 is analogous to the one described in Gen 1, although the narrative is different in important ways, notably in style, vocabulary, and scope. Instead of a sublime chaos churning beneath a divine spirit (1:2), there is simply a dry wasteland without suitable vegetation (2:5). Instead of rulers bearing the divine image and likeness (1:26), there is a single man formed out of the dust and animated with a puff of air (2:7). Instead of worldwide dominion for humankind (1:28), the man is put in charge of a garden (2:8, 15). In both cases, though, humans are late arrivals put in positions of responsibility. Missing from the P account are two trees that play a central role in the narrative of Gen 2–​3: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Both are introduced in 2:9, though only one plays a significant role in the narrative. The tree of life is mentioned here and in the story’s denouement (Gen 3:22–​24), where the plan to bar Adam and Eve from the tree of life and expel them from Eden is conceived and carried out. The fact that the tree of life has no part in the main story, which is concerned with one tree rather than two, has led to the critical conjecture that the story was originally about a single forbidden tree, “the tree in the midst of the garden,” but was later adapted so as to join an older, universal “tree of life” tradition with a “tree of knowledge” theme that emerges from the narrative itself.12 Be that as it may, it will be useful to treat the two trees separately, focusing here on the tree of knowledge of good and evil and returning later to the tree of life. After describing the land of Eden and the garden in greater detail, the narrator

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sets the stage by reinforcing the man’s position of responsibility (“to till and keep” the garden; Gen 2:15) and the condition under which he is to live and work: “and the Lord God commanded [vayṣav] the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil [vemeʿeṣ haddaʿat ṭob varaʿ] you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’ ” (Gen 2:16–​17). The verb introducing these instructions is ṣivvah (“to command”), and so the tree becomes a tree under divine interdict, a “tree of command.” It is also, interestingly, the first occurrence of the verb in the Hebrew canon. Of special relevance here is the fact that the tree of command is identified with knowledge (daʿat). Given the prominence of an orderly, intelligible creation in Gen 1 and the man’s position of responsibility, it is surprising and perhaps even disconcerting that the story’s “great commandment” and the first words uttered in the second creation account amount to a prohibition of knowledge. Without ruling knowledge, how are humans to exercise dominion over creation (P) or even keep the garden ( J)? The issue here is knowledge in the context of responsibility: “knowledge of good and evil” or, translated differently, “knowledge of good and bad.”13 In either case, the commandment appears to deny something useful to the man as keeper of the soil and essential to the man as a moral and rational being. The first thing to note about the command is that it is, strictly speaking, a prohibition against eating a particular thing. To speak of eating is to bring into view the man’s position as a dependent, embodied creature: he lives by drawing nourishment from the earth. This point is also made, as I have shown, in the P account, where humans are directed to eat fruits and vegetables while animals feed on grasses of the field. The creational blessing in Gen 1:28–​30 circumscribes the human sphere of action by sanctioning procreation, rulership, and vegetarianism. Far from being an arbitrary or incidental matter, the question of food is essential to the divine mandate. In Gen 1:29, vegetable foods are not simply indicated; they are given to humanity: “see, I have given [natati] you every plant . . . for food.” The use of the verb natan (“to give”) suggests that eating is not simply a response to biological necessity; it is instead an act that is framed by a relationship in which there is a giver, a gift, and a recipient. Though the second creation account does not include this particular verb, the dynamic is essentially the same. The man is permitted to eat of every tree in the garden except the forbidden one; the former are given to him while the latter is expressly withheld. The provision and sanctioning of food is an expression of the man’s relationship to Yahweh and to the earth, his intermediate position as a ruler under divine authority who is “of one essence” with the earth. Unlike P, however, J frames the relationship in

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terms of a prohibition rather than a blessing. This alters the characterization of the relationship in one important respect. What was a stable, hierarchical ordering in P, a kind of cosmic blueprint, has become in Gen 2–​3 the background for a test. The life of the man is staked on obedience to a single, clearly defined commandment. It is true that the commandment is not explicitly identified with a test, as it is, for example, in the case of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac: “after these things, God tested [nissah] Abraham. . . . ‘Take your son, your only son’ ” (Gen 22:1, 2). Yet the essential elements of a test are present: one with authority to judge another and power to enforce consequences; a subject who is aware of relevant criteria and able either to succeed or to fail; and, finally, a clear way to assess results. What is the significance of the fact that the forbidden fruit comes from a tree identified, specifically, with “knowledge of good and evil”? The phrase has proven elusive.14 One suggestion, fortified by a parallel with the sexual awakening of Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, has been to identify knowl­ edge here with sexual experience. According to Gen 3:7, the man and the woman, on eating of the tree, have their eyes opened, recognize their nakedness, and cover themselves with fig leaves. Examples of knowing “good and evil” elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible also have sexual connotations, in the case of a man past his sexual prime (Barzillai; 2 Sam 19:35) and in the case of children who have not reached sexual maturity (Deut 1:39). A second option, followed by many scholars, has been to understand “good and evil” as a merism that takes the two opposites as standing for a whole: in this case, all that may be known.15 What is forbidden, then, is a form of total knowl­ edge that approximates divine omniscience. For this reason, knowledge of good and evil is associated with being “like God” (Gen 3:5, 22). Nahum Sarna advocates a more refined understanding of this knowledge as “the capacity to make independent judgments concerning human welfare.”16 In my view, this description suits the context of Gen 2–​3 best. It seems clear, for example, that when the Lord God states that the man and the woman have become “like us, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:22), he is not claiming that they have become omniscient. Nor does the narrative suggest that they have, in fact, become superhuman in this respect; their experience of fear, shame, banishment, and strife suggests the opposite. The point seems rather to be that the man and the woman are now given to evaluate experience in a particular way, to make subjective judgments about it, to think of things in terms of “good and evil”; for example, to see nudity as nakedness, wife as traitor, serpent as trickster, and divine presence as something to be feared. To make qualitative judgments about things in the world is a divine prerogative. In Gen 1, for example, God repeatedly calls things “good” (ṭob); and, before creating the woman, the Lord

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God states that it is “not good [lo ṭob] that the man should be alone” (Gen 2:18). To “know good and evil” is, in this sense, to pronounce on the propriety and ultimate value of things. And because this right belongs to God, to do so for oneself is to be “like God.” One of the great mysteries of Genesis is the identity of the serpent. He tells the woman that she and the man will become like God as a result of eating from the tree—​a result that is confirmed by God in Gen 3:22. And the serpent claims, too, that they will not die after eating the fruit. From the perspective of the narrative, both statements are half truths. The man and the woman acquire a new capacity to form judgments about experience, but this does not, as the serpent suggested, elevate them to God-​like status. And the man and the woman do not die immediately after eating the fruit; death, instead, comes later. The half truths are designed, of course, to make the prospect of eating the forbidden fruit less repugnant. The serpent takes aim at the commandment initially by presenting a distorted version of it, one that offers the woman an opportunity to correct what the serpent has said. The commandment does not forbid all trees, she says, but only one. With the focus on the tree of command, the serpent succeeds in presenting its fruit as an appealing thing in its own right. He disengages the tree from the commandment by attributing the prohibition to divine jealousy, leaving the way open for the woman to see the tree as an object: So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took [vattiqqaḥ] of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate (Gen 3:6). The act of eating is preceded by the formation of what Sarna called “independent judgments” and shows that the serpent initiated the woman into a “knowledge of good and evil” even before she ate anything. The independent action of “taking” the fruit in hand (laqaḥ “to take, take up, appropriate”) and eating it, then, is but the physical reflex, the logical outcome of the serpent’s exercise in knowledge. In contrast to sanctioned foods, the fruit is taken rather than received, seized rather than accepted, such that the basic framework of human rule under divine authority is compromised. How and why the serpent succeeds in upending this carefully planned arrangement is not explained. The only clue is the indication in Gen 3:1 that the serpent was “more crafty [ʿarum] than any other animal that the Lord God made.” Note that the serpent is not an alien being but a creature made by God, one whose distinctive trait is craftiness or shrewdness [ʿormah]. Though craftiness

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has a negative connotation here and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, it is also commended as a mark of wisdom.17 Though understood traditionally as a diabolical figure, the serpent in Gen 3 seems rather to be playing a role, one suited to his crafty nature. That he plays it, perhaps, too well is indicated by the fact that God punishes him, but the conditions for the serpent’s actions were, broadly speaking, created by the commandment. After punishments are specified for the serpent, the woman, and the man (3:14–​19), the Lord God turns his attention to the tree of life, which, many have noted, plays no part in the main action of the story. When it reappears here, in the postscript to the story, the tree of life further reinforces the thematic importance of death. In the narrative, death is threatened (Gen 2:17), denied (3:4), and finally decreed (3:19). The deathward trajectory of the man’s life, from dust back to dust, forms a contrast with the prospect, apparently still viable, that the man might live forever (“vaḥay leʿolam”; 3:22). Concerned that he might repeat an earlier act, “reach out his hand and take [laqaḥ] also from the tree of life” (3:22), the Lord God expels the man and the woman from the garden and puts cherubim and a flaming sword in place to bar access to the tree of life. At the end of Gen 3, the man and the woman leave Eden and begin mortal lives. The tree of life, now under heavy security, remains behind untouched, its fruit uneaten. But the tree does not disappear. As an inaccessible but still present reality, it forms a second contrast to the post-​ Edenic lives of the man and woman. Gerhard von Rad captures the mood of the narrative when he writes that Gen 2–​3 “closes in profound sadness”; after Eden, “what is left for a man is a life of trouble in the shadow of a crushing riddle, a life entangled in an unbounded and completely hopeless struggle with the power of evil and in the end unavoidably subject to the majesty of death.”18 A  sense of loss also overshadows the one thing that the man and woman did gain from the tree: a God-​like knowledge of good and evil. In the views represented in Genesis, it is appropriate for God to pronounce on the value of things because, as these texts make clear, he is the source of being. Because he is creator, he can also be judge. Human attempts to pronounce on the ultimate meaning or value of things may resemble the exercise of divine judgment, but these judgments are unreliable because humans have only a limited, derivative perception of cosmic order. So for humans to “know good and evil” is to apply categories they do not fully understand, to assign value without knowing the larger context of things. A “knower” in this sense encounters the world in a fragmented way and interferes hastily with his or her own perception of things. For such a “knower,” the exercise of judgment gets in the way of a simpler, more direct form of understanding. Before the man

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gained knowledge of good and evil, he excelled at naming creatures, birds and “every animal of the field” (Gen 2:20). To name something is not to assign it an arbitrary sound but to do something far more profound: to discern its fundamental character, to identify its essence. When the man named the woman, for example, he did not simply describe her, he recognized her: “this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (2:23). The wholeness and totality of the man’s perception, its power and immediacy, differ remarkably from the partial character of the woman’s discursive, “good and evil” thought process in 3:6. For her, the tree is an object that presents itself in stages and in changing aspects—​edibility, aesthetic appeal, intellectual value. The language of the verse, therefore, is the language of subjective judgment. She regards the tree successively as “good for eating,” a “delight to the eyes,” and “desired to make one wise.” This verse describes a process of cognition interrupted by desire, an objectification of the tree that corresponds to and arises from the woman’s own enhanced subjectivity. In the end, this form of understanding leads both to a mistake regarding the nature of the tree and a violation of divine order. Humans cannot rule creation under God’s authority if desire, presumption, and haste are allowed to divert the mind, play havoc with reality, and prevent them from seeing things as they are. Yet humans have eaten of the forbidden tree. Though doomed with mortality and impaired by knowledge of good and evil, they must still work the soil, fill the earth, and fulfill the creational mandate. Given all that humans have lost, how will they carry it out? The presence of the tree of life at the end of Gen 3 may provide a clue. The tree of life does not disappear. Positioned in the background and, this time, closely guarded, it stands for a new post-​Eden possibility, a way for humans to manage the new situation. The tree will not provide immortality; neither will it provide knowledge. A  form of life that stands in opposition to death, even when death is inevitable, is to be accessed, instead, through wisdom. This, at least, is the path, the possibility, that the sages saw. As it says in Proverbs: wisdom is “a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy” (Prov 3:18). This metaphor may only be a “pale figure of speech” and not a direct reference to the tree of life in Genesis.19 But it is an indication, all the same, that prospects for flourishing life lie not with knowledge but with something older, larger, and more vital.

The House of Wisdom Though a notion of wisdom is reflected in the substantive rešit of Gen 1:1, the orderliness of creation, and the hope for flourishing life in the midst of

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death, “wisdom” goes unnamed in Gen 1–​3. The word (ḥokmah) does not appear there. These chapters are concerned with the primeval stage of human life, one in which wisdom-​seeking as a deliberate, self-​conscious endeavor was, for reasons I have indicated, unnecessary and out of place. But after the man and the woman left the garden to live under a new set of conditions characterized by pain, fragmentation, and death, something was necessary to guide human life. In the wide scope of biblical literature, we find a number of texts aimed at assembling just such a guide. Because wisdom and related concepts became the focal point of this effort, it has been customary to speak of the Bible’s “wisdom tradition” or “Wisdom literature.”20 It is best not to define the formal category too rigidly. Though Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job are certainly books concerned with wisdom, the themes, language, and vocabulary of wisdom may also be found in Psalms, in narratives, and in prophetic books. What wisdom materials share is a basic outlook, a sense that human flourishing depends upon the careful discovery and successful transmission of a body of knowledge. According to James Kugel, wisdom is a search for order: It begins with the belief that nothing that happens in the world is random:  everything occurs in keeping with a highly detailed set of (divinely established) rules, divine “wisdom.” No single human being can hope to discover or master the whole of the divine rule book, for God has hidden at least part of His plans far beyond human discovery, and, in any case, human life is much too short to allow a single sage, no matter how discerning, to understand everything. But parts of the divine plan have been grasped by sages past, and they have formulated their insights and set them down for later generations.21 What Kugel describes as a “highly detailed” set of rules begins with the recognition of cosmic regularity, the notion of an ordered creation such as we find in Gen 1. In the Bible, this notion is not expressed in a modern scientific idiom, either in terms of Newtonian natural laws or a determined physical universe with which, as Einstein said, God does not play dice. Instead, the denial of essential randomness is expressed by the claim that the world was created in wisdom or by wisdom.22 In Psalm 104, a meditative hymn of praise, we find a description of human life in the context of a peaceful and hospitable natural environment. The psalmist declares: “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Ps 104:24). In a very different kind of text, a prophetic polemic against idolatry,

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the prophet contrasts the gods of the nations with the God of Israel: “but the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King. . . . It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens” ( Jer 10:10a, 12). In both passages, the supremacy of God is staked on an affirmation of a wisdom that is clearly evident in the world, a cosmic order understood to be the handiwork of a single deity. The best known and certainly the most dramatic identification of creation with wisdom in the Hebrew Bible is found in the speech of Woman Wisdom in Prov 8:22–​31.23 It is not the only passage in which a personified wisdom speaks in the first person.24 But it is especially relevant here because of the way it characterizes the human relationship to divine order: The Lord created me at the beginning [rešit] of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth—​ when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker [ʾamon]; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race. (Prov 8:22–​31) The passage reflects a hierarchical understanding of reality. There is a clear and strong division between creation and creator, between things that are brought into being (mountains, hills, waters, skies) and one who brings them

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into being. What is striking in this passage is that something additional is interposed between them. Remarkably, the familiar biblical idea of a wisely created world is expressed in Prov 8 as the active participation of Wisdom, a separate being, in the creation process itself. Wisdom cannot be classed with other creatures, even the oldest and mightiest among them, because, as a feature of the “beginning” (rešit), she precedes them temporally and logically. Yet she remains subordinate to Yahweh, having been created or acquired by him (8:22) and nurtured in the far distant past as a beloved child, an object of divine delight (8:30).25 What is accomplished by the insertion of an intermediary like Wisdom into an otherwise two-​tiered world? To speak of Wisdom as an entity “between” God and the world is to overcome the brute facticity of creaturely life, to avoid the starkness of an arrangement in which life in the world terminates, logically, in the fact of its own existence. Wisdom thus becomes a way to orient theological reflection, moral reasoning, and spiritual aspiration. It does so on the one hand by directing thought and observation to the world—​cosmic, rational, hospitable, characterized by limits—​and the creator reflected in it. But because, as Kugel points out, the divine plan is too large for any single person or any single generation to exhaust it, wisdom also points to tradition, specifically the wealth of wise sayings (mešalim) handed down from generation to generation. The inclusion of Wisdom’s creational autobiography in the book of Proverbs, then, is entirely apt. As a kind of muse, Wisdom becomes the sponsor of the whole learned tradition, the fons et origo of knowledge. Wisdom speaks with the voice of moral as well as intellectual authority. She commands as often as she informs. In the concluding section of Prov 8, Wisdom alternates between statements and ultimatums:  “hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it.  .  .  . For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord; but those who miss me injure themselves; all who hate me love death” (Prov 8:33, 35–​36). The identification of divine commands with Wisdom characterizes the commands as instructions that are rooted in the order of things, rules that help human beings to secure life and blessing by going, as it were, with the grain of the universe. Apart from Wisdom, divine commands may appear arbitrary. Rooted in wisdom, however, they become a form of instruction directed at beings capable of knowledge and motivated by an appropriate interest in human flourishing. Wisdom, then, serves as a medium for divine commands, a means by which God addresses humans, not simply as base creatures but also as servants capable of understanding and appreciating what is required of them.

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Woman Wisdom speaks of human beings in two categories: those who find her and so find life and divine favor and those who neglect her instruction. The latter come only to ruin and death. There is no middle ground. One either loves wisdom and attains life or treads the path to destruction: “all who hate me love death.” If the world is constituted with a particular moral and intellectual shape—​if it is the product of Wisdom—​then any failure to lay hold of Wisdom must result in fatal, insuperable deficiencies. The constructive character of the created order yields only dualities: life or death, prosperity or perishing, folly or wisdom, righteousness or wickedness. Dualisms structure most of the Proverbs, including the exhortations of Woman Wisdom, but dualistic thinking is also a feature of the broader wisdom tradition. The idea that a wise person should seek to understand life in clear-​cut, black-​and-​white categories jars with modern sensibilities and, indeed, any honest reckoning of life as experienced by most people: Anyone who inhabits terra firma knows full well that few human beings belong entirely to one category or another; why, then, does wisdom literature insist on assigning all of us to one of these two groups? It is, I think, because in that severe eternity of spiritual essences, there really is no room for, no point in, nuance and shadow: the great choices are made in the depths of the human soul, far from the sunlight. . . . [In wisdom’s world] the testimony of the senses is by definition suspect, treacherous, and everything that happens obeys a set of higher moral laws.26 As Kugel points out, it belongs to wisdom not only to work at a high level of abstraction but also to essentialize phenomena, to strip away the confused and often misleading “testimony of the senses” in order to discern fundamental realities. The point is not to deny the ambiguity of appearances, “gray areas,” but rather to deny that ambiguity is the final word. When it comes to scientific investigation, one seeks to go beyond appearances and understand something fundamental about how and why particles, materials, and organisms behave the way they do. Wisdom, similarly, seeks to understand human motivation in more fundamental terms, to set it against a “severe eternity of spiritual essences” that clarifies perception, illuminates understanding, and galvanizes the faculties for moral action. As a framework for moral and intellectual perception, then, wisdom is principally concerned with structure. Knowledge and other wisdom cognates play subsidiary roles as intellectual virtues or attainments that allow humans

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to think and act appropriately within a world ordered by wisdom. To use a domestic metaphor, wisdom is the blueprint for the house; the virtues reinforce it, fill it out, and furnish the rooms: By wisdom [ḥokmah] a house is built, and by understanding it is established; by knowledge [daʿat] the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. (Prov 24:3–​4) Though a commanding, even severe presence, wisdom is nevertheless made to appear in Proverbs as an appealing figure. Like the solid, beautifully adorned house in these verses, the majestic, seven-​pillared house of wisdom in Prov 9 is rich and ample; it is the site of a great feast (Prov 9:1–​6). The “house of wisdom” is large enough, too, to include characteristics that are also identified with the wicked, namely “cunning” (ʿormah) and “shrewdness” (mezimmah). The serpent of Gen 3 is the most famous example of a cunning figure, but human beings can also use cunning in harmful and mendacious ways ( Job 5:12, 15:5). Shrewdness has to do with the devising of subtle plans and the harboring of secret intentions. In the Psalms, for example, such things are associated entirely with the wicked (Ps 10:2, 4; 21:12; 37:7). In the apt translation of the Tanakh, to think or speak in this way is operate by “intrigue” (limzimmah; Ps 139:20) Yet even these capacities are not foreign to wisdom. Like knowledge, cunning and shrewdness are also found in the house of wisdom: I am Wisdom. I inhabit [šakanti] cunning [ʿormah]; knowledge of shrewdness [mezimmah] I find. (Prov 8:12)27 The formulation is striking. By using a verb associated with dwelling or habitation (šakan), the verse suggests that wisdom takes over the territory or space usually assigned to cunning. By wisdom one is able come by shrewdness as well. As a “neutral” attainment, knowledge might be expected to come under the aegis of wisdom. What is remarkable here is that wisdom also incorporates these shadier traits as well. Wisdom does not merely oppose wickedness; it also appears to assimilate some of its characteristic traits and to annex the powers that make it attractive. To adapt a modern American saying, for the authors of Proverbs wisdom “isn’t everything; it’s the only thing!” Anything that is worth achieving or acquiring is ultimately available as a by-​product of getting wisdom: wealth,

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prosperity, and peace (Prov 3:13–​17), as well as honor and security (4:5–​9). So too with skills and traits ranging from insight, knowledge, and discipline to those that are more competitive in nature: cunning, shrewdness, and resourcefulness. Wisdom encompasses them all. Given the identity of wisdom as the rešit, the “beginning” of creation, this is not surprising. Whatever belongs to the successful navigation of order belongs necessarily to wisdom. What is notable, though, is that wisdom itself is not without foundation. It has its own rešit, its own first principle. Wisdom was created by Yahweh (Prov 8:22). For this reason, the sages speak of piety toward Yahweh as the point of origin for wisdom and knowledge. According to Prov 1:7, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning [rešit] of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” A similar verse in Proverbs 9 uses a synonym for rešit that also makes fear an initial step in the acquisition of wisdom: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom [teḥillat ḥokmah], and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (Prov 9:10).28 Wisdom, then, begins with fear. The “fear of Yahweh” describes an ethical stance attuned to personal limitation and characterized by an awareness, moreover, of one’s position as the object of divine concern, a “person of interest” in Yahweh’s active enforcement of the moral order. To fear Yahweh is to fear him, specifically, as a judge who punishes wrongdoing: “by the fear of the Lord one turns from evil” (Prov 16:6; see Prov 8:13). One who does not fear Yahweh acts without regard to norms that Yahweh has put in place, preying upon the innocent and unsuspecting, acting deceitfully, and pursuing advantage in dishonest and unscrupulous ways. The strong moral reflexes of living in “fear of Yahweh” resemble those of a life lived in obedience to conscience, that is, a life guided internally toward goodness or righteousness.29 Despite the similar roles played by a general notion of conscience and the “fear of Yahweh,” there are important differences. To describe a moral life based on fear of Yahweh is to emphasize the relational context that exists between the judge and the one who stands under judgment. It is also to suggest that wisdom is rooted in something more fundamental even than wonder, curiosity, or reason. Wisdom begins with metaphysical vulnerability. Adam’s first acquaintance with a wisdom appropriate to life after the “Fall” is a profound realization of smallness and subjectivity. No longer the ruler of the garden, he is a naked creature compelled to hide. When asked his whereabouts, Adam replies, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I  was afraid” (Gen 3:10a). His prospects as keeper of the soil, husband of Eve, and mortal man are framed by a new experience of God as one who is feared. Though “fear of Yahweh” is commended in Proverbs and taken as the basis

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for wisdom, the image of Adam—​naked, ashamed, trying vainly to hide himself from one who sees all—​suggests that “fear” is not simply a good path that one may choose to follow but rather an appropriate response to a situation that one cannot afford to ignore. In other words, wisdom is not supererogatory, an “extra” virtue that one attains by going beyond basic moral requirements. It is, instead, an ethical response to a fundamental, metaphysical reality. Out of this response arises, in turn, wisdom’s distinctive intellectual framework: ordered, hierarchical, dualistic, and concerned with limits. Fear of Yahweh, then, is the first principle of wisdom because it orients the totality of human life, places it on a single axis that extends from heaven to earth. Wisdom is a creature (Prov 8:22) but also the means by which creation is brought into being (Prov 3:19–​20). Though “beside” God (ʿeṣlo) at the very creation (Prov 8:30), wisdom is “beside” humans as well, addressing them in their everyday lives, as they walk the streets or gather at the city gates (Prov 1:20–​21; 8:1–​3). A companion both of God and of humans, wisdom draws the creation into harmony with itself and with the creator. It is fear—​the experience of metaphysical vulnerability—​that disposes humans to embrace this harmony and understand their place as small beings in the order of things. Fear is also a form of awareness. Thus, the fear of Yahweh dignifies consciousness, acknowledging the strange ability of humans ultimately to recognize the order in which they are embedded and to adopt an affective stance toward it. It involves feeling as well as action. For the sages, wisdom is an entity to whom human beings are, through shared fear of Yahweh, not only obedient but also loyal and loving: “say to wisdom, ‘you are my sister’ ” (Prov 7:4). The sage, in other words, does not possess wisdom but, fearing the author of wisdom, makes wisdom a friend, companion, and guide.

To Know or Not to Know But what if wisdom is not friendly or accessible? What if honest reflection and observation reveal a world that is disordered? What if they suggest that God is inscrutable or possibly indifferent to humanity? The book of Ecclesiastes raises these and many other vexing questions, asking whether life as human beings generally understand and experience it is in fact as just, rational, and good as the sages make it out to be. Though anyone may question life in this way, Ecclesiastes presents the reader with a disturbing possibility: namely, that the one most attuned to the frustrating opacity of life may be the sage himself. In other words: by cultivating an intelligent perception of reality, wisdom makes it possible to conclude that the truths of wisdom

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are themselves contingent, that wisdom, in the end, deconstructs itself. On this view, the quest to find meaning does not fail because people undertake it badly; it fails precisely when it is undertaken well. It is not surprising, then, that the book is often regarded as bearing witness to a dissenting voice among Israel’s sages—​a skeptical, heterodox challenge to an existing wisdom tradition. As Crenshaw puts it: Qohelet “struck at the heart of the tradition in which he had been nurtured. Between him and old wisdom stretched a great abyss which was too deep for either to cross.”30 That the book—​with its despairing attitudes toward knowledge, its fatalistic stance toward human endeavor, and its resigned acceptance of injustice—​may be understood plausibly and pointedly as a failed search for meaning by a wisdom specialist is clear. Because of the considerable difficulty and complexity of the book itself, it is hard to rule out with certainty this or any other larger judgment concerning the message of the book as a whole. For such a judgment must resolve, in a coordinated way, the answers to many difficult questions: the relation of the book to Israelite national traditions and history; the identity and reliability of the first person narrator known as Qohelet; and, most famously, the relation between the vast middle portion of the book and the editor (or “epilogist”) who reduces Qohelet’s reflections, jarringly, to two simple commands at the close of the book: fear God and keep his commandments. For this reason, the book has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways and with differing judgments concerning its overall meaning. In what follows, my aim is not to defend a particular view of the book as a whole (though, as will be clear, my sympathies lie with those who see more continuity than discontinuity between Ecclesiastes and Proverbs). Instead, I propose to argue that, whatever else might be said about the theological profile of the book, it differentiates wisdom from knowledge in order to save wisdom from the distortions and disappointments of “knowingness.” The book of Ecclesiastes is somewhat unusual among biblical books for being written (mostly) in the first person. What makes it truly unusual, though, is the attention that the narrator, Qohelet, constantly draws to himself: his background, his experience, his observations, his reflections, even his emotional states. This fact makes the person or persona of Qohelet an especially important matter for interpreters. Some details such as the fact that Qohelet is described as “son of David, king in Jerusalem” (1:1) and as a man of exceptional wisdom (1:16) suggests that he may be Solomon or a Solomon-​ like figure, though the name “Solomon” does not appear in the book.31 These phrases, however, may also be understood as more general indications of kingship; correspondingly, the name “Qohelet,” if derived from the root

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qhl (“assembly”), may evoke a king’s power to summon assemblies such that the narrator is not to be understood as a generic person (a philosophical “Everyman”) but, as Jennie Grillo suggests, a generic king (an “Everyking”).32 What is crucial to recognize, however, is that the fictive royal identity of the narrator, though imperfectly maintained over the course of the book, remains throughout a vital link to the national life of Israel: “I, Qohelet, have been king over Israel in Jerusalem” (1:12). In Eccl 1 and 2, Qohelet clearly exercises the prerogatives of a king to undertake construction projects at will and pursue pleasure without constraint. After these chapters, though, Qohelet seems less like someone at the center of public life than a powerless, oddly detached observer who merely talks about public life (e.g., 4:1–​3). Whether the royal persona of Qohelet reappears at the end of the book (12:9–​11) is unclear. There Qohelet is described as teaching the people (12:9), a function more readily associated with a sage than with a king, but the reference to him as a “shepherd,” albeit one who uses sharp implements to sting people into action and awareness (12:11), may be an oblique reference to kingship. Similarly, while the arrangement of proverbs (12:9) may be an unusual task for most kings, it is perhaps to be expected of a Solomon-​like ruler (1 Kgs 4:32; Prov 1:10; 10:1). However the royal identity of Qohelet is precisely understood, it gives him a commanding position from which to evaluate a range of experiences unavailable to most people. The peasant or pauper, for example, is hardly qualified to pronounce on the ultimate futility of wealth or fame. More significantly, Qohelet’s kingly position raises in a powerful way the specter of Israel’s national’s experience:  not only of kingship but also of the loss of kingship in the early sixth century bce. Though it has been common among scholarly interpreters (for example Fox, Zimmerli, Whybray, and Hengel) to see Ecclesiastes as a strikingly denationalized book, one devoid of references to Israelite history or traditions, recent treatments of the book have illuminated the exilic consciousness that serves as a background for the book’s dark reflections on justice, the divine will, and indeed many other things.33 As Grillo argues compellingly in her recent book on Qohelet’s engagement with Israel’s national story, Israel’s history of defeat and disappointed hopes forms Qohelet’s “climate of thought” and surfaces in a variety of ways throughout the book of Ecclesiastes.34 In what she describes as a “resonating-​chamber for echoes of the Exile,” the author of Ecclesiastes weaves allusions and echoes of Israel’s past into a discourse that reflects an acute sensitivity to the exile as a national trauma.35 Instead of spotting specific allusions to the exile as Grillo does, Peter Enns cites in more general terms the embeddedness of Ecclesiastes in a Hellenistic social and cultural milieu, one in which Israel’s

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sages undertook a “spiritual/​intellectual journey” shadowed by national defeat, seeking “to make their way against the backdrop of Israel’s rejection by God in the exile.” In this way, Enns sees Ecclesiastes not simply as offering “a diverse opinion about wisdom, but a development in the nature of wisdom itself.”36 If, as some scholars maintain, Ecclesiastes dates to the early Hellenistic period (third century bce), then the book represents an extraordinary undertaking: to voice an anguished meditation on life’s meaning from the perspective of an Israelite king who is haunted—​paradoxically—​by the memory of his own people’s future downfall. The work is suffused with a sense of loss and meaninglessness proportionate to national calamity, but the choice to make the book’s narrator an Israelite king, and an exceedingly wise one at that, highlights both the painful personal resonance of this calamity and its deep resistance to any kind of simple political or intellectual resolution. The book’s thematic question is posed at the outset:  “what advantage [yitron] is there for man [laʾadam] in all his toil at which he toils under the sun?” (1:3) The noun yitron, from the root ytr (“to surpass, be additional”), is found only in Ecclesiastes and refers to the profit, gain, or advantage one derives from an activity or transaction. Though the word has economic overtones (“profit” or “gain”), it is also used in a more general way in the book to indicate the good that is “left over” for the individual in various endeavors (“advantage”).37 Given the toilsome character of human life, Qohelet asks, what good remains to man as a being whose way is marked by continual work, thought, deliberation, and suffering? What is the point of his short, anxious life? The verdict of the book is largely negative (2:11): human toil yields no yitron; it results in no lasting human benefit. To the extent that the book as a whole is an inquiry into human yitron, its thematic pronouncement that everything is hebel may be understood, accordingly, as a characterization of the “unprofitability” of the human situation. Unlike yitron, the word hebel is not unique to Ecclesiastes; yet hebel is a term of special significance in the book. Not only does it recur throughout the book (thirty-​eight times), it also forms a motto that initiates and ends Qohelet’s discourse (“hebel hebalim hakkol habel”; 1:2; 12:8). In the familiar language of the Authorized Version: “vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” Etymologically, hebel means “breath” or “vapor.”38 In Ecclesiastes, though, the word clearly has a more extended sense. In places, hebel bears a meaning similar to “breath.” Pleasures and the enjoyment of good things are hebel in the sense of ephemeral (2:1), and youth, too, is hebel because it is fleeting (11:10). Throughout most of the book, however, the word hebel is used to characterize such a wide array of vexing phenomena that interpreters have had to resort to more abstract meanings: for example, “futile,” “meaningless,” “mysterious,”

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or “absurd.”39 In truth, there is no single English word that is equivalent to Qohelet’s hebel. The author is so fond of the word and uses it so liberally that it seems to be a kind of slang term whose many nuances are discoverable only by adopting (or entering imaginatively) a very specific cultural-​linguistic attitude. The English adjective “cool,” for example, has a straightforward meaning, but one cannot grasp the full semantic range of “cool” in popular usage without assuming a particular mindset. Once one does, however, one comes to understand the strange way in which a great variety of things (a song, a person, a piece of technology, a discrete action, a situation, etc.) can all participate, somehow, in “cool-​ness.” As a narrator, Qohelet’s mindset seems to be one shaped by profound loss, disappointed hopes, and the frustration of finding that human effort and activity do not secure for anyone (not even a wise king) the lasting benefits associated with conventional wisdom and covenantal piety. From this perspective, no effort to alter reality nor even to gain a therapeutic understanding of it rewards the individual with the sought-​after satisfaction. As for Israel, so for Qohelet: all is utterly hebel. Another difficulty posed by the book is that it lacks a clearly discernible structure. Qohelet’s motto is quoted for the reader in the opening lines, and Qohelet identifies himself in the first chapter:  I, Qohelet, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business [ʿinyan raʿ] that God has given to human beings to be busy with [laʿanot bo]. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind (1:12–​14).40 Here Qohelet informs the reader that his purpose is to investigate life in its public, observable aspect. This includes things accessible to him both through direct observation and memory. The reason given for making this investigation is not altogether clear. Qohelet does not undertake it willingly but accepts it, instead, as a divinely appointed task that gives him no satisfaction. He describes this as an “unhappy business” (ʿinyan raʿ) that God assigns to humans to keep them occupied. Whether this intriguing phrase is to be understood simply as “busywork” given to humans by God or, perhaps, as the burden of consciousness by which humans are given to “care” (in a Heideggerian sense) about themselves and their place in the world is not certain. Qohelet seems, at any rate, to be strangely unable to leave aside the task of seeking and searching out. I propose to understand the thematic quest to identify the yitron of human life—​here characterized as an “unhappy

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business”—​as Qohelet’s basic task. Though subsequent chapters (2–​11) have proven resistant to clear structural analysis, I  propose further that the first half of the book may be read as a report of his investigation concerning knowl­ edge, specifically the quest to know what the human yitron is. Chapter 7 marks a turning point in the book, as Qohelet shifts his focus to wisdom, specifically the question of whether wisdom yields the lasting benefits that make the pursuit of wisdom worthwhile. The epilogue (12:9–​14), then, is the fourth section of the book, which sums up the investigation with reference to wisdom, knowledge, and what emerges as a crucial topic for Qohelet: fear of God. 1. Introduction (1:1–​11). What is the human yitron? 2. Knowledge (1:12–​6:12). The search for yitron in human life. 3. Wisdom (7:1–​12:8). The true value of wisdom. 4. Epilogue (12:9–​14). The end of the matter. The proposed division between sections 2 and 3 is certainly not absolute, as Qohelet comments negatively on the profitability of wisdom in section 2 (for example, 1:16–​18; more on this below). The outline proposed here, then, is heuristic, marking out one way of reading the book without claiming anything about how the book was originally designed by an author or editor. It is simply an attempt to discern the relation between wisdom and knowledge by attending to points of emphasis in the book. After posing the book’s thematic question (1:3), the introduction moves to a poetic description of natural phenomena, in which the elements themselves are portrayed as toiling without profit.41 The sun completes its daily journey only to hurry back to its starting point and do it all again (1:5). The winds blow in unending circuits (1:6), and the streams, for all their flowing, effect no change in the sea (1:7). All things are “wearisome” (1:8). In ­chapters 2–​6, Qohelet leaves “nature” aside and focuses entirely on the prospects of knowledge with reference to human affairs. Can a wise man defeat the apparent meaninglessness of life in the world by coming to know its meaning, the yitron that remains to humans? Is there, for him, salvation through knowingness? He begins by confessing that his training, background, and stature as a sage have not, in fact, yielded satisfactory understanding. Despite the fact that he once labored hard in “vexation” and “sorrow” to master the structure and insights of traditional wisdom (1:17–​18), he finds, later in life, that his labor has not given him the cognitive advantages that one might expect an educated man to have.42 He thus calls this early pursuit of wisdom hebel (unprofitable), and he promptly shifts

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from received knowledge to knowledge gained from direct experience. As king, he has at his disposal the means to see whether an active life, one devoted to pleasures and projects, yields lasting human benefit. He thus fashions for himself a life of luxury (gold, silver, singers, concubines) and grandiose achievement (parks, pools, gardens, houses). In this, he resembles, in Grillo’s words, a “self-​aggrandizing, accumulating, connoisseur king” on par with the “barbarian tyrants of Greek literature.”43 Qohelet does not question the morality of his pleasure spree but regrets, instead, that its benefits, though real, were not durable. He reports that he “found pleasure in all [his] toil,” but alas, this momentary pleasure was the only reward for his toil (2:10). Nothing remained to him beyond the experience itself. This leads naturally to a consideration of death, for death prevents humans from receiving or securing the benefits they intend by their efforts. It keeps some from reaping the fruits of a wise, well-​lived life (2:15–​16), and it forces others to leave their projects—​built with “wisdom and knowledge and skill” (2:21)—​to others who are fools (2:19) or strangers (6:2). Unable to find lasting benefit in his pleasure experiment, Qohelet broadens his perspective. Chapter 3 includes the famous “catalogue” of times (3:1–​8), according to which “everything” (being born and dying, planting and uprooting, killing and healing, etc.) has a divinely appointed “time.” Qohelet’s thoughts concerning death in ­chapter  2 suggested not only that his own undertakings are subject to realities beyond his control but that all mortals are similarly constrained. Yet as the “catalogue” in ­chapter 3 makes clear, it is not only death that prevents people from realizing benefit but, indeed, life itself. For life is not subject to time as a blank, undifferentiated stretch of being, which individuals color in as they see fit, in the small spaces of time allotted to them. Instead, life is subject to times (“a time of x, and a time of y”). That is, life is a differentiated reality that features discrete seasons or occasions ordered by God. What gain has the worker from his toil? I  have seen the business [ʿinyan] that God has given to the sons of men to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end (3:9–​11; RSV). The upshot of this understanding of reality is that, once again, man is denied lasting benefit from his work. He finds all too often that desired outcomes are unavailable or, as it were, “out of season.” What remains to him, then, is not the enjoyment of yitron but continual return to the ʿinyan raʿ, the “unhappy business” of conscious contemplation first mentioned in 1:13. Yet in 3:10, the

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divinely appointed task of contemplation is oriented, specifically, toward an awareness of time. The placement of “eternity” in the human mind makes it possible for humans to perceive that “times” are divinely ordered, but inherent limitations prevent humans from knowing what the order is. In this, Qohelet’s perspective resembles the Homeric view that fates and fortunes are dispensed to humans in inscrutable ways, from one of two “urns” over which they have no control. Despite not knowing the ultimate order of things, though, Qohelet affirms its goodness. The fittingness of events within their allotted frames makes the entire arrangement, from the divine perspective, pleasing: each event is “beautiful” (yapeh) in its time. Therefore, the human result of this situation is not intellectual mastery but an experience of awe.44 This realization, interestingly, prompts new knowledge for Qohelet: namely, that God’s works, which are permanent and unalterable, are manifest in order to make humans fear God (3:14). Though the nature of human yitron remains obscure, Qohelet professes here to know (yadaʿti) what his failure to find it ultimately means. In ­chapters 4 and 5, Qohelet directs his search for lasting benefit to the social realm and to the life of the community. He strikes a prophetic note when he complains in 4:1 of oppression that he has seen, of helpless victims without aid or comfort. Whether the mention of the “oppressed” (see Jer 50:33)—​ their “tears” and their lack of comforters (see Lam 1:2)—​echoes Israel’s experience of exile or evokes social injustice in a more general way is hard to say. In any event, the “tears of the oppressed” bear powerful witness to the fact that injustice is a prominent reason why humans fail to secure lasting benefit. In many cases, it is humans who prevent one another from deriving appropriate benefit from their labors, quite apart from larger questions of temporality and mortality. Avarice makes humans competitive (4:4) and antisocial. Though working together is the prudent thing to do (“two are better than one . . . a threefold cord is not quickly broken”; 4:9, 12), many choose instead to work alone, preferring greedily to make and enjoy their fortunes by themselves (4:8). In 4:17–​5:6 (ET 5:1–​7), Qohelet turns his attention to the Temple. Though human societies are run badly, for example, by foolish kings who no longer take advice (4:13), worship at the Temple is ultimately overseen by God. The difficulty here is not that God is unjust. Quite the opposite: God is not only just but formidably exacting. Human tendencies toward rash behavior, idle talk, and ill-​advised vows, then, make the prospect of “drawing near” (qarob; 4:17; ET 5:1) to God a precarious and perilous one. The Temple cult is not a venue for human yitron but the place where, above all, one must take care to avoid mistakes in giving God his due. By contrast, the psalmist who bore his griefs and doubts to the Temple ultimately found

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lasting benefit: “whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you” (Ps 73:25). Where the psalmist declared that “drawing near to God” (“qirbat ʾelohim”) was his “good” (Ps 73:28), Qohelet sees a visit to the Temple mainly as something that can go wrong. He therefore advises respectful, mistake-​free religious performance: “guard your steps” (4:17; ET 5:1); “be not rash with your mouth” (5:1; ET 5:2); “pay what you vow” (5:3; ET 5:4); “let not your mouth lead you into sin” (5:5; ET 5:6). Above all, “God is in heaven, and you upon earth; therefore, let your words be few” (5:1; ET 5:2).

Wisdom without Knowledge A searching examination of human life shows that everything, or almost everything, is shot through with peril and contingency. Very little can be relied upon to yield satisfaction or lasting benefit—​neither a hard-​won education, an active life of pleasures and projects, social engagement, nor even Temple piety. Qohelet continually presents the judgment that “all is hebel” as the conclusion to his search for knowledge, the summation of what he has come to know. It is possible, however, that Qohelet’s comments are intended (or presented) ironically. On this view, there are too many oddities in the book to take it at face value: the sweeping and sometimes contradictory character of many of Qohelet’s judgments, the strange mix of skepticism and dogmatism, and the impression of disorder created by the flow of the book and the heightened subjectivity of the narrator (“I said to myself ”; “I turned to consider”; “then I  said to myself ”; “moreover I  saw”; “so I  hated life”; etc.). Carolyn Sharp has argued that these are signals to the reader that the observations of Qohelet do not so much contain knowledge as caricature it.45 According to Sharp, the book puts Qohelet on display. It uses Qohelet’s first person discourses to portray him as a sinful, miserable, and untrustworthy figure, thus showing the dangers and follies of the pretentious wisdom tradition that he represents. According to Sharp, Qohelet is an “anti-​hero,” a “sinful Adam who strove for knowledge apart from obedience to God”; in his failure to find satisfaction, he becomes an embodiment—​or, better, an effigy—​of human hubris: “the new scarecrow in the Garden of Eden.”46 By putting the unappealing Qohelet on display in this way, the book argues indirectly for the abandonment of sagely wisdom in favor of a piety based simply on fearing God and keeping his commandments. By employing irony to commend a simple piety, it renders the fear of God and the keeping of the commandments “impervious to further irony.”47

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In her insightful analysis, Sharp makes many valuable points. She is correct, I believe, to argue that an important function of the book is to criticize aspects of the “sapiential project.” By referring to Qohelet as a “scarecrow” in the garden of Eden, Sharp characterizes the narrator as one who aspired to forbidden knowledge and experienced, as a result, a painful estrangement from God and the good, satisfying life that he intended for humankind. Like the creation story in Genesis, the book of Ecclesiastes presents death and the great shadow that it casts over life as the consequence of seeking knowledge inappropriate to humans. When the man and the woman take the forbidden fruit in order to gain knowledge of good and evil, they move from one form of life to a new one characterized by fear, uncertainty, toil, and death. Similarly, when Qohelet adopts the position of an “autonomous” knower seeking answers to questions of ultimate value, he is overcome by frustration.48 Qohelet, like Adam, is brought face to face with mortality. In a clear echo of Genesis, he is made to understand that humans come from the dust and return to it in death (Gen 3:19; Eccl 3:20). The bodily expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden, their lost innocence, and their lives of labor are mirrored in the unhappy sage’s own exilic consciousness, his painful sensitivity to life as an uneven mixture of good and evil. The God-​like knowl­edge of good and evil promised by the serpent is experienced by Qohelet ironically as a God-​given task (ʿinyan) from which there is no relief, a psychic burden that compels him to make sense of life in subjective categories that continually prevent the knower from enjoying a stable relation to what is known. Good and bad, beneficial and pointless, durable and lasting—​all are binaries that precipitate vacillation and throw the knower back upon his own subjectivity. His categories thus prevent him from attaining a satisfying grasp of the eternal reality that his heart dimly perceives (3:11), and he is left clutching vainly at vapor, breath, and wind. Elias Bickerman wrote that there is something of the “fallen angel” in Qohelet.49 Given the book’s resonance with Genesis, however, he might be better described as a “fallen Adam.”50 The question, then, is whether the book presents an alternative to the predicament of the Adamic knower. When Sharp argues that the point of Ecclesiastes is to commend Torah piety at the expense of everything else, she echoes the judgments of the rabbis who refused to withdraw the book from religious use because, in their view, it ultimately teaches the reader to reject earthly toil in favor of laborious study of the Torah.51 The definitive reduction of the book’s message to fearing God and keeping his commandments (12:13) certainly supports this view. Yet there is more to Qohelet’s discourse than an ironic, wholesale rejection of all sagely wisdom that falls outside

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the boundaries of strict Torah study. For Sharp, Qohelet is the “epitome” of sagely wisdom and at the same time the “epitome of the misery caused by privileging the sapiential project over the fear of God.”52 In other words, Qohelet’s words serve only as an ironic foil to what would become the rabbinic view. Yet if this is so, then Qohelet’s own positive statements concerning the fear of God would be ironic as well. For it is not just the “epilogist” who urges the reader to fear God but Qohelet himself who identifies fear as the proper attitude of the temple-​goer (5:6; ET 5:7) and as the appropriate response to God’s mastery of times (3:14). And despite the vagaries of human justice, Qohelet “knows” that ultimately “it will be well with those who fear God, because they stand in fear before him, but it will not be well with the wicked, neither will they prolong their days like a shadow, because they do not stand in fear before God” (8:12–​13). Religious performance and moral rectitude may not make a difference when it comes to avoiding the “same fate that comes to all” (9:2), but the “fear of God” does indeed seem to be consequential in the matter of divine judgment (see 12:14). Though it is possible to imagine that, for Qohelet, there is a time to vow and a time to refrain from vowing, a time for making sacrifices and a time for not doing so, it does not seem conceivable that there would be in his catalogue of times a time to fear God and a time to forsake the fear of God. The great importance assigned to fearing God derives not from the epilogue’s ironic undermining of Qohelet but rather from the epilogue’s reinforcement of an essential Qohelet theme. This brings us to the question of Qohelet’s attitude toward wisdom, specifically wisdom as a counterpoint to knowledge. In the second half of the book (­chapters 7–​12), Qohelet makes wisdom a focus of his inquiry. Sharp is right to see the fear of God as an essential element of the book’s program, though perhaps not right in denying it to the narrator. As I have shown, the fear of God is a kind of ethical-​intellectual anchor here (8:12–​13), as it is in the first half of the book (3:14; 5:6). Qohelet’s understanding of wisdom is consistent with the stance or attitude of the God-​fearer; it befits one who acts modestly and prudently because he is aware that all things are subject to a supreme being who will judge humans for what they have done. Wisdom follows from this basic life-​orientation—​not as a body of knowledge capable of ordering or evaluating larger human aims and aspirations but rather as a way of conducting oneself, as Achilles and Odysseus did, with intelligent respect for limits. These include limits imposed by human mortality, by human finitude (i.e., the inability to bring about desired outcomes), and, relatedly, by the fact that humans are entirely at the mercy of a God who rules the world

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according to his own inscrutable purposes. Qohelet maintains a complex attitude toward wisdom. On the one hand he maintains that the rigors of sagely education do not always pay off (1:17–​18), that being wise does not necessarily prevent one from suffering the fate of an unwise person (2:14), and that an individual’s wisdom is not justly remembered (2:16; 9:15). On the other hand there is, for Qohelet, no denying that wisdom, which is given by God (2:26), is preferable to folly (2:13). In ­chapters  7–​11, Qohelet elaborates further the character of wisdom. Despite certain misgivings about the fate of wisdom in the world, Qohelet, by and large, retains a positive attitude toward wisdom itself.53 He commends wisdom in three ways. First, he notes that wisdom engenders a sober attitude toward life. Wisdom persistently inclines the wise man to the darker aspects of human life, to death and suffering, so that he avoids the folly and indignity of seeming (or being) frivolous when, inevitably, disaster and disappointment occur. For this reason, “the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth” (7:4). One who pursues mirth and celebration, making them the central preoccupation of his life, is “out of tune” with a world whose bass notes are pain and loss. It is only a matter of time before circumstances expose the shallowness of the happy-​go-​lucky attitude and bring shame and embarrassment on the fool. Second, the orientation of wisdom toward pain and loss gives it a “protective” character. Money is valuable because of its ability to insulate one from accidents, losses, setbacks, and unpredictable events. In time of need, it may be used to buffer the pains and perils of undesirable or hostile situations. Like money, wisdom is useful. There is no need to pine for a past in which one enjoyed greater material prosperity, for wisdom in the present brings similar benefits (7:10). In the way that an inheritance puts someone in a good position vis-​à-​vis life’s uncertainties, so too does wisdom (7:11). And in the way that wealth is key to survival, so too is wisdom: “for he who has acquired wisdom has acquired money and profit. The knowledge of wisdom keeps its possessors alive” (7:12).54 Wealth, of course, does not guarantee security; neither does wisdom. Yet wisdom improves one’s chances of withstanding life’s challenges in much the same way that wealth helps to “keep its possessors alive.” Third, wisdom helps one to succeed. It engenders a prudence that rulers often lack (7:19) and is more beneficial to the city than weapons of war (9:18). Living under the authority of a ruler can be precarious, but wisdom allows the wise man to steer a good course, making himself necessary by providing beneficial counsel (8:1) while, at the same time, humbly knowing his place (8:2–​5). Every line of work has its own hazards (“he who quarries stones is hurt by them; and he who splits logs

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is endangered by them” 10:9), but wisdom is an additional element—​a certain masterfulness—​by which a worker avoids common mistakes. The wise man works better and with less effort: “if the iron is blunt, and one does not whet the edge, he must put forth more strength; but wisdom helps one to succeed” (10:10). As Stuart Weeks has put it, wisdom for Qohelet amounts to the use of “a practical, analytical tool—​not so much a science as a technology.”55 The idea that, for Qohelet, wisdom is less a science than a technology is apt. Wisdom seems to “work” whether or not one knows why it works. Like technology, it works even when one does not understand the science behind it. But in trying to understand why wisdom works, Qohelet comes to the end of his knowledge: All this I have tested by wisdom; I said, ‘I will be wise,’ [ʾeḥkamah] but it was far from me. That which is, is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out? (7:23). Throughout much of the book, Qohelet speaks of wisdom in objective terms as something one accumulates (1:16), a thing by which one makes inquiries (1:13), a faculty that guides conduct (2:3) or functions itself as an object of knowledge (e.g., 1:17). But in the verse just quoted, Qohelet uses ḥokmah as a verb (ʾeḥkamah). In trying to become wise, Qohelet finds that he is unable to appropriate wisdom in any personal or profound sense. Its depths are too deep, its substance too far away. For this reason, he advises his hearers not to go too far with wisdom, not to identify with it personally in a way that suggests that they themselves are actually wise. Once again he uses a verbal form:  “do not be wise in excess [ʾal-​titḥakkam yoter]” (7:16). The word yoter (“what is left over”) reinforces the sense that the attempt to go beyond a modest use of wisdom by becoming wise will, in the end, lead to ruin (tiššomem; 7:16). What dooms the bid to become wise is the sheer mismatch between the scope of the human mind and the divinely ordered reality that the human sage would have to understand in order to be wise in a profound sense: When I  applied my mind to know wisdom, and to see the business [ʿinyan] that is done on earth, how one’s eyes see sleep neither day nor night, then I saw all the work of God, that no one can find out what is happening under the sun. However much they may toil in seeking, they will not find it out; even though those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it out (8:16–​17).

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In seeking to know wisdom, Qohelet is drawn into the “business” (ʿinyan) of making sense of all that he sees. It is precisely at this point that he confronts the futile character of the ʿinyan as an investigation that will ultimately yield no finding. Though the wise believe that their familiarity with wisdom gives them a lasting advantage in this respect, their “claim to know” cannot and will not be sustained. Wisdom “works” for the “wise man,” but without elevating or altering him in any substantial way. In ­chapter 7, wisdom comes into focus as the basis for action precisely when one must act in ignorance. Qohelet counsels the people to share generously with others because they do not know whether some future calamity will put them in need of friends (11:2). He advises them to sow seed in the morning and work in the evening, “for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good” (11:6) By wisdom one may act deliberately and confidently, in spite of the fact that, ultimately, one knows very little about what one is doing or what it may achieve. Wisdom, then, emerges from Qohelet’s search for meaning as something smaller and more modest than what fellow sages (those who “claim to know”) made it out to be. Despite carrying out a thorough and, in places, devastating critique of the wisdom project, Qohelet, in the end, is unable to abandon it. As Kugel puts it, Qohelet is a sage, “irredeemably so.” He “holds the received wisdom of sages up to the light and finds it wanting,” yet “this he reports without joy, since, as he has discovered, there is no alternative path to wisdom.”56 Qohelet’s failure to provide a constructive answer to his thematic question (“what is the human yitron?” 1:3) casts a rather long shadow over the book. Yet it must be remembered that Qohelet has identified some human goods: not only the protective value of wisdom but also, notably, the joys of work, family, and conviviality (2:24–​26; 3:10–​15–​22; 5:18–​20 [ET 5:17–​19]; 8:10–​15; 9:7–​10; 11:7–​10). In light of the book’s affirmation that all is hebel, the joys and wisdom granted by God to humans may seem to be but minor concessions to human misery and contingency—​what Fox describes, in somewhat Freudian terms, as “accommodations” or “little meanings” that make otherwise senseless lives bearable.57 They do not appear to constitute a stable and satisfying benefit proportionate to human toil, one that answers adequately to human consciousness of eternity. Though a deep sense of disappointment pervades the book of Ecclesiastes, it is not necessary to view Qohelet’s commendation of wisdom and simple pleasures as ironic, insincere, or resigned. Wisdom, as I have shown, is useful and effective when rid of a preoccupation with God-​like knowledge of causes, effects, and ultimate goods. It is given to humans as a light (2:14) and an aid in deliberation—​in Aristotelian terms, as phronēsis divorced from sophia.

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And commentators have noted that the pleasures Qohelet affirms—​eating, working, and living with a beloved wife—​recall the tasks appointed to the man in Genesis; they are intrinsic to creaturely life.58 Taken together, these pleasurable tasks make up what Qohelet consistently calls the “portion” or “lot” (ḥeleq) assigned to human beings by God (2:10; 3:22; 5:17–​18 [ET 5:18–​19]; 9:9). The fact that these divine Urgeschenke “survive” Qohelet’s deconstruction of meaning should not be underestimated. When Qohelet comes to the end of his investigation, he has argued both that humans cannot find out the order of things and that they may nevertheless find a measure of protection and satisfaction by respecting the limits of their modest place in that order. In the book’s final chapter, Qohelet directs his audience, surprisingly, to the end of things. Though he has complained that the cycles of nature are repeated in wearying succession (1:4–​11) and that civic and commercial life endure pointlessly, leaving the lives of fools and wise men alike in its wake (2:12–​17), he now sees that life itself is limited. The images in this lyrical section (12:1–​8) are drawn from a funeral scene in a village. The sky overhead darkens. Homes and places of business are emptied and shuttered. Mourners make their way into the streets. And in the end, a gold and silver lamp is overturned and clay vessels are shattered. The dust returns to the earth, and the spirit returns to God. The strange mix of material and immaterial that makes up vital human beings is no more. Life is extinguished, and nothing remains. The funeral poem has been interpreted in a variety of ways. It has been taken as an allegory for aging and death, a symbolic representation of the slow deterioration of the individual. Given its position at the end of the book, it has also been interpreted as a counterpart to the nature poem at the beginning of the book: though the cosmos appears to be immutable, it too comes to an end, marking an end to life as we know it.59 The poem clearly resonates on a number of levels. Its poignant description of life slowly darkening and dwindling to a state of nothingness draws the reader into an experience of “ending” that completes the book’s meditation on life as a vaporous, fleeting thing. Yet it may be that the funeral poem also resonates, as Grillo has argued, with the destruction of the nation and the fall of Jerusalem.60 Read in connection with Qohelet’s reference to the “days of darkness” in 11:8 (see Jerusalem’s “day of trouble”; Jer 17:17–​18; 51:2), the funeral poem may be seen as a lament for the fall of the city that the king once took pleasure in constructing (2:4–​11). If this is correct, then what Qohelet includes here is not a vision of individual or cosmic disintegration but something closer to a remembrance of national disaster. To the

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extent that the nation, the people of the covenant, experienced the collapse of the divinely sanctioned institutions that held them together—​kingship, priesthood, Temple—​they became mourners at their own funeral. It was not that Israel merely succumbed to the vicissitudes of history, though Qohelet would hardly deny this. It is rather that the end of the Israelite nation in particular says something about the “Creator” (12:1): he is not simply an unfathomable God, one who cannot be understood, as much as he is a God who, in Israel’s case, has been misunderstood. He gave Israel life, but not the power or authority to order it. He gave Israel wisdom, but not a wisdom that lays bare God’s intentions. And he gave Israel kings, but no guarantee that they would rule wisely. These things should have been understood. The fall of Jerusalem, unthinkable as it was, was the event that signaled God’s willingness to let the nation’s wisdom fail and allow all to appear before them as “vanity.” What makes the anticipation of death and the individual experience of hebel so painful is not that they are “tokens” of “the end of humanity” in some general way but rather that they serve as a “reminder of the end of the nation.”61 It is Israel’s experience of exile that frames the unsuccessful quest for yitron and the slow journey to a death that God has ordained.

Conclusion What, then, of the book’s definitive conclusion: “the end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep the commandments, for that is the whole duty of everyone” (12:13)? The first command to fear God should not surprise the reader. As I have shown, the “fear of God” is the only appropriate response to the situation of metaphysical vulnerability in which humans find themselves. Their lives are not precarious merely because of the constant threat of death and disaster. This much is true for animals as well. Vulnerability arises from an anxious awareness that “time and chance happen to all” (9:11), that the inexorable human drive to find meaning in things is answered by metaphysical realities fundamentally indifferent or even hostile to human projects. Times are coordinated by God, but without any apparent connection to human cares or aspirations. Whether divine concern for humanity amounts to “love or hate” one does not know (9:1). God is not an intimate friend but a judge with total power who must be feared and respected. Unlike the fear of God, however, the commandments are not discussed earlier in the book. In some ways, this reference to the “commandments” in the conclusion seems out of place, for neither the Torah nor Torah piety has a significant place on the book’s theological horizon. Yet if the book is read, appropriately in my

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view, as responding in some way to the experience of exile, then the injunction to “keep his commandments” is a key moment in which the author’s (if not Qohelet’s) covenantal consciousness rises to the surface. What remains to Israel after the kings have had both their day and their say is to return to its foundation. Before David built Jerusalem and Solomon the Temple, the people were formed and united by the law. When the city fell, many other things fell with it, but Israel’s obligation to its God endured. What this covenant means from God’s point of view is no longer possible to say. But Israel, for its part, still has the law. To persist in keeping it, when nothing else is certain, is, for Qohelet, the only wise thing left to do. In Qohelet’s understanding, then, wisdom is what remains “after” a proper reckoning with the exilic character of life. By such a reckoning one recognizes, in both personal and national life, the painful inadequacy of human understanding and the need for patient endurance. To live according to wisdom is to live within limits that one has learned, by long and hard experience, to respect. In Proverbs, though, wisdom comes “before.” It is the principle of God’s creative activity and, as such, is logically and ontologically prior to all of creation. The life of wisdom, then, is presented as a form of intellectual and ethical conformity to this order, which produces knowledge about how things work and about how life is best lived. In seeking a flourishing life, one does not so much “end up” with wisdom as begin with it. The discourses of Prov 1–​9, for example, presume that the young disciple, in mastering received wisdom, may vindicate wisdom in life rather than death, in success rather than failure, and in prosperity rather than misfortune. The creation story in Genesis is a narrative that, in some sense, moves from Proverbs’ sense of “primary” wisdom to Qohelet’s “secondary” one. It describes a rational and hospitable cosmic order in which humans retain a clear and dignified position as responsible rulers. To know this order and live according to it would be wisdom in its “primary” sense. In a bid to attain “knowledge of good and evil,” though, the first humans transgress the divine command and open themselves to the experience of pain, toil, and death. Yet they are not stripped of life; instead, they make their way in the created order with new kinds of awareness (nakedness, inequality, mortality). Limits, dangers, and frustrations form the background for subsequent attempts to rule, reproduce, and flourish on the earth. Their post-​Eden wisdom is attuned to the primal order but conditioned secondarily by a new, Qohelet-​like experience of metaphysical vulnerability. The texts reviewed in this chapter by no means exhaust perspectives on wisdom and knowledge in the Hebrew Bible. Yet the three—​Gen 1–​ 3, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes—​highlight an important aspect of the relation

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between the two. Wisdom and knowledge may be understood as two distinct ways of apprehending reality. To possess knowledge is to understand in nonrelative terms what the world is and is like. Wisdom, though, is a form of acquired knowledge that is appropriate to the life and limitations of the knower. Qohelet knows that all is vanity, but, by wisdom, he understands that, for all its absurdities, life must still be lived. To go on living is what humans do. And despite life’s deep disappointments, it may be lived not only with skill and enjoyment but also with a measure of confidence that justice will ultimately prevail: “for God will bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil” (12:14). Ecclesiastes thus holds open the possibility that divine loyalty to creation will ultimately prove more fundamental than human despair, provided there is an honest reckoning with failure and a refusal to give up. The heart of the wise may be in the house of mourning, but hope dwells there too.

Summary In the biblical texts discussed in this chapter, wisdom is distinguished from knowledge. As a form of understanding that corresponds, necessarily, to what the knower is capable of seeing, grasping, experiencing, and cognizing, the knowledge that humans gain is limited by who and what humans are. Though a divinely ordered world is indeed intelligible to humans, it is only partially so. Inasmuch as wisdom is a program for life ordered to an account of the whole—​a whole that confounds our inescapably subjective judgments—​it must be based on a holistic form of understanding that guides and directs in the face of ignorance and deep existential uncertainty. Instead of knowledge, then, wisdom identifies this form of understanding with the recognition of metaphysical vulnerability. Wisdom is based, in a word, on fear. Yet because it is based on fear, specifically, of one who is the author of a “good” creation, wisdom is closely allied with piety and the pious person’s hope for a just and blessed life.

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Job the True Sage I detest my life. It is a unity. —​Job 9:21–​22

In the Bible, wisdom is a contested thing. When one person lays claim to it, another is bound to deny the claim. One identifies wisdom with the life of power and plunder, while another says that those who prey on others foolishly set an ambush for their own lives (Prov 2:10–​19). One says that wisdom reveals an underlying order by which to become knowledgeable and prosperous; another says that the better part of wisdom is to admit that such an order cannot be known or discovered (Eccl 8:16–​17). In no other biblical book is the contested character of wisdom clearer than in the book of Job. Like other ancient Near Eastern wisdom tales, it features a U-​ shaped plot line in which a prosperous and pious individual suffers grave misfortune and is restored by the deity in the end (see, for example, the Babylonian Ludlul bel nemeqi or the Ugaritic tale of Kirta). While the “fall and rise” of Job frame the book, the substance of the book in its canonical form is a series of dialogues between Job and his friends. In these dialogues, Job’s precipitous downfall serves as the occasion for an extended debate on a constellation of issues in the larger orbit of wisdom:  divine justice, the purpose of human suffering, the meaning of piety, and the coherence of cosmic order. These topics are debated in the deep and broad “trough” that forms the bottom of the book’s U-​shaped trajectory. It is there, in the “house of mourning” (Eccl 7:2), that a bitter and intractable contest to define wisdom is played out. Deep in the heart of the Joban dialogues lies one of the Bible’s great meditations on wisdom, the famous “hymn to wisdom” in Job 28. It bears no simple or obvious connection to the contentious speeches that make up the vast middle of the book of Job. It appears instead to have been a discrete composition that was later incorporated into the book. The hymn takes the reader on a brief tour of the world’s darkest and most perilous places—​mines,

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ocean depths, the subterranean kingdom of Death. As remote as these places are, though, the abode of wisdom is still stranger and more remote. Thus, the poet asks, “where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?” ( Job 28:12; see 28:20) The answer, of course, is that no human knows (28:13), for only God knows the way to it (28:23). The confession that wisdom is, in a fundamental sense, humanly inaccessible is an essential part of biblical “wisdom theory.” Yet the idea is not so much that wisdom is out of reach—​though this is part of it—​as much as it is that wisdom is hard to reach. Just as people assume the risks and dangers of venturing underground to seek things of value (precious stones, 28:6; water, 28:11), they cannot quite leave the pursuit of wisdom untried, arduous and uncertain though it is. Wisdom has a gem-​like allure and an air of numinous danger (28:22) that combine to make it strangely compelling. One of the most essential features of wisdom in this poem, then, is its agonic character. Wisdom invites but resists human effort. The great undertakings involved in overturning mountains to find precious stones and metals (28:9–​10) or in amassing fortunes that consist of these things (28:15–​19) do not compare to the difficult struggle to reach “the place of understanding.” The basis for this struggle is the straightforward desire to live well and meaningfully, but the realization of this desire is, in the book of Job, painfully fraught and uncertain. It is significant that the hymn to wisdom is placed in the mouth of Job, whose own struggle for understanding has brought him to the outer edges of human experience. He finds, even there, that he is no closer to seeing where wisdom can ultimately be found. Knowledge fails him. The book of Job, then, presents a particular aspect of wisdom and the quest for wisdom. It resembles Ecclesiastes in conveying the contested character of wisdom, portraying it as something that yields a discourse of claims and counterclaims. It also resembles Ecclesiastes in suggesting that wisdom lies beyond the reach of conscious contemplation yet within the range of a certain kind of moral perception, a fearful sense of metaphysical limitation. What makes the book of Job distinctive among biblical wisdom books, however, is the way it connects this sense of limitation specifically to the nature of piety. In many respects, the piety attributed to Job is conventional. He enjoys the life of prosperity and blessedness identified in Proverbs with a God-​pleasing life: health, wealth, a large family, and social status. Both God and Job’s friends call him a God-​fearer (1:1, 8; 4:6), and he does not sin against God when the blessings mentioned above are suddenly and violently stripped from him. His catastrophic downfall, however, does not merely serve to show the great extent of his piety; it becomes, rather, an opportunity to probe the nature of

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his piety. The dialogues show piety in an unusual light, connecting it with Job’s sense of self and, in a new and dramatic way, with conformity to cosmic (dis)order. When Job’s fortunes change, his conventional, self-​effacing rectitude gives way to defiant self-​assertion. Far from being an abandonment of piety, this defiance emerges in the book as the basis for piety. And when God appears at the end of the book to address Job, he speaks of a strange cosmos, in which Job, surprisingly, has been made to fit. In this way, the piety of Job serves as the touchstone for a way of construing the self, of understanding how the self may be oriented ethically and cosmically in a world governed by a dangerous and unpredictable God. Joban piety is, in this way, the basis for a distinctive—​and sharply contested—​understanding of wisdom. In what follows, I will examine the book of Job in relation to three views of wisdom with which the book, taken as a whole, is in dialogue:  (1) that wisdom is undermined by the existence of human injustice; (2) that wisdom turns piety into a self-​serving bid for prosperity; and (3) that wisdom is fatally doctrinaire, an impersonal system of knowledge that effaces individuality and neglects experience. The book of Job addresses these objections, in part by affirming a traditional view of wisdom such as one finds in Proverbs and in part by revising its essential features. As in ­chapters 1 and 2, on Homer, Genesis, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, the book of Job maintains a clear focus on metaphysical vulnerability. Indeed it heightens this theme and makes it, in many ways, the centerpiece of the book. In doing so, however, it does not sunder the metaphysical from the ethical. It rather preserves the link by suggesting that the counterpart to a deity strangely willing to afflict the pious is a creature, correspondingly strange, who is willing to persist in piety while afflicted. This willingness, which comes into view as a very specific kind of integrity, is portrayed as a surer path to wisdom and the blessed life than the one afforded by the kinds of traditional knowledge and deductive arguments attributed to the friends of Job.

The True Sage To assemble the cosmic order piece by piece, mašal by mašal, and to integrate humans into it through fear of Yahweh and participation in a single, divine-​ human program—​wisdom—​is an ambitious undertaking. Reckoning with the fragmented character of human knowledge and the unstable quality of the human heart (leb; Gen 6:5; Prov 17:3, 19:21, 20:9, 28:26), wisdom reconstitutes the world in terms conducive to the moral and metaphysical aspirations of the chaste, pious, and sober individual. Where human experience is otherwise

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confusing and ambiguous, the life of the sage is ordered by concepts and categories that give intellectual activity shape and coherence while making moral effort meaningful. Given the scope of this enterprise, it is not surprising that it attracted questions and criticisms. Some are relatively straightforward. One, for example, might be called the “empirical objection.” If experience does not bear out the teachings of wisdom, then wisdom seems less like a cosmic blueprint for flourishing and more like an empty system of words. If those who fear Yahweh do not in fact prosper in a world of Yahweh’s making, or if the wicked do not actually perish, then wisdom, in broad outline, seems implausible and unrealistic. A second, far subtler objection is the “satanic objection.”1 If wisdom is a source of knowledge about the world, it may devolve into a form of instrumental reason or a body of knowledge that allows knowers to “game the system.” The problem here is not a wisdom that does not work but a wisdom that works too well. If piety coincides with prosperity, then piety may simply become a means to prosperity. And if this is the case, then the distinction between a pious person who seeks to prosper and one who pursues personal advantage in wicked and false ways becomes tenuous. The single, self-​interested end supersedes the various means, rendering the basis of wisdom, one’s fundamental ethical disposition, irrelevant. In the book of Job, the “empirical objection” arises, in the first instance, from the narrative. Though Job is given the highest possible wisdom rating by the narrator and by Yahweh (“blameless and upright, fears God and turns away from evil”; 1:1, 8), he is made to undergo the kind of misfortune—​sudden, inexplicable, total—​that, in wisdom terms, only the wicked experience. In an extended version of the objection found in Job 21, Job points to the opposite end of the spectrum to reinforce the empirical argument. He, Job, is a pious man who perishes, but “the wicked live on, reach old age, and grow mighty in power” ( Job 21:7). In poignant contrast to his own life, Job describes a (hypothetical) wicked but prosperous “anti-​Job” who is surrounded by loved ones (21:8–​9), watches over strong flocks (21:10), enjoys good health (21:24), and is buried in peace and honor (21:32–​33). Job adds that one need only consult those with a broad experience of the world—​merchants, for example, “who travel the roads” (21:29)—​to find out that, by and large, the wicked survive whatever troubles befall them: they “are spared in the day of calamity” (21:30). Given the existence of Job and the world’s many “anti-​Jobs,” any talk of wisdom’s categories seems like “falsehood” and “empty nothings” (21:34). Despite the prominence of the empirical objection in the book, it must be said that the figure of Job has more often been taken as a refutation of this particular objection. Job the righteous man is, after all, granted health, honor,

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and prosperity in the end (42:7–​17). Thus, Job as we find him in the prologue and the epilogue—​that is, the Job of the “didactic tale”—​is a paragon of the old wisdom.2 This Job exerted a powerful influence on the exegetical tradition and was understood by Christian interpreters, for example, as an archetype of the “true man” (homo verus) who faces death and overcomes human weakness through virtue and spiritual fortitude, ultimately reaching his appointed end.3 To the principal understanding of a prosperity that comes (eventually) to the righteous, the Job of tradition adds only a virtue-​ethical footnote: one must not only be righteous, one must also take care to endure in the face of setbacks and sufferings, to show “the patience [hypomonē] of Job” in attaining the reward of the righteous ( James 5:11). Though the “empirical objection” cannot be lightly set aside, the ultimate restoration of Job prevents those reading the book holistically from identifying the book with this objection in any simple or direct way. When the “satanic objection” is raised by a member of the divine council, a figure called “the satan” (haśśaṭan; 1:6–​12), it serves as the complicating action for the plot and the theme of Job 1–​2. The stable situation at the beginning of the book is one in which Job’s reputation for piety is matched by the report of his great wealth and stature (1:1–​5). The stasis is disrupted by actions that stem from heavenly deliberations about which Job knows nothing. In the setting of the divine council, Yahweh invites the satan, newly returned from patrolling the earth, to comment specifically on Job. Yahweh names Job as his servant and repeats the narrator’s claim concerning Job’s righteousness: “have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns from evil” (1:8). In adding the detail that “there is no one like him on the earth,” Yahweh highlights Job’s uniqueness. It is clear that the satan has indeed considered Job. He immediately responds to Yahweh with a question that goes directly to the connection between piety and prosperity suggested in the book’s opening verses. The satan asks whether Job “has [to this point] feared God for nothing?” (1:9).4 That is, has Job’s characteristic mode of life, one based on the “fear of God,” really been undertaken “for nothing” (ḥinnam), that is, without expectation of reward? Is it not possible that Job’s “fear” is closer to prudence than to piety and that Job, all along, has been aiming, simply, at avoiding misfortune and securing the prosperity that God grants to those who fear him? The satan’s question raises the possibility that Yahweh, as sponsor of wisdom, has created a system that undermines itself by turning piety into an instrument of profit and making “servants” into hired hands. In this way, the satan’s question reverses Yahweh’s initial query and forces him to

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wonder whether he has really considered Job. There is only one way to find out what Job’s motivations are. The satan proposes to proceed by way of experiment: take away Job’s prosperity and watch his loyalty to Yahweh disappear. Perhaps the most startling moment in the book is the brief word of assent that Yahweh gives to the satan’s plan. He authorizes the satan to destroy Job’s family and estate (1:12) and, later, to attack Job’s body as well (2:6). The satan is forbidden only from killing Job, since this would bring the investigation to an end and prevent anyone from learning the basis for Job’s piety. In two distinct episodes, the satan smites Job, takes away all that he has, and turns him into an isolated and afflicted man. Despite his precipitous decline, Job never curses God as the satan predicted he would. Neither does Job “charge God with wrongdoing” (1:22) or “sin with his lips” (2:10). As far as ­chapters 1 and 2 are concerned, Job’s piety is not dependent upon his prosperity. Job indeed fears God ḥinnam, without expectation of reward. To the extent that Job’s responses to suffering register as a “fact” about the world, there is at least one piece of counter-​evidence against the satan’s inductive argument concerning piety. Because not all piety is self-​interested, the general claim that humans fear God simply in order to prosper cannot be sustained. The prologue ( Job 1–​2), then, portrays a “successful” Job, a champion of wisdom. Yet it does more than offer Job as a “black swan” who falsifies the claim that “all swans are white.” It also sheds light on the nature of a piety that, in withstanding extraordinary ordeals, comes into a view as something real, genuine, and resistant to cynical reductionism. It explains how a fear of God such as Job has “works” in a world characterized by suffering and alienation. To see this, it is necessary to read Job in a wider biblical context. In a comparative study of Gen 1–​3 and Job 1–​2, Sam Meier argues that the author of the prologue to Job deliberately echoes Genesis in an effort to portray Job as a “second Adam” who “does not succumb to the temptation.”5 According to Meier, the first five verses of Job appropriate a number of details from the P account, which serve to place Job and his family in an “idyllic” state akin to that of humans in Gen 1. Job has been fruitful and multiplied; he exercises dominion over the animals; his children’s perpetual feasting recalls life without hard labor; and Job “shows reverence for the sabbath” by “sanctifying” his children (vayqaddešem) only after the seventh day in their weekly cycle of feasting has passed (1:5).6 When Job’s trials begin, “his cosmos collapses” in a way that recalls Gen 1. As animals preceded humans in Gen 1, so Job’s animals die before his children perish. The fact that they do so in a house brought down by a “great wind” (ruaḥ gedolah) may also be significant (see ruaḥ ʾelohim in Gen 1:2).7 The J source also informs the plot of the prologue. In the second part of

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the trial, the satan proposes to “touch” the “bone and flesh” of Job (2:5). This refers, on one level, to Job’s body, but it also recalls Adam’s description of Eve as his “bone and flesh” (Gen 2:23). Significantly, it is after the affliction of Job’s “bone and flesh” that the wife of Job makes her appearance in the narrative.8 The satan’s strategy, then, was not only to afflict Job’s body but also to turn his wife against him, something he ultimately succeeds in doing. According to Meier, the investigation undertaken by the satan is a midrashic elaboration of the unexplained presence and activity of the serpent in Gen 3. Just as the satan was authorized to probe Job’s piety, “the serpent would have been sent by God himself to test humankind.” That the serpent is cooperating with God is clear from the fact that the serpent remains behind after speaking with Eve; it is also significant that God does not interrogate the serpent about what he has done. He knows why the serpent is there.9 The unanswered question, then, is not why the serpent is there (he was commissioned to test Adam and Eve) but rather why he was punished for “succeeding.”10 By contrast, the satan does not succeed in causing Job to sin. After the satan has fulfilled his role, he simply disappears from the narrative. How, then, does the Genesis background illuminate the piety of Job in the prologue? The point is not simply that Job is a second Adam who manages to succeed where the first Adam failed. The point of the prologue is rather to examine wisdom by imagining a sage, a wisdom expert, not in a new Eden but in the midst of a decreated cosmos.11 To the extent that the Job of the prologue succeeds, he does so as a paragon of a wisdom aimed at managing life at the extremities of human suffering. The tale of Job asks whether and how wisdom as “tree of life” (Prov 3:18) sustains the life of the wise after their forebears opted for the tree of “knowledge of good and evil,” were driven from the garden, and begot humanity in their image (Gen 5:3). Job and Adam, though similar, are different in important ways. Adam’s mastery of his environment is natural and primeval, but Job’s is a direct reflex of his status as a wisdom exemplar. His large family and prodigious wealth do not suggest the outworkings of creational imperatives from Gen 1 as much as the prosperity that, in Proverbs, comes conventionally to the righteous. The superlative degree of Job’s piety is matched by the superlative degree of his possessions and status as “greatest of the men of the East” (1:3). Adam bears no special moral distinction, but Job is a marked man: one who, the prologue insists, is “blameless and upright [tam veyašar], fears God and turns from evil [yere ʾelohim vesar meraʿ]” (1:1, 8; 2:3). With this fourfold description, the author of the prologue identifies Job as the embodiment of the wisdom ideal. Fear of God, as I have shown, is wisdom’s sine qua non. Turning from evil is the

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indispensable counterpart to fearing God (Prov 3:7; 8:13; 14:16; 16:6). Being blameless and upright (tam veyašar) describes the wisdom ideal in more constructive terms. In places where the two terms are found together, they refer especially to the secure and prosperous position of the sage: [Yahweh] stores up sound wisdom for the upright [layšarim]; he is a shield to those who walk in integrity [tom]. (Prov 2:7) May integrity and uprightness [tom-​vayošer] preserve me, for I wait for you. (Ps 25:21) Mark the blameless [tam], and behold the upright [yašar], for there is posterity [ ʾaḥarit] for the peaceable. (Ps 37:37) In calling Job “blameless and upright,” then, the author of the prologue alludes to a traditional expectation that the wise man will be preserved, even as that expectation is dramatically reversed in the narrative.12 Thus, Job is Adam reimagined as a sage, a man without a genealogy (like Adam) who is put before the reader in order to probe the efficacy and veracity of the sage’s wisdom. But there is one more crucial marker of Job’s sagely character in the prologue: competence with wisdom words. Job’s trial takes place in two distinct phases (1:13–​22 and 2:7–​10) that are, in both cases, prefaced by heavenly deliberations and concluded by sayings from Job (1:21 and 2:10). It is in looking at Job’s words that one sees most clearly how and why he succeeds in defeating the satanic objection. After Job learns that his animals, servants, and children have perished, he refers to nakedness: Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1:21) Both the surprising image of nakedness ( Job has just torn his clothing in grief and is not, in fact, naked) and the language of return to the “mother’s womb” are Adamic. Adam realizes after eating the fruit that he is naked (Gen 3:7). Along with the impulse to hide and the confession of fear (Gen 3:10), the nakedness of Adam signals his new, highly vulnerable position. It is precisely in this sense that Job too is “naked.” As Meier points out, the “womb” in question is not the actual womb of Job’s biological mother. It is, instead, the earthly “womb,” the soil out of which humans are created. The return to the

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“womb” is the same deathly return to dust that was promised to Adam: “to dust you shall return” (Gen 3:19).13 Job’s misfortunes are, in the first instance, a memento mori. His confession bespeaks a wisdom framed by an awareness of mortality that brings grief and loss into broader perspective. But it is the second line of 1:21 that connects Job even more explicitly to a wisdom derived from the human situation in Gen 1–​3. The second line does not specify an object for the two verbs. On one level, the object of the verbs, though implicit, is clear: it is Job’s prosperity—​his animals, servants, and family—​that Yahweh gave and then took away. But as part of a mašal the two verbs make a larger point as well. In Gen 1–​3, it belongs to God to “give” all creatures their sustenance (Gen 1:29–​30; see Ps 104:27); creatures, therefore, receive. By contrast, the consumption of forbidden fruits is described in terms of human initiative, as the act of “taking” (Gen 3:6; 3:22). To say that Yahweh both “gives” and “takes” is to recognize that both are specifically divine prerogatives. For humans, “taking” is a presumptuous act, one at odds with trust in divine providence. The sage understands events with ultimate reference to divine purpose (Prov 16:4). But because the divine will is inscrutable (Prov 25:2), the characteristic stance of the sage is one of trust, patience, and acceptance. Where the first man and woman presumed to “take” what was forbidden, Job identifies the authority to “take” with God alone. Job’s doxology (“Blessed be the name of Yahweh!”) shows that his particular stance, though passive, is not one of fatalism and resignation but rather one of reverence and loyalty. The second statement, found in 2:10, is a response to the wife of Job. Finding Job covered with sores on the ash heap, she asks him whether he is “still holding fast to his integrity [tummah]” (2:9). Assuming he is, she then tells Job to “curse [lit. “bless”] God and die” (2:9). As Adam was given forbidden fruit by Eve, so Job is urged by his wife to act in a way that is contrary to his form of life. Instead of being led to violate a specific commandment, though, Job is told to disavow the totality of his life as a sage, his tummah, and to recognize its futility. The God who was thought to bless and authorize Job’s mode of life has now clearly abandoned Job. The only course left to Job, his wife suggests, is to recognize the fact and face his own death without pious illusions. For both Adam and Job, loyalty to an apparently malevolent deity, whether jealous (Adam) or hostile ( Job), is at stake. Job does not appear even to consider the proposal, as he dismisses his wife’s suggestion as foolish talk (2:10). Job explains its foolishness, once again, by way of a pithy saying. As mešalim go, it is perhaps not very subtle, too general and philosophical to convey the kind of refined insights typical of Proverbs. But it still has an aphoristic quality reminiscent of wisdom sayings: “shall we receive the good

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[haṭṭob] from God and not receive the evil [haraʿ]?” (2:10). As in the first statement (1:21), Job emphasizes his passive position: it belongs to him and all humans to “receive” their fortunes from God. As such, humans are not in a position to decide what they receive. They get what they get. Job’s (rhetorical) question, then, does not refer to the hypocrisy or inconsistency of receiving one thing while refusing to receive another from the same giver. The point is rather that labels applied to fates and events, by which one considers them either “good” or “evil,” serve only to confuse and fragment perception. To evaluate things in this way is to opt for terms that correspond to the subjectivity of the recipient, not the intent of the giver or even the nature of the gift. It is to break faith with the givenness and goodness of the world as circumscribed by God. Thinking in terms of value is the same kind of cognition exemplified by Eve (Gen 3:6) and associated with the forbidden fruit. The “knowledge of good and evil” attained by Adam and Eve is here disowned by Job. For in his willingness to receive both good and evil alike, Job renders the distinction between them useless. It belongs to humans to receive their lot from God. In the view of the sage: what is the point of saying “good” or “bad” if the goal is to be reconciled to whatever one receives, to fear God more than one fears fate? With this saying, Job punctuates the triumph of wisdom. Where Adam failed, the sage succeeds.

Knowledge and Integrity The Job of the didactic tale ( Job 1–​2, 42:10–​17) offers a robust apology for the traditional, sagely concept of wisdom. If the point of the book were simply to address the “empirical” and “satanic” objections to wisdom, then it could have been a good deal shorter. Only the prologue and epilogue would have been necessary. Instead of three chapters, though, the book of Job contains forty-​two. The substance of the book—​the dialogues, the intervention of Elihu, and the whirlwind speeches—​is concerned with a third criticism of wisdom, one that is subtler and more difficult to address than the other two. The third objection arises from the intellectual character of wisdom; this may be called the “formal objection.” The anthological character of wisdom, with its large collection of wise sayings and its venerable traditions, makes it possible for wisdom to become doctrinaire, a basis that enables sages to impose false categories on experience. As the “knowledge of good and evil” gives the knower formal control over experience at the expense of intellectual holism (because the knower orders knowledge subjectively), so, too, may wisdom degenerate into a set of convenient notions, a system of pat answers

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to vexing anomalies that does not comport with the world as people actually experience it. Wisdom may prove unable to account for the peculiar and particular experiences of one who, like Job, perishes in spite of being pious. Wisdom in this case becomes not only an empty description but also, in the hands of wisdom proponents, a false, misleading, and oppressive ideology. In other words, if wisdom collapses into knowledge, it loses something essential. It ceases to be wisdom. In Job 1–​2, Yahweh tests Job and thus allows the reader to measure wisdom by considering Job’s anomalous experiences in light of the empirical and satanic objections. But in the book’s vast middle, Job himself is the anomaly. He becomes the strange datum with which sagely wisdom—​ represented by the four friends—​must reckon. What complicates the book further is the fact that Job is identified as a paragon of wisdom in the prologue. He is not an outsider. One might imagine a challenge to wisdom posed by an anti-​Job, a wicked man with terrific luck and inexplicable good fortune. Such a case would indeed test “wisdom theory,” but because an anti-​Job would not himself be wise, it would not speak to the substance of wisdom in the same way. Because Job is a sage pitted against other sages, it is not the external plausibility of wisdom but rather its nature, its inner coherence, that is at stake. Thus, the greatest challenge to wisdom comes from wisdom itself. Though still clearly an expert sage, the Job of the dialogues is a much darker figure, one given to bitterness, despair, and hostility.14 When Job’s friends arrive to comfort him (2:11–​13), they find a man altered beyond recognition by his ordeal. An initial period of silence and solidarity gives way, after seven days and nights, to the speeches and dialogues that dominate the book (3–​37). All of these presume the situation described in the prologue: Job has lost everything and remains “within the frame” of this situation, a man still very much in the throes of affliction and grief. His friends do not see a triumphant figure but a deathly one whose “pain” is “very great” (2:13). In what follows, the friends—​Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—​take turns addressing Job in a concerted effort to console him and reintegrate him into human life. As “comforters,” the three bear the conventional responsibility of sympathizing with Job, helping him to accept what has happened, and returning him to his position within the community. But it is equally conventional for the bereaved to resist their help for some time and continue the grieving process—​to “refuse to be comforted”—​before eventually accepting help and consolation.15 In the book of Job, this ritual is used to frame an encounter in which Job’s friends urge him to “change his position” and he refuses. What is normally a conventional back-​and-​forth between mourner and comforters becomes the setting for a profound examination of what it

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would mean for Job to rejoin the world of the sages and why wisdom, as Job understands and embodies it, makes such a reentry impossible. In the ensuing contentious debate, the two sides argue in distinctive ways. The position of the three friends, taken together, has been characterized variously as a “traditional view,” an “orthodox wisdom,” or an “orthodox doctrine.”16 Because of the difficulties involved in specifying exactly what constitutes “orthodoxy” and “tradition” in this context, it is best to take these labels as suggestive descriptions rather than precise categorizations. What the labels capture well, however, is the fact that the friends hold in common a certain set of beliefs. Note that the friends never challenge or even address one another; they only speak to Job. These beliefs are based on an authoritative system of principles that have been handed down from earlier generations. Bildad, for example, refers to the traditional character of knowledge: For inquire now of bygone generations, and consider what their ancestors have found; for we are but of yesterday, and we know nothing, for our days on earth are but a shadow. Will they not teach you and tell you and utter words out of their understanding? (8:8–​10) He dramatizes the disparity between an impoverished knowledge restricted to present experience (“we know nothing”) and one based on ancient discoveries carefully passed on by ancestors. A single generation passes quickly (it already belongs to “yesterday”) and discerns little of value on its own. But, fortunately, the ancestors live on in the voice of the past. Present-​ day sages like Eliphaz ratify their time-​honored principles and pass them on to others (in this case Job): See, we have searched this out; it is true. Hear, and know it for yourself. (5:27) Their principles are thought to be sound, that is, strong enough to support deductive arguments that produce true conclusions about individuals like Job. The essential principles include the following: (1) God rules the world justly; (2) the wicked ultimately perish; (3) the righteous ultimately prosper; and (4) God restores the fortunes of the repentant sinner.17 As Brian Doak has demonstrated in an insightful study of nature imagery in the book of Job, the friends also appeal to the natural world, to plants and animals, to

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illustrate and reinforce their arguments.18 Though characterizations of natural phenomena vary in the friends’ speeches, they all exemplify the broader wisdom tendency to draw analogies between moral order and cosmic order and, therefore, to see nature as a source of theological knowledge. Given the friends’ principles and the fact, acknowledged by all, that Job is quite visibly perishing, the conclusion that Job is a sinner (who may yet repent) is impossible to avoid. Job’s friends believe that a rational application of wisdom principles in this case yields true and reliable knowledge about him. Though the friends resort in places to innuendo and suggestive analogies to suggest that he (and his family) have suffered for their sins (e.g., 4:10–​11; 8:4), they also speak directly.19 Eliphaz, for example, states the shared conclusion quite plainly: Is it for your piety [yirʾat] that he reproves you, and enters into judgment with you? Is not your wickedness great? There is no end to your iniquities. (22:4–​5) The friends arrive at the conclusion that Job is wicked because his life fits a pattern that is affirmed by tradition, experience, and their understanding of the natural world. In this, the friends appear to have distilled wisdom into a kind of scientific program. As Wilcox points out, what the friends stress are not “ ‘deep’ claims, or speculations about God’s motives; what they stress is their ‘empirical’ claims that the wicked fall, and the upright and innocent are protected.”20 And Carol Newsom, drawing on Philippe Nemo, describes the friends’ form of knowledge as “sciencelike”: oriented to “the regularities underlying apparently diverse phenomena” and attuned to fundamental “principles of creation that operate with predictability.”21 The analogy between wisdom and science should not be pressed too far, but it does shed light on the shape and character of the friends’ knowledge. Job, by contrast, argues largely from his own experience. Where the friends seek to fit Job into a larger pattern, Job insists on the need to face a single fact: he is under attack from God. The problem is not, as Eliphaz suggests, that Job is a weak and lowly human (4:17) or a wayward man under discipline (5:17). The situation, Job says, is hostile and personal: For the arrows of the Almighty are in me; my spirit drinks their poison; the terrors of God are arrayed against me. (6:4)

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When Zophar commends to Job an inscrutable God who nevertheless rules justly (11:7–​11) and restores the repentant (11:13–​20), he implies that the man in front of him is a confused and presumptuous sinner. Again, the categories do not fit. Job dismisses the suggestion and shifts the discussion from Zophar’s categories to his own history: I am a laughingstock to my friends; I, who called upon God and he answered me, a just and blameless man, I am a laughingstock. (12:4) In the same speech, Job (ʾiyyob) asks why God hides his face from him and counts him as his “enemy” (ʾoyeb; 13:24). Repeatedly, Job vents his frustration with the friends and expresses his desire, instead, to appear before God directly (e.g., 9:33–​35; 13:3, 13–​19; 19:25–​27). Job wavers between terror at the prospect of a personal audience with God (e.g., 23:15–​17) and confidence that such an encounter would turn out well. God, Job says, would not overawe him in that case but instruct him, reason with him, and deliver him (23:5–​7). Arguing against the friends, then, Job sees a different present reality and a different future: instead of punishment for wickedness, personal attack; instead of restoration after repentance, an encounter with God in which he is either vindicated or overcome by divine power. The difference between the two views is not to be explained by the fact that Job is ignorant of or opposed to the wisdom articulated by the friends. On the contrary, Job is himself a sage who understands it all too well. As he says in exasperation: Look, my eye has seen all this, my ear has heard and understood it. What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you. But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God. (13:1–​3) In no way inferior to the friends, Job is a peer, one equal to the friends in knowledge afforded by wisdom. The difference between Job and the friends is instead explained by the fact that Job has come to understand things from the altogether anomalous perspective of the pious man who perishes. Within this point of view, God is a hunter, and Job is the prey (10:16). The wicked lead prosperous lives (21:1–​ 34). The cosmos is unstable and unpredictable (9:5–​9) and is ordered only

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by violence (26:11–​14). Thus, Job inverts the knowledge propounded by the friends. Rejecting their knowledge, he opts for a kind of authentic ignorance: I am blameless [tam]: I know nothing else about myself. I detest my life: it is a unity [ʾaḥat hi]. Therefore, I say, he destroys both the blameless [tam] and the wicked. (9:21–​22)22 In this section (9:14–​24), Job imagines a scene in which he, overwhelmed by God, does not receive a fair hearing and is therefore made to suffer the fate of the wicked. Job realizes that he is unable to prevail, whether by knowledge or by power. All that Job knows, all that remains to him, is the “unity” of his life, specifically its quality as a complete life, a life that is tam. The connotations of this important word have shifted. What was a conventional marker of piety in the prologue (where tam is often rendered as “blameless”) assumes, in the dialogues, its fuller sense of something that has its own integrity, completeness, soundness, and even simplicity.23 “Destroyed” by God, Job accepts that he now shares the fate of the wicked, yet he faces this fate as himself, as the person he has always been. Despite the fact that he now receives the portion of the evildoer, he does not become one. The conjunction in verse 22 is important: though God destroys indiscriminately, Job insists that the destruction is not a single calamity for humans in general. Defiantly, Job claims that when acts against humanity, he unfairly metes out destruction both to the blameless and to the wicked. Job’s life has thus become detestable, but, as one who is tam, Job cannot disown it. This brings us to the central theme of Job’s life: his tummah (“integrity”). It is this property, more than any other, that others identify with Job, and by which Job characterizes his own life. After the first set of trials, Yahweh points out to the satan that Job “still holds fast to his integrity” (“veʿodennu maḥaziq betummato”; 2:3). And after the satan afflicts Job’s body with sores, Job’s wife uses the same formulation to ask whether Job means to persist in his loyal way of life (“ʿodka maḥaziq betummateka”; 2:9). Eliphaz opens his first speech by calling to mind Job’s personal history as an exemplary sage who instructed others and supported the weak (4:3–​4). Now that Job himself is weak and afflicted (4:5), Eliphaz urges Job to draw the appropriate lessons from his own life of integrity: Is not your fear of God your confidence, and the integrity of your ways [vetom derakeka] your hope? (4:6)

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Job and the friends disagree, of course, about what piety requires in Job’s case. The friends urge Job to repent and be reconciled to God. To do so, however, would not be an act of integrity but, Job argues, a violation of his tummah, a repudiation of his entire mode of life. He rejects the deductive arguments of the friends because their conclusions are false to his experience. This experience includes what he has done and the life he has lived, but it also includes, as Eliphaz puts it, the “hope” and “confidence” toward which Job lived. To reassume the hope and confidence of a pious man after all that has happened—​ after God has apparently broken faith with Job—​would merely be an act of self-​preservation, an attempt to move to an advantageous position on the wisdom grid. Were Job to repent, he would, in effect, be adopting a new piety attuned to circumstance and, as the satan suspected, motivated by self-​regard. In refusing to repent, Job shows that in living the life of one who is “blameless and upright” he has not been pursuing prosperity but instead something rarer and more difficult: nearness to God.24 Job’s desire is to see God (19:25–​27), and it is only after seeing God that Job finally backs down (42:5–​6). His aim, like the afflicted righteous in the Psalms and elsewhere, is to appear before God.25 But unless this happens, Job insists that the only course left to him is to die as he has lived. He declares defiantly that even death will not deter him: “though he kill me, I will praise him” (13:15).26 And to the friends he avows the same determination to maintain his integrity: Far be it from me to say that you are right; until I die I will not put away my integrity [tummah] from me. (27:5) Finally, in the series of oaths that close Job’s speeches (­chapter 31), he pleads for a fair evaluation of his life: Let me be weighed in a just balance, and let God know my integrity [tummah]! (31:6) Given a choice between a course of action prescribed by the friends’ system and one consistent with his own experience, Job chooses the latter. Instead of knowledge, Job opts for integrity. As God’s servant (1:8, 2:3), Job demands that God—​and no one else—​dispatch him. It is by his integrity, and not the friends’ knowledge, that he stands or falls. It must be said, however, that Job’s insight that the sage is a servant of God before all else—​theoretician, moralist, expert, and so on—​is not actually a departure from traditional wisdom. The hymn to wisdom in Job 28

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culminates in the traditional formula: “the fear of the Lord is wisdom” ( Job 28:28). This saying is entirely consistent with Job’s arguments. To the extent that Job’s tummah begins and ends with loyalty toward Yahweh, as he insists it does, then he does not seek to repudiate wisdom as much as restore it to its theocentric orientation. The issue, then, is not the friends’ wisdom but the knowledge they have incorrectly derived from it and applied (rather cruelly) to Job’s situation. It is likely that the vehemence of the dialogues is explained more by shared assumptions than by any fundamental disagreement among them.27 The dispute, then, concerns the way that beliefs are coordinated to realities seen and unseen. The friends state what must, according to wisdom, be the case; Job, though, refuses to alter his confession and redescribe his life in terms of their knowledge. Job’s warrant for doing so, as I have shown, is his tummah. As a champion of integrity, Job cuts a noble and even inspiring figure. But the portrayal of a Job who sits among the ashes with open sores and covered with dust, one who denounces his friends wildly and curses himself extravagantly, may also suggest that tummah has its limits. If the book of Job seems to commend tummah as the cardinal sagely virtue, then it does so with certain qualifications. When it seems clear that Job has moved beyond the friends’ help, indeed that they have only made the situation worse by provoking him into an impassioned defense of his integrity, a fourth friend, Elihu, appears (32–​37). As something of an outsider, Elihu’s aim is to break the impasse between Job and the friends. Because Elihu is younger than Job and his friends, his authority to speak rests not on age or his status as a peer but on two related claims: that he speaks under the influence of divine inspiration (32:8–​10, 18–​22; 33:4) and that he possesses knowledge.28 The frequency with which Elihu refers to knowledge is striking, and so is the degree to which he claims to possess knowledge: I will bring my knowledge from far away, and ascribe righteousness to my Maker. For truly my words are not false, one who is perfect in knowledge [temim deʿot] is with you. (36:3–​4) The rivalry between integrity and knowledge is continued in the Elihu speeches: where Job boasted of an integrated life, Elihu boasts of a complete knowledge. But if the friends’ recourse to knowledge earlier in the book failed to move Job, then it is hard to see how another round of learned commentary could add anything new. One thing that is distinctive about Elihu is the

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strong claim to divine inspiration.29 But what is equally important, given Job’s insistence on tummah, is the role Elihu plays in curbing and constraining Job’s attempt to recast piety in terms of integrity. Elihu aims to show the limits placed on tummah by piety itself. That Elihu should identify this correction with “knowledge” shows his affinity with the approach taken by the three friends. That he should do so after Job’s words have ended (31:40) shows that, for the author or final editor of the book, a tummah that leaves Job alienated from God, Job’s friends, and the world cannot be the final word. Elihu’s cue to intervene is the silence that results when the friends, seeing that Job is “righteous in his own eyes” (32:1), finally give up. Where Job broke the first silence by cursing his own birth (­chapter 3), Elihu breaks the second silence by chiding both the friends and Job: the friends for failing to answer Job and win him over (32:11–​15); Job for speaking of himself as an innocent victim of a predatory God (33:8–​11). Despite Elihu’s reputation as a derivative thinker, a presumptuous and bombastic interloper, I believe that his criticisms of Job meet their mark.30 This is not to say that Elihu would have succeeded (or did in fact succeed) in “comforting Job” where the older three failed. The Elihu speeches are reported after the dialogues have closed. Since he is not among those given the task of bringing Job’s mourning to an end, Elihu is a disengaged figure, and his speeches occupy a space somewhere outside the existential realities of the narrative.31 They are “speeches” in form only; in substance, they are a distant, learned, after-​the-​fact criticism of Job’s tummah-​ based attack on knowledge. Had Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar voiced this criticism, it would have been inseparable from the attempt to get Job to do something, namely, repent and accept comfort. And for this reason, it likely would have failed to penetrate Job’s defiance. But as a set of arguments that follow the collapse of the main dialogue, it gives the reader an opportunity to reflect on the path that Job has taken and to understand its implications. As Job 32:1 adumbrates, the problem lies in the blameless man’s inclination toward self-​righteousness. Job has opposed every effort on the part of his friends to characterize his situation. To a great degree, his speeches are taken up with vivid redescriptions of things mentioned by the friends:  his past, present, and future. He thus appears to be enclosed in a reality very different from that of his friends. Using Job’s own words, Elihu probes the world described in Job’s discourses. The fact that Job is “righteous in his own eyes” is not simply a matter of his claiming to be above the reproach of others (33:8–​11). According to Elihu, it is also a matter of claiming falsely that his integrity is a source of knowledge about God. The error of the friends was to deduce from first principles the claim that Job is impious. Job’s error, however,

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consists in his making a similar deduction about God: if Job suffers the fate of the wicked, then God must be hostile and malevolent. But this conclusion only follows if Job’s premises are both true and complete. As Elihu points out, however, Job has no right to move from his own limited experience to the claim that God is unjust. To the charge that God has willfully refused to answer Job (33:13), Elihu responds that God speaks to humans in ways that Job himself has experienced but failed to perceive correctly: through dreams, pain, and mediators (33:14–​30).32 Job claims that it “profits one nothing to take delight in God” (34:9), but Elihu points to the workings of justice in the world (34:10–​30). If injustice requires explanation, then so do examples of justice (for example, wicked rulers getting their just deserts in spite of the fact that there are no people above them to hold them to account; 34:17–​20). In his passion to vindicate himself, Job himself has fallen short of this justice, refusing to take the example of the pious man eager to know his own faults and correct them (34:31–​32). According to Elihu, Job imagines that his piety somehow constrains or affects God. Elihu, though, rejects moral grandiosity and makes morality an essentially human affair: If you are righteous, what do you give to him; or what does he receive from your hand? Your wickedness affects others like you, and your righteousness, other human beings. (35:7–​8) Finally, there is the question of scope. Job, it seems, has taken things too personally in claiming to be the object of God’s malevolence. According to Elihu, there is a great deal more to God’s governance of the world than what Job in his particular situation is given to understand. Though he has lost sight of the fact, Job still lives in a world in which God oversees kingdoms (36:5–​12), coordinates weather to sustain agriculture (36:24–​33), and commands lightning, thunder, rain, and snow (37:1–​13). God’s purposes in doing so are manifold: They turn round and round by his guidance, to accomplish all that he commands them on the face of the habitable world. Whether for correction, or for his land, or for love, he causes it to happen. (37:12–​13) In presenting all this knowledge, Elihu does not contest Job’s piety as much as criticize its tendency toward smugness, narrowness, and smallness of heart.

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Cosmic Reconciliation As one commentator put it, Job’s conception of things “is but the reflection of his own case, as he conceived it, flung over the world.”33 If this is the case, then what is required, ultimately, to restore Job is not simply the intervention of a critic like Elihu but an understanding of the real world over which Job has “flung” his conception. Though alienated from the friends and their conventional wisdom, Job remains sage enough to know that his wisdom must be cosmic as well as ethical. It must align with the structure and nature of the world if it is to retain its character as wisdom. Job’s speeches move tentatively in this direction (12:7–​8). In places, Job describes the natural world as the venue for irrational, divine power (9:5–​9; 26:5–​14)—​the Joban situation writ large. The friends, for their part, believe that animal and plant life mirror the harmony and regularity of the moral economy (5:22–​27; 8:11–​20). Knowing, too, that nature has a role to play in ascertaining the nature of piety, Elihu ends up talking about the cosmos in his attempt to correct Job (36–​37). But it is not until the reader arrives at the “whirlwind speeches” of Yahweh (38–​41) that the question of competing wisdoms—​Job’s versus the friends’—​is finally resolved. Given the importance of cosmology to wisdom, it is not surprising that the resolution comes by way of a description of the natural world. Many details indicate that the speeches involve a confrontation in which Yahweh asserts his power, overawes Job, and silences him:  Yahweh, for example, answers Job from a whirlwind (38:1), questions Job’s “legal standing” (38:2; 40:8–​9), and proceeds to interrogate him (38:3; 40:7). Eventually, Job gives in, confessing his inability to carry on the disputation with Yahweh (40:4–​5) and finally withdrawing altogether (42:6). Despite the framing of the whirlwind speeches in legal, adversarial terms, the substance of the speeches has nothing to do with Job’s actual case. The whirlwind speeches are, quite simply, about things in the world. The point of the speeches is to reembed Job in that world. The cosmos described in the whirlwind speeches is not the ordered harmony found in other passages relevant to wisdom (e.g., Prov 8:22–​31; Ps 104; see Gen 1). The natural order that appears elsewhere in the Bible to be peaceful and domestic becomes here in the whirlwind speeches utterly inhospitable to man, strange to both to human reckoning and to human projects. In the whirlwind speeches, the rain is diverted to the wilderness, where no one lives (38:26). Snow and hail are set aside to visit the earth in the “time of trouble, the day of battle and war” (38:23), and ice locks away needed water (38:30). Celestial bodies move in unaccountable patterns, and storms

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alternate with droughts so that the dust grows hard, and the clods of soil cling together (38:38). Young lions and goats feed and procreate in unmanageable ways, while the wild ass and wild ox pay no heed to the multitudes in the city. The ostrich and the wild horse mock human attempts to understand and control them. The great birds are no use to man. The hawk and the eagle live far away in the mountains. Some even feed on human blood; as 39:30 says, where the slain are, there, also, is the vulture. In the whirlwind, Job is made to see an astonishing variety of creatures, meteorological and zoological. What they all have in common is a strange, unaccountable particularity. Each, created by God, inhabits a form of life specific to itself. Each one keeps its own arcane secrets and obeys strange divine directives peculiar to itself. The creatures of the whirlwind speeches, then, do not fit into a cosmic system that redounds to human benefit or usefulness, as they do, quite clearly, in the cosmic order of Psalm 104. Instead, each, in being true to itself, defeats human attempts at domestication and rational control. To put this in the language of Job, the life of each creature in the whirlwind speeches is marked by tummah, an integrity that is manifest precisely in the gratuity of existence and the determination to be oneself. In the whirlwind speeches, Job is made to understand that the essential creaturely virtue is tummah. Doak puts it nicely when he says that in the whirlwind speeches, “nature teaches humans how to be human.”34 These descriptions of meteorological phenomena and various wild animals build to a climax in ­chapters 40 and 41, when God questions Job about two creatures in particular: Behemoth and Leviathan. The massive Behemoth seems gentle enough, feeding on grass and bathing serenely in the river, but no human can master it. No one can rival its strength or control it with hooks and snares. In language that recalls Woman Wisdom, who was the “beginning of [God’s] way” (rešit; Prov 8:22), Behemoth is described, startlingly, as the “beginning [rešit] of the ways of God” (40:19). Here the cosmic manifestation of wisdom is not the lofty guarantor of limits and order who appeals to humans (Prov 8–​9) but an unconquerable beast indifferent to humans and heedless of danger. It is not the majestic figure of Woman Wisdom who is identified with the divine principle of creation (Prov 8:22) but Behemoth, a very different embodiment of order (if that is what he is). Similar things are said of Leviathan. No one can lead Leviathan around with a hook, soothe him with words, or even approach him (41:1–​10). His scales are impenetrable and his flesh as hard as stone; swords, spears, and arrows fall upon him like straw and rotten wood. He sneezes lightning and spits fire. What makes this portrayal even more arresting is the sharp contrast between this portrait of Leviathan and other references to him in the Hebrew Bible, notably in Gen 1:21 and Ps 104:26.35

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Instead of being a generic sea animal (Gen 1:21) or a harmless creature that plays in the water while ships pass safely by (Ps 104:26), the Leviathan of the whirlwind speeches is pure menace, the undisputed “king over all that are proud” (41:34). He does not cooperate with commercial endeavors (41:4–​7) as he does in the psalm but remains well outside the sphere of human control. Most significantly, Leviathan is described in Joban terms. According to Yahweh, there is no one like Job on the earth (1:8; 2:3). Leviathan, too, is beyond compare: “on earth it has no equal, a creature without fear” (41:25). Job is known for his fear of God, Leviathan for his lack of fear. But both are singular beings, and both are tamed, in the end, only by God. In the whirlwind speeches, then, we do not have an image of a good and peaceful natural order but, rather, something like a photographic film negative of that order, enriched here and there with dramatic close-​ups.36 The colors and light values are inverted, so that the image is recognizable but somehow disconcerting, familiar but uncomfortably strange. But what is the upshot of this inverted picture? The point is not simply to overawe Job, to mark a power differential, or to induce a bafflement that will somehow humble him and put him in his place. Nor does it amount to a kind of philosophical screen designed to insulate God’s inscrutable ways from impertinent inquiry or criticism. I believe the point of the whirlwind speeches is actually much simpler. God reclaims Job as one of his own. He causes Job to see that the cosmos—​and therefore wisdom itself—​are ordered by a God beyond knowledge. Though Job’s ordeal has radically dislocated him and left others wondering about his sanity, let alone his righteousness, the whirlwind speeches reassure him that his “situation is fully within the purview of what is real.”37 Reality includes what is strange, unaccountable, and, from a human perspective, useless. Job resembles Leviathan. In a manner of speaking, Job is Leviathan: a mighty creature who cannot be tamed, soothed with words, and integrated into a system (whether a commercial arrangement or a moral one). The life of Leviathan yields no discernible benefit to human beings. Inasmuch as Leviathan remains himself, he serves God ḥinnam. By the end of the book, Job—​seated on the ash heap, afflicted with boils from head to toe, alternately wild with indignation, laid low with melancholy, and seized by ecstatic visions—​has become a kind of chaos monster. Having refused to disown his life and adopt his friends’ conventional view of it, he clings to his tummah and, in doing so, takes his place in a created order where piety is pointless, undirected, and free. This brings us, finally, to Job’s repentance and restoration in the last chapter of the book. The whirlwind speeches accomplish what the speeches of the

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friends could not: they move Job from his ash heap. After the conclusion of Yahweh’s second speech, Job withdraws from his disputation with Yahweh, admitting that he spoke of things he did not understand, and wonders that he “did not know” (42:3). This is, more or less, what Elihu was getting at: in opposing the knowledge offered by the friends, Job failed to recognize that there remained a higher order of knowledge into which his experience might be integrated. Though Elihu does not reveal very much about this order, his speeches challenge Job’s rejection of knowledge and prepare the reader for its unveiling in the whirlwind speeches. Once it is revealed to Job in all of its strange glory, he finally completes the ritual of mourner and comforter begun in ­chapter 3: By the hearing of the ear, I heard of you; but now my eye sees you. Therefore, I repudiate [ʾemʾas] and repent [veniḥamti] of dust and ashes [ʿal-​ʿapar vaʾeper]. (42:5–​6)38 Where Job decried his miserable condition in 9:21 (“ʾemʾas ḥayay”), he now disavows his opposition to the friends and finally gives in. He mentions the symbols of mourning—​the dust upon his head and the ashes upon which he sat scraping himself—​in order, finally, to disown them, accept comfort, and seek restoration. In doing so, however, does Job also disavow his tummah? There is no explicit mention of “integrity” anywhere in the epilogue, but the implication is that Job, in leaving behind dust and ashes, no longer keeps the position he held tenaciously for most of the book. Something has changed. Job’s vision of Yahweh (42:5), his direct encounter with the God of the whirlwind, separates his former and future lives. Because his aim all along, the culmination of his piety, consisted in his seeing God with his own eyes (19:25–​27), he is able, once God appears to reclaim him, to “repudiate” his position (dust and ashes) without repudiating himself. He is able, in other words, to emerge from his ordeal and continue his life. As if to emphasize the perdurance of Job’s identity, Yahweh refers to Job three times in the epilogue as his “servant” (42:7–​8), the same title Yahweh applied to him in the prologue (1:8; 2:3). Though his position with respect to Yahweh returns to what it was (namely, one of spectacular blessing), there are subtle indications that Job’s “integrity” now includes a fuller involvement in the lives of others. Aloof from his children in the prologue, Job, in his new life, lavishes his beautiful daughters with extraordinary care (42:15). Where earlier he kept out of the

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cycle of feasts, he welcomes family and friends to his house to eat with him and comfort him (42:11). And where a doubtful and uncertain Job voluntarily made sacrifices for his children, he now prays for his friends at Yahweh’s suggestion (42:9). In the whirlwind speeches, his tummah was aligned, rather surprisingly, with the cosmic order. Here in the epilogue, it is aligned, or realigned, with the social order. In Job’s posttrial life, the reader is made to see the social reflexes of piety in a somewhat unconventional light. On one level, the epilogue reprises the world of Proverbs: Job regains wealth, honor, and progeny befitting a pious man (42:12–​13). But the epilogue also makes Job’s restoration dependent upon actions toward the friends: “and the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends” (42:10; emphasis added). The point of connection between the pious man and the social order is not simply (as Proverbs emphasizes) prosperity and philanthropy, two things that characterized Job’s old life to a high degree. Instead, in the epilogue, the markers of Job’s integrity—​to wit, his integration—​are reconciliation and forgiveness. Reconciliation is costly for Job, as he must leave the site of his heroic stand and rejoin the community from which he was painfully estranged. It is also costly for the friends, as they must supply seven bulls and seven rams, witness the public vindication of Job, and humbly accept his prayer on their behalf (42:8–​9). Unlike Adam, no command is laid on Job. The decision whether to intercede for the friends or not is free and uncoerced. Whether Job is ultimately moved to do so by a higher form of knowledge or something else is left unstated. One can only speculate that, in praying for the friends and returning to his own house, Job demonstrates one final time what it means to hold fast to one’s integrity.

Conclusion Knowledge is an important theme in Genesis and Ecclesiastes and, as I have shown, in the book of Job. These texts probe the concept of knowledge by setting it in a broader context. This contextualization raises certain questions. What does it mean to be a “knower” in a divinely ordered cosmos, or, indeed, in one that is divinely dis-​ordered? How is knowledge conditioned by one’s ethical commitments or compromised by human limitations? To what extent is knowledge a sufficient guide to human flourishing? By introducing another theme, wisdom, into this discussion, we become able to see a larger biblical framework within which knowledge functions. All things considered, the position of knowledge-​seeking in such a framework must be described as a subordinate one. There is something intimate, personal, and direct about

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knowledge that makes it unfit, somehow, to describe the ordinary relationship of humans either to God or even to the world. When the prophets, for example, speak of knowing God, their words seem better suited to the eschaton than to the everyday realities with which the sages were concerned.39 On the far side of human travail, in some bigger, better future, God will be knowable. But, these texts suggest, not now. So, too, the world. If it can be described alternately as harmony (Ps 104) and disharmony ( Job 38–​41), then it seems as though the embeddedness of humans in the world—​surely a rich source of knowledge—​is nevertheless what prevents them from fixing its character, mastering it, and knowing it in the way God knows it. The real world is, in a sense that Kant would recognize, transcendent. Though it perhaps goes too far to say that the world has a sacredness or holiness comparable to God’s, it would also be inaccurate to say that the world—​the cosmic Temple of Gen 1 or, indeed, of the whirlwind speeches—​is but an inert, profane thing that anyone who cares to can fully and finally know. The world courts human knowl­ edge without giving in to it. It is precisely because there are “higher” things in it—​realities cosmic and divine, things “too wonderful” to know ( Job 42:5)—​ that knowledge-​seeking, paradoxically, may become a path to ignorance. To know things in the world in terms of “good and evil”—​that is, by description (Gen 3:6) instead of by name (Gen 2:19–​20)—​is to possess them as objects of knowledge while losing them as things in their own right. It is the difference between seeing as and seeing. For this reason, both the bid for knowledge (Adam and Eve) and the derivation of it from first principles (Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar) lead to less complete forms of understanding. Wisdom, then, functions as a bridge between the realm of wonder and the realm of action. Unlike knowledge, it retains an axial, participatory structure that joins heaven and earth (Gen 1; Prov 8:22–​31) while also reconciling humans to one another ( Job 42:10). It thus works with rather than against the embeddedness of human life. According to Proverbs, one acquires wisdom (Prov 4:7) by recognizing her claim on one’s loyalties, by going over to her side and entering her “house” (Prov 9:1–​6). The questions that wisdom asks of knowledge are thus ethical and contextual. Chief among them is the question of identity: who is it that claims to know ( Job 38:2)? The wise person is characterized, first of all, by fear. Fear is a rich and important concept that includes many things: the visceral response of Adam to the violation of the commandment (Gen 3:10), the conventional piety of the sage (Prov 1:7), and the terror of Job’s God-​forsaken life ( Job 3:25; 23:15–​16). What these experiences have in common is the basic realization of metaphysical vulnerability, the sense that humans lead brief, fleeting lives at the mercy of external

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realities they can never fully know, beset by moral and intellectual weaknesses they can never fully remediate. Wisdom recognizes that the knower is small and mortal: as Job says, he is “of small account” (40:4). Job’s experience of metaphysical vulnerability is no doubt deepened by his close companionship with Death throughout the dialogues (e.g., 17:6–​16). What knowledge is unable to overcome, wisdom takes as a starting point for clear and truthful perception. Wisdom also frames knowledge by making the knower himself or herself an explicit object of perception. When the book of Proverbs gives voice to bloodthirsty conspirators (Prov 1:10–​19) or sketches a seduction scene (Prov 7), it holds up a mirror to human life. Yet in this mirror one does not see, simply, causes and effects but rather choices and consequences. As the Joban dialogues show, the struggle to identify relevant contexts and consequences for human choices lies at the heart of wisdom. The debate is not simply about what Job and the friends know but how they, as disputants, relate to the divine, cosmic, and social orders. The description of wisdom specifically as a presence “beside” humans (Prov 8:2–​3) suggests that wisdom includes the ability to stand, as it were, beside oneself, to gain distance from one’s unconscious perspective, and see oneself and one’s situation as others see them. In this way, knowledge follows from a personal dislocation inherent in wisdom-​seeking. Finally, by making the friends and their knowledge foils to Job’s recalcitrant piety, the book of Job elevates wisdom in a very particular way. The prologue establishes a narrative truth, namely that in testing Job, God did not aim to punish Job’s wickedness but instead to probe his piety. Job’s ordeal was a test, not a call to repentance. Holding fast to his mode of life, Job manages somehow to ascertain this truth, while his friends, for all of their knowledge, do not. In some unaccountable way, then, Job’s tummah becomes, itself, a source of knowledge. His final words (42:1–​6) include the claim that he has reached the limits of understanding and the end of knowl­ edge. But in maintaining his integrity he has learned, at least, that there is more to God, the world, and humanity than what a “knowledge of good and evil” discloses.

Summary In the book of Job, wisdom is sharply contested. In the speeches of the friends, wisdom comes into view as a program based on a pious alignment with divine justice as that justice is realized and manifest in the sacred, social, and cosmic orders. In the figure of Job, the reader is invited to reconsider the nature of piety on which this understanding of wisdom is based. The book raises

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the possibility that piety is identifiable with a form of integrity that yields a different relation to order. Accordingly, piety does not consist in a knowledge of order that leads to a prudent and prosperous life but rather in the determination to hold one’s place within the order, to remain true to the inner dictates of one’s pious life. To do so is to inhabit an order in which the strange inexplicability of this determination is coordinated to the strangeness of the cosmos itself and to the will of an inscrutable God.

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Piety and Wisdom in Socrates Those who are wise declare, Callicles, that heaven and earth and gods and humans are held together by the shared bond of friendship, and by orderliness, moderation, and justice, and for this reason, my comrade, they call this whole a cosmos, not a disorder or dissipation. —​Gorgias 508a

Philosophy requires leisure. 1 To live the examined life, one must have time and freedom to detach oneself from the pursuit of particular ends. Equally important is a willingness to think hard about what ends are choiceworthy, what claims are worthy of belief. No one embodied philosophical leisure more memorably than Plato’s Socrates. Plato did not merely immortalize Socrates, he vivified him. Whatever the precise relation between Plato’s hero and the “historical Socrates,” Plato’s attempt to initiate his readers into the great moral and intellectual quest of his teacher surely counts as one of the greatest achievements of Greece’s classical period. Central to this achievement was the use of dialogue both to portray and to exemplify a particular kind of inquiry. In Plato’s writings, Socrates is one with his “method,” the form of cross-​examination known as the elenchus. Though Socrates held certain convictions, the dialogues do not yield a Socratism, a system of Socratic doctrines. The most durable element of the Socratic inheritance is, instead, a live person, one characterized by a distinctive intellectual stance, a just and charitable way of being in the world, and a strange mix of tough-​minded criticism and almost childlike naiveté. In Theaetetus, Socrates tells the young geometer that wonder “belongs very much to the philosopher, since there is no other source of philosophy than this” (Thea. 155d).2 From the experience of wonder follow inquiry, conversation, and dialogue. Those with leisure allow these to unfold in both content and form according to the dictates of rational discourse, the shared effort to “hit upon what is” (Thea. 172d). Those

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who make their living by words, however, are unaccustomed to navigating the rough, open waters of the elenchus. In the law courts and in the halls of power, they move with purpose. They speak without leisure. Constrained by necessity or impelled by ambition, they aim to secure with their words personal advantage. Their goal is not knowledge but success. By contrast, the practiced leisure of the philosopher makes him or her useless and even ridiculous in such competitive environments. According to Socrates, this kind of social vulnerability is simply the price to be paid for philosophical freedom (Thea. 175e). The leisure of Socrates, which should not be confused with indolence or a lack of spiritedness, is his willingness to take his time and, if necessary, revise his judgments when deliberating about human concerns. In an atmosphere of freedom, Socrates and his interlocutors follow paths that lead from “small matters” of observation and experience to profound intellectual and moral questions that can hardly be articulated, let  alone resolved. In the dialogues, though, we do not witness individuals thinking about their lives in the world as much as rethinking them. Socrates arrived on the scene after parallel developments that were centuries in the making—​the development of literacy and the rise of abstract thought—​had set the stage for a radical shift in Greek culture. New demands were placed on the great “tribal encyclopedia” of culture contained in Homer and Hesiod, as natural philosophers created a new intellectual idiom suited to the description and analysis of physical realities in terms of concepts and categories rather than poetry or narrative.3 The challenge that they posed to traditional forms of education was significant. There is a good deal of the poetic in the compressed speculations of a Heraclitus or Parmenides, but their point was less to delight or instruct than to indicate a reality behind or above linguistic expression. While the “pre-​ Socratics” oriented the pursuit of knowledge toward natural principles, the sophists made human perspective the starting point for their investigations. Protagoras’s famous declaration that “man is the measure of all things, of those that are that they are, of those that are not that they are not” is not only descriptive but programmatic.4 It is the foundation for a mode of philosophy that recalls the thinker from the realms of speculation to the realm of practical activity and returns his attention, usefully, to “the world of our relative, conditioned, human experience,” in which the struggle for enlightenment actually takes place.5 Both quests—​the search for the unifying principle (archē) of the cosmos and the effort to solve human problems by attending to speech and argument (logos)—​form the background for Socrates’s own mission, his use of dialectic to direct and evaluate thought, and his pursuit of the good life.6

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The aim of this chapter is to understand the role of wisdom in the mission and program of Socrates. The Socratic quest was marked by two clear conceptual maneuvers: one identifying wisdom with virtue and another equating virtue with knowledge. This rather neat pair of associations appears to bring the lofty and mysterious concept of wisdom squarely into the realm of human affairs and to include it among the ordinary products or byproducts of learning and moral education. But the equivalences are more formidable and less stable than they appear. In the dialogues, deep questions surface. To what extent, if any, is virtue teachable? Can it, in fact, be reduced to a form of knowledge? How is knowledge itself to be understood or described? How does one know if he or she has reached a form of understanding adequate for moral guidance? If wisdom, virtue, and knowledge are indeed interconnected, then any determinations about what wisdom is depend directly on the answers to these questions. Anyone seeking to examine these questions specifically with reference to Socrates faces an additional challenge: to understand the role of piety in the total ethical-​intellectual enterprise. According to one scholar, the time has come to face a “fact about Socrates which has been so embarrassing to modern readers,” one that can no longer be explained away: “Socrates’ acceptance of the supernatural.”7 The gods were a matter of great concern to Socrates, not as subjects for a traditional, systematic theology (such as one finds in Hesiod) but rather as objects of human loyalty and respect. Very much in keeping with Socrates’s sharp interest in moral conduct, his preoccupation with the divine is better understood in an ethical aspect, that is, in terms of piety, than in a speculative, theoretical mode of theological reasoning. Moreover, the fact that Socrates was tried and executed for impiety and that, in defending himself, he characterized his entire life’s work as service to God (Apol. 30a, e) suggests that piety bears an essential connection to the wisdom by which he lived. In what follows, I  will focus on Euthyphro in order to explore the connection between knowledge and piety. I  argue that the difficulty inherent in defining piety is a problem for Socrates as well as Euthyphro. In the second part of the chapter, I turn principally to Apology and Gorgias to examine Socrates’s conception of wisdom. In the conclusion to this chapter, I take up the connection between piety and wisdom, arguing that Socratic piety furnishes the framework within which other virtues like wisdom are understood and practiced. This is the case because, as wisdom accounts in earlier chapters demonstrated, knowledge of what is good or ultimate is exceedingly difficult to attain. The Socratic dialogues dramatize this difficulty and make it, paradoxically, an indispensable step toward enlightenment. But in light of

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the fact that certain knowledge of higher things is unavailable, the figure of Socrates connects wisdom to a form of understanding that arises not from a definite intellectual grasp of ultimate realities but rather from a form of life oriented toward the good. As in the case of the Homeric heroes, the accent in the Socratic wisdom program falls on virtue, character, and integrity. In this, Socrates also resembles Job. Holding fast to his integrity, Job was socially alienated. In the life and death of Socrates, we see, likewise, a sage who is determined to live a self-​particular life and is thereby at odds with the social order. Socrates’s vulnerability, though perhaps not as deeply “metaphysical,” is nevertheless a very real condition in his pursuit of wisdom.

Knowledge and Piety If Socrates wrote anything, it no longer survives. It should be readily admitted, therefore, that no attempt to expound the views of Socrates ever fully escapes the problem of distinguishing the “real” Socrates from his literary representations. One strategy for doing so in the past was to set the skeptical, authentic Socrates of the early dialogues apart from a Socrates who, in the later dialogues, serves as a mouthpiece for Plato’s systematic thought. Without secure, noninterpretive criteria for dating the dialogues, however, the attempt to pry Socrates apart from Plato on the basis of chronology is inevitably circular.8 Another difficulty arises from the fact that Socrates appears in dialogues: one, therefore, must determine from context whether Socrates is expressing his own view or making statements designed to provoke, stimulate, or guide his interlocutors. In light of these considerations, I will treat the figure of Socrates portrayed in Plato’s dialogues as “Plato’s Socrates.” That is, I believe in the coherence, reality, and singularity of a man to whom the words of Socrates are assigned. The consistency of character displayed by Plato’s Socrates across the dialogues is, in my view, impressive, and the notion that this character was radically different from the historical figure on whom he was based seems to me rather implausible. However, careful not to forget that the dialogues are Plato’s literary creations, I remain open to the possibility that the words of Socrates serve purposes other than to express what Socrates himself believed to be the case. It would be consistent both with the character of Socrates and the literary form of the dialogues for Socrates to employ irony, for example, or to adopt certain positions strategically, for the purpose of improving or advancing the dialogue. It also goes without saying that the statements attributed to Plato’s Socrates are conditioned by what Plato himself, at times in opposition to Socrates, understood to be the case. Though

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one must proceed cautiously in assessing Socrates’s specific statements, certain things about him are clear. The essential elements of my understanding of Plato’s Socrates are, I hope, uncontroversial: that he was a loyal citizen of Athens; that he was committed to the elenchus as a means of avoiding error and conducting the pursuit of truth; that he believed, at the same time, in the power of divine beings to communicate with him and guide his life; and that he was devoted to a life of virtue. How, specifically, these commitments shaped Socrates’s views on knowledge, wisdom, virtue, and piety remains to be seen. First of all, knowledge. Plato and Socrates took great pains to separate the genuine philosophical enterprise from the enterprising philosophy of the sophists. The sophists gained prominence in fifth-​century Athens as a special class of educators, itinerant teachers who promised to turn students into skillful and knowledgeable men. Because success in political and civic life depends on the ability to speak persuasively, sophists paid special attention to the cultivation of rhetorical skills and argumentative prowess. Due to the demand for this kind of training, many sophists became wealthy celebrities. Though Socrates was also interested in cultivating people, his interest was not pecuniary. No itinerant, Socrates remained in Athens his whole life (except for military service). He charged no fee and, in his appearance before the Athenian jury, denied that he was a sophist by pointing to his poverty (Apol. 31c). Most important, where others professed expertise, Socrates professed ignorance. These differences, however, should not obscure the fact that he also shared much in common with the sophists. As the Eleatic stranger points out, the sophists perform a noble function, a purification of the soul that follows from the “refutation of the empty belief in one’s own wisdom” (“ho peri tēn mataion doxosophian gignomenos elenchos”; Soph. 231b).9 Like the sophists, Socrates was skilled in the use of the elenchus to clear away false opinions and help others to confront their ignorance. The value of this sort of mental cleansing for effective education is clear. It is particularly important if the kind of education that one offers is not simply a matter of imparting a skill or body of information that the student already knows he does not possess. Sophists like Protagoras instead pursued a larger goal: not only to make their students better people but to start them on a path of continual progress in human excellence (Prot. 318a). For this, students must be brought to the realization that they do not know what they think they know. This is a Socratic goal as well. As already noted, the sophists valued knowledge of human affairs (“hē technē politikē”; Prot. 319a) over scientific knowledge of physical realities. Though Socrates may indeed have been a scientific enthusiast at one point

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(as Aristophanes suggests in Clouds), he disavowed scientific interest in the natural world as such (Apol. 19b–​c) and claimed that nothing was more important than ethical knowledge, that which concerns the way one ought to live one’s life (Gorg. 500c). Though Rémi Brague speaks of the uncoupling of “the mode of being of the self ” from the “things present in the world”—​the detachment of ethics from physics—​as a “Socratic revolution,” Socrates was not alone in making this maneuver.10 This raises a difficult question:  what kind of knowledge is necessary to guide human life? An obvious place to look, given the great authority accorded to Homer, was in the poetic tradition. In the Ion, Socrates encounters a successful, prize-​winning rhapsode named Ion and engages him in a conversation about poetry and poetic performance.11 Ion, who has just won first prize in a contest, professes to be the best of the rhapsodes and an expert on Homer. This sentiment, along with its implicit claim to knowledge, make Ion an ideal figure for Socratic cross-​examination. He seeks to understand what the expert rhapsode is expert in or about. That is, what body of knowledge forms the basis for what the rhapsode does? As the dialogue unfolds, however, it becomes clear that Ion cannot ground his belief in the superiority of Homer in a general knowledge of poetry or poets. Ion admits that he neither knows nor cares about any poets other than Homer. Though Ion lacks general knowl­edge, the fact remains that his performances are effective; something about them, therefore, must be compelling. At this point, Socrates shifts the discussion to various subjects that surface in the epics—​charioteering and divination, for example—​in order to see whether it is the rhapsode’s knowl­ edge of things in the world that distinguishes him from others and makes poetic performance attractive. When it turns out, predictably, that Ion’s knowledge does not compare to that of the charioteer, diviner, or anyone else, then Socrates concludes that Ion’s “skill” is a product of divine inspiration and that the poet, in fact, does not know anything. The dialogue is thick with irony. Socrates pretends to envy the fact that rhapsodes dress up for their performances (Ion 530b). Socrates deflects Ion’s suggestion that he (Socrates) is a wise man, countering that it is really the rhapsodes, actors, and poets who are wise (Ion 532d). And, in the final lines, he indulges Ion’s desire to be thought of in the “lovelier” way, as a devotee of the divine Homer rather than as someone who possesses a skill or body of knowledge (Ion 542b). The result of Socrates’s dialogue with Ion, then, is an attack on poetry that works on two levels. At one level, it is an argument about the status of the poet and the rhapsode: neither one is a “knower.” The origins and appeal of poetry are noncognitive. Because the knowledge possessed by either the poet

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or the rhapsode cannot be identified, Socrates argues that their words have a different source. Poetry derives from inspiration received by the poet from above; the power of poetic performance, similarly, derives from the inspiration imparted to the rhapsode by the poet. In this way, there is a “chain” of enthusiasm reaching back to the Muse (Ion 536a–​b). At no point is knowledge required. In fact, the poet soars to divine heights precisely because he has left intellect behind and gone out of his mind (Ion 534b). Because this is essentially a passive experience, poetry does not qualify as a technē.12 At another level, the dialogue criticizes poetry as a social phenomenon whose best (that is, most successful) representatives are impervious to the reformatory power of the elenchus. Where the first criticism was intellectual, the second is moral. Ion is arrogant and superficial, preoccupied with honors and competitions. Despite admitting that all other forms of knowledge belong to subjects with recognized experts, he is unwilling to affirm that his ability to recite beautiful passages about subjects of which he knows nothing does not qualify as knowledge. In a final attempt to wriggle out of the elenchus, he claims that his abilities as a performer would make him a successful general (Ion 541b–​d). Incredulous, Socrates realizes that Ion is unserious and that they have reached the end of the discussion. He allows Ion to save face by retaining the title of a divine singer who knows nothing. Ion agrees, much to his discredit. If, as Ion makes clear, there is a difference between knowledge and inspiration, then so much the worse for inspiration. Euthyphro presents a parallel case in which Socrates again engages a single individual whose actions reflect divine influence. As Socrates awaits his turn in court, he encounters a young man named Euthyphro on his way to prosecute his own father for “murder.” Socrates learns the facts of the case: one servant in Euthyphro’s household killed another servant in a fit of drunken rage; Euthyphro’s father had the guilty servant bound and placed temporarily in a ditch; and the servant died there from hunger and exposure while Euthyphro’s father sought advice from a seer about what to do. The fact that Euthyphro’s father tried to consult a seer about how to respond to the killing suggests that the father, though he neglected the servant’s physical needs, was quite conscientious about his own religious requirements. His diligence in this regard reflects the fact that homicides in the Athens of the period had both legal and social-​religious consequences. In murder cases, legal determinations, of course, were made, and punishments such as fines, imprisonment, exile, or death were administered. But the taking of a life also incurred the possibility of negative consequences beyond the scope of the law. Chief among these was a certain taint or defilement brought on by the shedding of human blood,

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the civic and social “pollution” (miasma) familiar, for example, from Greek tragedies. This is precisely the danger Euthyphro identifies as a consequence of his father’s actions (Euthphr. 4c). For Euthyphro, the death of the second servant overshadows the first. Elsewhere, in the Laws, Plato offers a prescription for the death of a servant at the hands of his master:  “if [one] kills a slave of his own, let him purify himself, and be quit of the murder according to law” (Lg. 865d).13 In this formulation, the legal requirement is separate from the religious one. Though one who kills his own slave is not subject to legal sanctions, he nevertheless stands under a religious requirement to “purify himself ” of the pollution created by the killing. Whether Euthyphro’s father is, in fact, a murderer is unclear. He did not intend to kill his servant; nor did the servant die as the result of any direct action on the father’s part. Instead, the servant died as a result of certain conditions (hunger, cold, bonds) imposed on him by the father. Euthyphro’s indignation suggests that the servant would not have died if conditions had been different. In his view, the servant’s death, though not intended by the father, was nevertheless caused by him. Interestingly, Socrates points out to Euthyphro later in the dialogue that the determination of murder or wrongful death in specific cases involves difficult judgments about justice (Euthphr. 8c–​d). Euthyphro concedes the point but remains convinced that he is right. Nevertheless, the extent of the father’s responsibility for the servant’s death remains unclear. There is also a formal dimension to the case that creates an opening for a broader consideration of right and wrong. Euthyphro assumes that the death of the second servant has brought on a pollution that needs to be cleansed. Though Euthyphro is certain about how to be rid of the pollution (prosecute the father), his family and Socrates find his proposed course of action shocking. Socrates, however, does not contest the assumption that killings necessitate purifications. In fact, he asks Euthyphro whether the man killed by Euthyphro’s father was a relative or not (Euthphr. 4b). His reference to this particular detail suggests an awareness of (though perhaps not a serious interest in) the relevance of the legal distinction between murder victims within one’s household and those outside. The real value of the skillfully posed question, however, is strategic. It draws Euthyphro out, giving him an opportunity to step forward and unfurl his banner as a champion of justice. It is ridiculous, Socrates, for you to think that it makes any difference whether the victim is a stranger or a relative. One should only watch whether the killer acted justly [en dikē] or not; if he acted justly, let him go, but if not, one should prosecute, if, that is to say, the killer shares

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your hearth and table. The pollution [miasma] is the same if you knowingly keep company with such a man and do not cleanse [aphosiois] yourself and him by bringing him to justice (Euthphr. 4b–​c.)14 The issue for Euthyphro is whether a genuine miasma has been introduced. This question, in turn, depends on the moral disposition of the agent, whether he acted according to dikē or not. A confirmed violation of dikē gives rise to the need for an aphosiōsis that returns the state of things to a proper, hosios condition. In affirming this sequence, Euthyphro is entirely conventional. Where he departs from convention is in his insistence that justice renders irrelevant the standard consideration given to the status of the victim (within the oikos or allotrios; Euthphr. 4b). In Euthyphro’s notion of justice, the boundaries of the household disappear. This is also made clear by the fact that Euthyphro is in no way restrained by the most essential principle of the traditional household, filial piety. For the one committed to justice, it makes no difference whether the wrongdoer is a parent who shares your “hearth and table” or not: one must set him straight. What impresses Socrates is not the substance of Euthyphro’s argument, which he does not address, but the confidence with which Euthyphro defies convention.15 Socrates reasons that this remarkable confidence must be evidence of knowledge, of an exceedingly strong and precise grasp of what is religiously correct and incorrect (“peri ton hosion te kai anosion”; Euthphr. 4e). Like Ion, Euthyphro has revealed himself to be an ideal candidate for cross-​examination. The topic here is piety rather than poetry, but Socrates is equally keen to discover the role that knowledge plays in human action. Central to Euthyphro is the attempt to define what is hosios and what is anosios. The standard English equivalents for these words in discussions and translations of Euthyphro are “piety” and “impiety.” Like hosios and anosios, they are difficult to define. Walter Burkert has argued that hosios may be understood in relation to hieros (“holy”).16 Hieros pertains to cultic matters, referring to all that belongs to the god:  the sanctuary, sacrifices, monetary offerings, land within the sacred precinct, and human temple functionaries. Laws governing what is in the realm of hieros are “positive” laws that specify exact religious procedures. They are not derived from nature or reason but are simply learned, practiced, and handed down. Hosios forms a contrast with hieros in that it has to do with things outside the sphere of the holy. The juxtaposition of hieros and hosios in certain texts has led some scholars to conclude that hosios was used in the past to indicate two opposing things, to designate, paradoxically, both the “sacred” and the “profane.”17 In fact, the relation

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between hosios and hieros, though contrastive, is essentially complementary. If hieros governs the realm of the holy, then hosios governs life outside the sacred sphere, requiring that it too be just, well-​ordered, and harmonious. Common to both concepts is the assumption that life flourishes within limits: “if hieros draws boundaries, then hosios is the recognition of the boundaries from the outside.”18 Hosios, not surprisingly, often coincides with dikaios (“just”) in identifying things that are just and proper. But the two are not completely interchangeable. Hosios represents the maintenance of a social order that is adjacent to and circumscribed by the sacred order. Where it is possible to use or understand the word dikaios with or without reference to the divine, by the fifth century hosios acquired a more focused meaning:  what one ought to consider good, right, or proper in light of divine realities.19 Both hosios and dikaios concern the field of human action, but hosios requires that the gods be taken into account (somehow). Just as one deliberates about justice, one may also deliberate about what is hosios. Though it is difficult to imagine Socrates and Euthyphro engaged in a debate about what is hieros, it is easy to see why a debate about piety would have been both difficult and necessary.20 When the elenchus begins, Euthyphro responds to Socrates’s first invitation to define piety by identifying it with his own course of action and with the “pollution-​purification” paradigm from his earlier account. As a man of action, Euthyphro persists in seeing piety in terms of specific deeds that cleanse the city of pollution caused by things like murder and temple robbery (Euthphr. 5d–​e). He also reintroduces the fairness argument: piety demands that one act without consideration of family ties, even the bond between father and son. This time he characterizes his quest for justice as an imitatio dei:  as Zeus took action against his own father in the name of justice, so Euthyphro prosecutes his father (Euthphr. 5e–​6a). As the elenchus demands an account of piety in itself, or “that form itself that makes all pious actions pious” (Euthphr. 6d), Socrates hints that imitatio dei is incoherent as an ethical principle and guides Euthyphro away from examples of piety, instructing him to offer a definition instead. Euthyphro fares poorly in the subsequent cross-​examination. He tries to identify what is pious with whatever the gods love or approve. This attempt fails initially because, as Socrates points out, inevitable disagreements among the gods about substantive matters (the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad) prevent us from ascertaining a stable conception of piety from their opinions. In the second instance, the attempt at a theocentric definition fails because the fact that the gods love a particular thing reveals nothing about its essential qualities. Even if divine unanimity is granted, the knowledge that a certain thing or

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even a group of things is loved by all the gods does not rule out the possibility of divine arbitrariness. Knowledge that a particular thing is god-​loved yields a “knowledge” of piety that lacks consistency and rationality: “and with consistency and rationality abandoned the very notion of knowledge—​theoretical and practical—​and knowability fall by the wayside.”21 Once Euthyphro’s suggestions are defeated, the dialogue reaches an aporetic interlude marked by an admission of failure by Euthyphro: “I have no way of telling you what I have in mind, for whatever proposition we put forward goes around and refuses to stay put where we establish it” (Euthphr. 11b). At this point Socrates comes to the aid of Euthyphro. Socrates provides him with a new starting point by inviting him to consider the relation of piety to justice (to dikaion; Euthphr. 11e). This move improves the dialogue for both men. It capitalizes on moral commitments that Euthyphro already has. Euthyphro has already shown himself to be a champion of justice, insisting that the sole criterion in identifying moral pollution is whether someone has acted justly (en dikē) or not; custom and the laws of the household are irrelevant. In characterizing his prosecution of his father as an imitation of Zeus, Euthyphro referred to Zeus as the “best and most just” of the gods (Euthphr. 6a). The introduction of justice by Socrates, then, gives Euthyphro a new path toward the definition of piety, one that he will presumably be willing and able to follow. This path is also a Socratic path. By proposing that piety bears an essential connection to justice, Socrates connects one virtue with another. The strategy of understanding a particular virtue by comparing it with other virtues is also used by Socrates in other dialogues, for example, Protagoras, Laches, and Meno. It is also consistent with the Socratic understanding that the virtues in some way form a unity, whether because virtue itself is unitary or because the virtues, taken together, form a whole.22 When Socrates reorients the elenchus toward justice, one has the feeling that he has moved it onto more familiar ground and adopted a more constructive stance. Euthyphro follows the lead and accepts the suggestion that piety is related to justice as a part to a whole. When Socrates asks which part of justice belongs to piety, Euthyphro gives what seems to be the “right” answer: “the godly and the pious is the part of the just that is concerned with the care of the gods [peri tēn tōn theōn therapeian], while that concerned with the care of men is the remaining part of justice” (Euthphr. 12e). Socrates congratulates him on the formulation, suggesting that Euthyphro has finally hit upon an acceptable answer.23 Though acceptable, the answer is still imprecise. A  full knowledge of piety must specify what “care” (therapeia) of the gods actually involves.

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Socrates starts Euthyphro off by citing examples of “care” (for cattle, horses, dogs) that presuppose expertise on the part of the care-​giver. Those who care for animals possess a complete knowledge by which they improve those under their care. Because humans cannot be said to improve the gods for whom they “care,” this understanding of care is abandoned (Euthphr. 13c). Eager to avoid any suggestion of human superiority to the gods, Euthyphro offers a counterexample of therapeia, the kind that slaves give their masters. Socrates helps Euthyphro once again by getting rid of therapeia altogether and renaming this relation “service” (hypēretikē). The shift in terminology is significant. Hypēretikē captures the sense of submission and subservience that Euthyphro wants; as Versényi explains, hypēretikē is “hard labor engaged in by an inferior being who performs in almost unquestioning obedience what his master bids him to do.”24 The word applies, for example, to the service rendered to military leaders by soldiers, or to captains by rowers and sailors. But hypēretikē also introduces a new element. Because it is service given to a superior who is engaged in a specific activity, it may be understood teleologically, that is, in terms of the goal aimed at by the master. Knowledge thus belongs to the one who is being served rather than, as in the case of therapeia, to the one providing care. With this new understanding of service established, Socrates presses on. All that is left is to specify the work (ergon) that humans are supposed to help the gods accomplish. Trying valiantly to elicit this from Euthyphro, Socrates leads him through a series of examples of goal-​directed activity (doctors producing health, shipbuiliders building ships, etc.). When it is clear that Euthyphro understands how to identify the characteristic aim of various professions, Socrates gives Euthyphro, a self-​professed expert on piety, the opportunity to say what the ergon of the gods is. Much to Socrates’s dismay, he cannot. Euthyphro breaks off the elenctic progression, pleads the difficulty of the question, and abandons the “justice-​ service” line established by Socrates. Exasperated, Euthyphro falls back on piety-​as-​action: “I say that if a man knows how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, those are pious actions” (Euthphr. 14b). Socrates knows that Euthyphro’s “new” suggestion, with its return to what is “pleasing to the gods,” will only lead them back to the same perplexities. He conveys his disappointment: “you were on the point of [teaching me], but you turned away. If you had given that answer [concerning the ergon of the gods], I should now have acquired from you sufficient knowledge of the nature of piety.” Discouraged though he is, Socrates will not abandon the elenchus. He explains that “the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may

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lead him” and he takes up the cross-​examination once again (Euthphr. 14c). In relatively short order, his questions force Euthyphro back to his initial position (Euthphr. 15b). Still unwilling to give up, Socrates gives Euthyphro yet another chance to begin again. Euthyphro, ever the man of action, abandons leisure, declares that he is in a hurry, and leaves Socrates alone. There is pathos in Socrates’s final words. The dialogue concludes with him standing outside the king-​archon’s court, on the eve of his trial, in a state of aporia: What a thing to do, my friend! By going you have cast me down from a great hope I had, that I would learn from you the nature of the pious and the impious and so escape Meletus’ indictment by showing him that I had acquired wisdom in divine matters from Euthyphro, and my ignorance would no longer cause me to be careless and inventive about such things, and that I would be better for the rest of my life (Euthphr. 15e–​16a). To judge from these words, the dialogue is a practical failure. Socrates did not gain from Euthyphro the “wisdom” needed to succeed in court and defeat the charge brought against him by Meletus. The results of the trial indeed bear this out. This, however, does not exclude the possibility that the dialogue was philosophically fruitful. The purpose of the elenchus is essentially critical and deconstructive, but its aim is to bring benefit, specifically by clearing away false wisdoms (Soph. 231b). This raises a question: to what extent, if any, did Socrates benefit from the refutation of Euthyphro’s conception of piety? The question may seem odd. Euthyphro is such an unattractive figure—​hasty, self-​ righteous, unreflective, hubristic, narrow—​that it is tempting to see him as nothing more than a conventional figure who gets his philosophical comeuppance, a grandee who offers Socrates an opportunity for some dialectic target practice. One cannot learn anything from Euthyphro, it seems, except how not to be. But the two men share similarities that suggest useful comparison. Like Socrates, Euthyphro is a citizen who seeks to bring benefit to the city. The benefits they intend are moral and theological: “both regard the divine as a source of conviction on matters of virtuous conduct.”25 When it comes to divine matters, specifically the nature of piety, Euthyphro appears to possess something that Socrates both needs and lacks. The realization that Euthyphro’s constructive statements turn out to be philosophically inadequate is not the only outcome of the encounter. Euthyphro affirms at the beginning and end of the dialogue that piety is identified with actions that please the gods. This

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conception, as I have shown, cannot deliver an understanding of piety in the rational, coherent, and universal form that Socrates requires. But why does he require an answer in this form? An insistence on definitions of this type is such a familiar feature of Socrates’s philosophical persona that one simply takes it for granted. We have come to expect that demanding responses to ti-​questions (questions that seek a definition of something) in the “form of x that makes all x things x” is simply what Socrates the philosopher does. But there are good reasons to think that the encounter with Euthyphro is not just a pretext for definitional inquiry, the setting for another philosophy lesson. The staging of the dialogue on the eve of Socrates’s trial for impiety not only heightens its dramatic significance; it also gives Socrates a compelling reason to learn from Euthyphro how to articulate what piety is. Throughout the dialogue, Meletus is very much on the mind of Plato’s Socrates. What Socrates wants—​and fails to obtain—​is wisdom. He insists on a general definition of piety because a statement in this form would allow him to apply an understanding of piety to his own situation, whereas an example (or set of examples) would not. When he refers to a description of piety that is transferable, he speaks of “wisdom” (sophia), a word that is prominent in Euthyphro. What makes someone politically dangerous, according to Socrates, is not simply being odd, eccentric, or clever but rather presuming to instruct others and “teach one’s own wisdom” (Euthphr. 3c–​d). Socrates notes that his volubility and his friendly disposition (philanthrōpia; Euthphr. 3d) make him seem like a peddler of wisdom, whereas Euthyphro, a man of action rather than words, keeps his “wisdom” to himself (Euthphr. 3d). Socrates regards such verbal reticence as a possible marker of wisdom.26 Because he stands in need of help, though, he aims to draw Euthyphro out and to induce him to impart what he knows. Socrates marvels at the bold action of Euthyphro, taking it to be an indication that Euthyphro is “far advanced in wisdom” (Euthphr. 4b). For how else could he presume to take such an extraordinary course of action unless he had clear, full, and accurate knowl­ edge of piety? (Euthphr. 4e, 6a–​b, 15d) If Euthyphro can explain how he arrived at such a firm moral judgment in the case of his father and the slave, Socrates promises to never cease extolling Euthyphro’s “wisdom” (Euthphr. 9b). Though Euthyphro fails to do this, Socrates persists. Toward the end of what has been an unsuccessful dialogue, a fatigued Euthyphro lets go of the elenctic lifeline that Socrates has thrown him and returns to the discredited position that piety is what is pleasing to the gods. Socrates, though, remains remarkably attentive to Euthyphro:  “I am so desirous of your wisdom [tēs sēs sophias], and I concentrate my mind on it, so that no word of yours may

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fall to the ground” (Euthphr. 14d). It is possible, of course, that this is simply an instance of Socratic irony that extends the dialogue and allows Plato to discredit one final proposition: piety as a commercial transaction (emporikē) between gods and humans (Euthphr. 14e). But because Plato’s Socrates offers to renew the discussion yet again, even after this option has failed (Euthphr. 15c–​d), he looks less like a smug victor than a man on a mission. Indeed, Socrates compares himself to Menelaos clinging desperately to the shape-​ changing Proteus in order to gain the knowledge he needs to return home (Euthphr. 15d; see Od. 4.382). When Euthyphro leaves, Socrates concludes only that he has missed an opportunity to acquire “wisdom in divine matters” from Euthyphro (Euthphr. 16a). Euthyphro’s failure to impart wisdom gives Socrates no satisfaction, ironic or otherwise. In this way, the dialogue raises an intriguing and important possibility: namely, that piety is incommunicable. Euthyphro bears the formal characteristics of a pious individual. Unlike so many of Socrates’s interlocutors, including Ion, he does not appear to be motivated by ambition. His unconventional prosecution of his father can scarcely be attributed to the love of honor or social esteem since it was much more likely to harm his reputation than to help it. Another consideration is that Euthyphro’s zeal for the gods is not merely notional. Piety entails action in the public sphere, and Euthyphro does not shy away from taking it. When examined by Socrates, Euthyphro claims to act in the name of piety and on the basis of clear knowledge of what piety is. His actions are not accidentally pious but deliberately so. Finally, the danger from which he hopes to save himself and others (miasma) is, at its root, a moral one. It is for these reasons that Socrates has high hopes for his conversation with Euthyphro. Instead of assuming at the outset that Euthyphro is simply an unthinking zealot ripe for elenctic humiliation, Socrates proceeds with a genuine interest in seeing whether the piety Euthyphro possesses is more than an idiosyncratic set of beliefs. He wants to know, in other words, whether it can be articulated and transmitted, shaped into something called “wisdom” that Socrates can appropriate. Despite Socrates’s best efforts, he is unable to gain anything from Euthyphro that might be useful in justifying other pious undertakings. This is because Euthyphro is unwilling and unable to abandon the notion that piety involves doing what is “pleasing to the gods.” It may be that Euthyphro is a poor philosopher, a man unaccustomed to leisure and abstract thought who cannot see beyond this simple description. Yet there is another dimension to Euthyphro’s failure to take the step required to translate his piety into wisdom. As I have shown, Euthyphro was on the verge of satisfying Socrates when he was about to identify the ergon of the gods.

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And it was precisely at this point that Euthyphro balked. The identification of the divine work, though necessary to frame the “wisdom” sought by Socrates, lies outside the scope of piety as Euthyphro understands it. Euthyphro simply cannot say what the divine work is: “I told you a short while ago, Socrates, that it is a considerable task [pleionos ergou] to acquire any precise knowl­ edge of these things [akribōs panta tauta ōs echei mathein]” (Euthphr. 14b). Though Euthyphro acts in the name of piety, he cannot say what divine purpose piety serves. Neither, it seems, can Socrates.27 After Euthyphro pleads ignorance, Socrates does not resort to leading questions as he has done earlier in the dialogue. He simply accepts Euthyphro’s response and resumes the elenctic search for wisdom. Euthyphro, then, raises for Socrates the troubling possibility that the one thing needed to account for one’s pious actions may be impossible to know. When it comes to the part or aspect of virtue that involves a proper respect for the divine (what is hosios), humans are epistemically deficient. As a form of justice, piety involves a kind of public reasoning about what is fitting to do. Tradition, custom, a general sense of propriety, and an ethical disposition of fear and respect toward the gods all figure into deliberations about what does and does not qualify as hosios. Though these things furnish the criteria by which a flexible array of large moral questions may be evaluated and debated, they do not always cohere or speak with one voice. Nor do they always produce clear, uncontroversial programs for action. At stake in the definition of what is hosios is an understanding of what things are ultimately worthy of reverence, respect, loyalty, and even awe. Yet debates about these things are the kinds of discussion that are hardest to arbitrate. Once ultimate ends are agreed upon, instrumental reason can work efficiently. Though instrumental reason is adequate to guide a great deal of human speech, thought, and activity, it cannot decide toward what aims and ends they ought to be directed. As Euthyphro shows, for this, a different, much more difficult type of reasoning is required: a reasoning toward wisdom. The prominence of the word sophia in Euthyphro illustrates the role that reflection about wisdom inevitably plays in ethical deliberation. It also portrays, brilliantly, the tendency of such reasoning to include circular argumentation and to resort to principles that refuse to stay in place under the strain and stress of rational scrutiny. Yet one cannot simply dispense with the category of hosios. Ethical reasoning requires a larger account of the good that makes specific action in the personal and social spheres morally intelligible. In the elenchus, Socrates proves that Euthyphro cannot provide such an account. Euthyphro’s understanding, somewhere between complete ignorance and full, articulable knowledge, is

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enough for him to act with conviction but not enough for him to instruct others. The skill of Plato, however, allows us to perceive that this situation describes Socrates as well as Euthyphro. If this is so, then Socratic wisdom is not to be identified with an explicit definition of what is hosios, what is ultimately worthy of reverence. It comes into view, instead, as a form of life characterized by piety itself.

Human Wisdom What sets Socrates apart from Euthyphro, of course, is Socrates’s recognition that his wisdom is limited. Euthyphro has no qualms about being regarded as a possessor of sophia. For Socrates, though, the claim to wisdom must be treated with great care. It makes a great difference, for example, what kind of wisdom one professes. If Socrates possesses wisdom in any sense, it is only a “human” wisdom, whereas others pretend to a wisdom that is “more than human” (Apol. 20d–​e). Socrates makes this particular distinction before the jury in Plato’s Apology. It is the theme of the first major section of the speech, in which Socrates deals not with the charge leveled by Meletus but with the old accusation, arising from Socrates’s similarity to the new intellectuals, that he too is a socially disruptive “wisdom professor.” Socrates tries to set the rec­ ord straight, disavowing interest in natural philosophy (“things in the sky and below the earth”; Apol. 19b) and distancing himself from the sophists. Unlike Gorgias, Prodicus, and Hippias, Socrates offers no product and charges no fee. To the extent that the sophists claim a knowledge of the good that is both complete and transmittable (indeed, marketable), they implicitly lay claim to something beyond human ken. This characterization allows Socrates to draw a contrast with them and to portray his own reputation as a wisdom professor as the result of a misunderstanding. His wisdom, such as it is, is unlike theirs, for his wisdom consists paradoxically in the awareness that he is not wise. This is not simply a clever bit of rhetorical jiu-​jitsu or a bid to disarm the jury by a show of humility. Socrates claims that an awareness of limitation is humanly appropriate; thus, he identifies it with “human wisdom.” To claim this, however, is not, as some claim, to make wisdom a purely human affair, a realm of concern insulated from theology and religion.28 Socrates is not a modern secularist. The “human wisdom” of Socrates, far from excluding the positivities of religion, draws its inspiration from an oracular pronouncement. The negative response of the Pythian to Chaerephon’s question (“Is any man wiser than Socrates?”) has become a “riddle” that compels Socrates to search for wisdom among his fellow Athenians (Apol. 21a–​22e). What underlies his

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search for wisdom—​and, eventually, the reluctant confession that his awareness of his own ignorance makes him wiser than those who profess wisdom—​ is the attempt to understand the god’s oracle, to see in what way it is true. It is not an attempt to rule divine knowledge out of bounds. As Socrates puts it:  “I must attach the greatest importance to the god’s oracle, so I  must go to all those who had any reputation for knowledge to examine its meaning” (Apol. 21d).29 The distinction between divine and human wisdom, then, yields an intellectual order of operations; it reflects a relation that is continuous and hierarchical, not disjunctive and binary. Socrates gives the impression in Apology that he would have been happy to disown the claim to wisdom entirely and to be known, instead, as one in search of wisdom rather than as one in possession of it. One thing that worked against this more modest claim was Socrates’s success as an examiner and his ability to attract followers. These suggested strongly that Socrates (like the sophists) had expertise of his own to offer. Another, more important factor, though, was the fact that the goal at which he aimed was clearly wisdom-​ like: a knowledge of the human good that produces virtue and happiness. For all this, though, he insisted that he was no teacher of wisdom. He therefore adopts the unusual position of someone who helps others to be wise even though he is not himself wise. One way of understanding this paradoxical position is to compare the formation of knowledge to biological reproduction, as Socrates does in Theaetetus. In the dialogue, the young geometer Theaetetus is in a state of perplexity, unable to settle on a satisfactory account of what knowledge is and unable, at the same time, to ignore such an important matter (Theae. 148e). Socrates compares the condition of Theaetetus to that of a pregnant woman laboring to bring forth a child. Socrates is a midwife who attends Theaetetus, assists him in completing a process that began long before Socrates arrived. Socrates’s principal interest, however, is not in Theaetetus as “mother” but in his intellectual offspring: And the most important thing about my art is the ability to apply all possible tests to the offspring, to determine whether the young mind is being delivered of a phantom, that is, an error, or a fertile truth. For one thing which I have in common with the ordinary midwives is that I myself am barren of wisdom (Theae. 150c).30 Socrates’s most important function, then, is to “test” the newborn baby. As an intellectual midwife, he identifies error, exercising a power to “clear out the burden of opinions ‘fathered’ by others” and to identify thoughts that

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are viable or potent.31 As important as this role is, Socrates points out that midwives are women who have experienced childbirth but who are now “barren,” that is, beyond their childbearing years. Though experts in what reproduction involves, midwives themselves no longer reproduce. In a similar way, Socrates disclaims responsibilities for the thoughts of others: he is “barren of wisdom.” Or, put in terms of the male, he does not beget disciples by fertilizing the minds of young students with his own conceptions: “I am not in any sense a wise man [eimi de oun autos men ou panu tis sophos]; I  cannot claim as the child of my own soul any discovery worth the name of wisdom” (Theae. 150c–​d). The typical wisdom professor recognizes the likeness of his wisdom in his philosophical children. However, Socrates offers no constructive doctrine of his own; he is intellectually continent. He cannot be held liable as an irresponsible “father” of the Athenian youth—​a point he makes before the jury in Apology. Especially relevant here is an additional similarity between characterizations of Socrates in Apology and Theaetetus. In both works, Socrates explains his role in terms of divine vocation. In relating the story of Chaerephon’s visit to Delphi in Apology, Socrates acknowledges that Apollo marked him as the wisest man in Greece. The oracular pronouncement thus identifies what Socrates does as a wisdom enterprise. Since this was conventionally understood to include teachers, students, and a transmittable body of knowledge, the pronouncement reinforces Socrates’s reputation as a public intellectual rather than a private man. In claiming that his “wisdom” is critical, deconstructive, self-​limiting, and nonlucrative, Socrates attempts to distance himself from wisdom professionals and so escape undesirable connotations associated with their business. But he cannot escape fully the responsibility of being a sage. He cannot plead ignorance or social insignificance. In this way, the divine endorsement of his wisdom thrusts him into a vulnerable and perilous position. Unwilling to flee, he compares himself to a soldier ordered by his commander to defend his ground against dangerous foes. In spite of impossible odds arising from the fact that he must defend a wisdom he does not possess, Socrates will not abandon his divinely assigned post (Apol. 28d–​ e). Similarly, his role as intellectual midwife is divinely appointed. He affirms this twice in his conversation with Theaetetus. At the beginning of their conversation, Socrates explains that the god “compels” him to attend to the “travail of others” and forbids him to procreate (Theae. 150c–​d). With Socrates’s help, his patients “discover within themselves a multitude of beautiful things, which they bring forth into the light” (Theae. 150d). Yet, unlike wisdom professors, Socrates has no role in producing such things. At the inconclusive

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end of the dialogue, he returns once again to birth imagery. The preceding examination has allowed Theaetetus to see that certain proposed definitions of knowledge are “wind-​eggs,” things with no capacity to become thriving organisms. Socrates and Theaetetus thus abandon them. The dialogue has delivered Theaetetus of these unworthy intellectual byproducts. Though no living thing has been “born,” the dialogue is not a failure:  Theaetetus will know better how to conceive sound theories in the future; failing this, he will at least not claim to know what he does not know (Theae. 209e). In doing so, Theaetetus will indeed resemble the Socrates of Apology. Such a profession of ignorance, however, would not mark Theaetetus as a student of Socrates but rather as his patient and, in this, a recipient of divine benefit. For, as Socrates claims, midwifery is an art that he and his mother received from the god (Theae. 210c–​d). The setting of Theaetetus in the days leading up to Socrates’s trial (Theae. 210d) connects it thematically to Euthyphro and Apology. Facing the indictment of Meletus on the charge of impiety, Socrates is forced to articulate his role in Athenian society and to explain his philosophical mission. As I have shown, the topic of wisdom surfaces naturally in this context. These dialogues show Socrates taking great care to manage the perception that he is wise. He claims to lack wisdom that he says Euthyphro surely has. In Apology, he turns Apollo’s endorsement of his wisdom into a profession of ignorance. And, in Theaetetus, he disavows an important feature of wisdom discourse, the intellectual eroticism of the teacher-​student relation, taking on the nonsexual role of the midwife. In focusing on Socrates’s social position, these dialogues highlight the formal character of wisdom. That is, they examine possible models of what it means to be a recognized sage—​whether to defy convention in the name of justice as Euthyphro does, to make oneself available as a cultivator of human excellence as the sophists do, or to produce intellectual offspring by inseminating young minds. To avoid the charge that he is a sage in any of these senses, Socrates argues that proponents of these other models of wisdom aspire, as he says in Apology, to wisdom that is “more than human.” The god, by contrast, has engendered in Socrates a pursuit of wisdom that is appropriately human. What guides Socrates is the conviction that wisdom, understood as something much closer to a virtue than to a profession, is essential to the good life. As Laszlo Versényi puts it: “wisdom is not one branch of knowledge among many in which a man may engage if it so suits him or leave to others with impunity if he is uninterested”; instead, it is “a natural requirement for all men.”32 Because humans desire to flourish and happiness depends upon wisdom, wisdom is not an optional human good.

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What, then, is involved in the attainment of “human wisdom”? Socrates never addresses an anonymous, disinterested reader; instead, he converses with individuals in discrete situations mediated to us by Plato. As a Platonic character, Socrates certainly discusses wisdom in ways that bear interest and significance beyond the original contexts of the dialogues, but they do not lend themselves readily to the formation of a Socratic system or developed wisdom doctrine. Perhaps the best way to approach the topic, then, is by way of dramatic contrasts created by the dialogues. Socrates’s thoughts and commitments surface most clearly by way of differences, that is, in situations in which we see what he is not or does not believe. So far we have seen that whatever his moral-​intellectual quest amounts to, it is not a function of divine inspiration (Ion), a personal crusade for punitive justice (Euthyphro), or a bid to indoctrinate others (Theaetetus). In one of the more formidable dialogues, Gorgias, Socrates draws yet another contrast, this time between the dialectic search for truth (logos) and the ability of the rhetor to wield power through speeches (logoi).33 The namesake of the dialogue, Gorgias, hailed from Leontini in Sicily and was one of the most prominent sophists and teachers of rhetoric in Socrates’s day. Just as Socrates asked Ion, a prominent rhapsode, to explain whether knowledge is needed for poetic performance, he is eager to learn from Gorgias what “power” (dynamis) belongs to the “art” (technē) of rhetoric and what makes it a teachable subject (Gorg. 447c).34 The dialogue unfolds in stages: in three more or less distinct conversations with Gorgias and then with two of his associates, Polus and Callicles. In the first stage, Gorgias celebrates the extraordinary influence of the rhetor. The rhetor’s ability to persuade crowds to adopt certain beliefs, even when he possesses no actual knowledge of subjects on which he speaks, gives the rhetor an uncommon power. According to Gorgias, the verbal skill of the rhetor is a potent but essentially neutral technology that may be used justly or unjustly (Gorg. 456d–​457c). Socrates objects, however, that if rhetoric concerns deliberative matters—​questions of justice—​then the rhetor must know what justice is (Gorg. 460a–​461a). In which case the rhetor is necessarily just. But if rhetoric is, as Gorgias claims, something that may be used justly or unjustly, then it either fails to qualify as knowledge or it is ethically determinate (i.e., just). It cannot be a “neutral” technē. When Polus comes to Gorgias’s aid, he elicits from Socrates a constructive statement about rhetoric, namely that is not an art but simply a “certain kind of experience” in bringing about pleasure and gratification (Gorg. 462c). A physical trainer develops real strength and beauty in trainees, but a beautician merely simulates these in customers. A doctor prescribes a diet that improves patients, but an experienced cook

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creates tasty meals without knowledge of what actually produces health. Similarly, the rhetor has experience in pleasing and gratifying crowds with speeches, but his words merely have an appearance of justice. What the rhetor does lacks substance. As long as the relation between rhetoric and justice is contingent and the chief possession of the rhetor is a power that he exercises at his own discretion, rhetoric is epiphenomenal, a matter simply of manipulating appearances and impressions. By far the longest and most intricate section of Gorgias is the conversation between Socrates and Callicles. Like Thrasymachus in book 1 of Republic, Callicles is a forceful, self-​styled realist who expresses impatience with the niceties of Socratic argument. Though Socrates may have scored verbal victories over Gorgias and Polus, his victories, says Callicles, are hollow. He may have painted the rhetor in a bad light, but it is the philosopher who deserves to be scorned and have sense beaten into him. Turning the tables on Socrates, Callicles paints an unflattering portrait of the philosopher. He argues that philosophers like Socrates are out of touch with reality. They fail to understand that either justice is a social convention used by the weak to shame the strong (Gorg. 483b–​c) or it is law assimilated to the advantage of those who are superior (Gorg. 484a–​b). Those who believe in the independent reality of justice become blind to the real springs of human action and forsake their chance for manly achievement: [The philosopher] is bound to become unmanly by keeping out of his city’s centers and marketplaces, in which [Homer] says men gain ‘highest distinction’; it’s his lot to spend the rest of his life slunk away in a corner, whispering with three or four teenagers, and never utter a thing that’s free or great or rises to the occasion (Gorg. 485d–​e).35 In the end, the philosopher becomes a sad and ridiculous figure. Men who are skilled in refutation (elenchontas andras) concern themselves with little things (mikra tauta) and ignore the real substance of human life. A good life, according to Callicles, includes the means to satisfy one’s desires, a good reputation, and all other good things that flow from these (Gorg. 486d). Though the subject of Callicles’s remarks here is the philosopher, the rhetor remains in the background. Whereas the philosopher, unable to impose his will on others, is weak, the rhetor is strong. The power afforded to the rhetor by his skill with words allows him and his students to benefit from the law, to succeed in the city center and marketplace, and to acquire the wealth and reputation necessary for enjoying life’s many good things. With the insertion

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of Callicles into the dialogue, Plato raises the stakes of the argument. What began as an inquiry into the status of a particular activity has become a contest between two visions of human flourishing. The extended speech of Callicles thus reorients the dialogue toward competing notions of the good life. Socrates is prepared. After expressing (ironically, it seems) the customary gratitude and goodwill for his dialectical opponent, Socrates hints that the attack from Callicles was not unexpected. He points out that Callicles and three friends earlier formed a “wisdom partnership” (“tettaras ontas koinōnous gegonotas sophias”; Gorg. 487c), presumably a kind of reform-​ minded fraternity. Socrates reports that he once overheard the four conclude that “one shouldn’t be eager to go on in philosophy to achieve any precision” but instead take care “not to become excessively wise [sophōteroi] beyond what’s right and proper” so as not to “ruin” oneself (Gorg. 487c–​d). Because this earlier conclusion matches what Callicles has just said, Socrates is assured that Callicles speaks candidly. Whether Socrates appreciated the prudence of this counsel—​perhaps even to the point of following it by strategically downplaying his own wisdom before the Athenian jury—​is left unsaid. The point here is that Socrates knows where Callicles is coming from, and he locates his criticisms within the context of a larger debate about the purpose and value of wisdom. The Calliclean position is to gain fluency in philosophical discourse without investing the kind of faith in it that engenders minute inquiry. Those who pursue philosophical “precision” think too highly of it, it seems, and eventually suffer ruin when it dulls their ears to the “beautiful music of practical life” and prevents them from thriving in the competitive environments of the city (Gorg. 486b–​c). Socrates recognizes in the speech and sentiments of Callicles the elements of a wisdom program:  education, ethics, a notion of the good life. He is thus pleased to transpose the dialogue to a higher “wisdom key”: “the inquiry into those things for which you reproached me, Callicles, is the most beautiful one of all, concerning the sort of person a man ought to be, and what he ought to pursue, and to what extent, both when he’s older and when he’s younger” (Gorg. 487e–​488a). How one ought to live is the most important matter two people can discuss (Gorg. 500c); it is, for Socrates, the highest and “most beautiful” inquiry they can undertake. It is appropriate, then, that the conversation with Callicles reflect a common feature of wisdom discourse:  the comparison of two rival forms of life. For such a comparison to succeed, a stable notion of the good is required. Socrates thus elicits from Callicles a fuller explanation of that which makes lives good. Callicles has in mind the abilities of someone who can

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manage the affairs of the city and accomplish what he intends without getting “fainthearted” or succumbing to “softness in the soul” (Gorg. 491b). Such a person is strong and free, allowing his desires to grow to the fullest possible extent so that he can experience the pleasure of satisfying them (Gorg. 491e–​492a). Socrates isolates the two touchstones of Callicles’s ideal life, desire and pleasure. According to Callicles, to feel desire is an essential part of being alive; to live without desires is to live as a corpse, or as one made of stone rather than flesh (Gorg. 492e). Socrates, however, compares desires to holes in an urn. They are the mark of a soul that is weak and deficient, and they make the life of the owner, who must constantly refill the urn, troubled, anxious, and painful. Callicles remains unmoved. Though unable to convince Callicles that contentment is a fuller and more stable state of being than desire, Socrates brings Callicles to the brink of admitting that pleasure cannot be identical to the good, since good and bad people feel pain and pleasure to similar degrees (Gorg. 499b). Again, Callicles resists the Socratic conclusion. When Callicles backs out of the elenchus again, Socrates changes course and takes up the contrast between two forms of life that Callicles has initiated. On one side is the life of the active man, trained in rhetoric and engaged in politics; on the other is the life of the philosopher (Gorg. 500c–​d). In order to develop this, Socrates begins with a distinction between two separate activities: those that aim at the health of the soul and those that aim merely to induce pleasure in the soul (Gorg. 501b). The former aim to improve the condition of those to whom the activity is directed; the latter—​including poetry, music, and dance—​are designed not to improve an audience but to please and gratify them. Revisiting the point established earlier in his conversation with Polus, Socrates includes rhetoric among activities aimed at pleasure rather than improvement. For what is rhetoric except poetry in prose form (Gorg. 502c)? When Callicles objects that some rhetors aim to gratify citizens while others aim to improve them, Socrates presses the point. This distinction naturally raises the question of how to tell the two apart. At one level, it is simple: the former pander to their audiences while the latter do not, instead saying “the best things,” whether these are pleasing to an audience or not (Gorg. 503a–​b). A more substantial criterion, however, has to do with the way one proceeds. The one who has both skill and virtuous intent (“ho technikos te kai agathos”; Gorg. 504d) speaks in an ordered and purposeful way. As is his wont, Socrates draws an analogy between the good man and craftsmen, possessors of technai:  “each of them puts each thing he handles into some arrangement and constrains one thing to be suited to and harmonious with

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another until the sum of them all is organized into an end result that’s arranged and ordered [kekosmēmenon]” (Gorg. 503e–​504a). Though this description of pleasing arrangement (kosmein) might also be applied to a work of art or musical performance, Socrates identifies harmonious composition specifically with craftsmen in order to indicate an order that is pragmatic rather than aesthetic, an order derived from the thing itself rather than the tastes of the crowd. For the work of craftsmen is governed, above all, by a knowledge of what is being produced and an understanding of how relevant processes and parts must be coordinated in order for it to serve its function. To know this function is also to understand a thing’s optimal condition. Though Callicles follows this line of argument easily, identifying the ideal states for particular things (for a house, livability; for a ship, seaworthiness; for the human body, health and strength), he hesitates when Socrates prompts him to name the optimal condition of the soul. Socrates must supply the description: “the regular and orderly states of the soul are called lawfulness and law, whereby men are similarly made law-​abiding and orderly; and these states are justice and temperance [sōphrosunē]” (Gorg. 504d).36 The speech of the good man, then, is ordered by the good goal at which he aims: the promotion of virtue. Callicles is a hedonist who charts the path to happiness through pleonectic satisfactions. Thus, when he sees that Socrates has identified the good life with virtue, specifically temperance (sōphrosunē), he breaks off the discussion once again (Gorg. 505c). Gorgias and Callicles then consent to let Socrates dispense with the question-​and-​answer format and bring the logos to completion by himself. What follows is a rehearsal of earlier points and the repetition of Socrates’s formal description of virtue. The virtue of a thing is identified with the condition of its being arranged according to the order (taxei), correctness (orthotēti), and craft (technē) proper to that thing (Gorg. 506d). To the extent that it is so arranged, it is good. Applying this definition of virtue to the human soul, Socrates concludes that it is the temperate soul (sophron psychē) that is good (Gorg. 507a). The intemperate Callicles, then, appears to have elicited from Socrates a formulation of the human good, above all, as temperance. That Socrates should here describe the human good as a form of life bound explicitly to virtue is not at all surprising. The necessity of virtue to human flourishing must surely be counted among Socrates’s first principles. What is noteworthy in Gorgias is the primacy or centrality accorded specifically to the virtue of temperance. One relevant factor is Callicles himself. Socrates aims to win Callicles over to the philosophical life, stating plainly that his goal is to persuade him to “change course,” reject the “insatiable and dissipated” life of desire, and choose an orderly life of contentment (Gorg. 493c). The dialogue

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also concludes with a final exhortation to Callicles to follow the logos, live the best form of life, and grow in virtue (Gorg. 527e). The virtue that Callicles needs most urgently is temperance, and so temperance takes center stage. Temperance, however, is not simply one virtue among many. It is what later figures like Thomas Aquinas called a “cardinal virtue,” a virtue that contains within it something required for the exercise of other virtues and, indeed, for virtuous character in general.37 To observe a temperate person in action is to see one who excels at being human. Thus, Socrates explains that a temperate person, by virtue of being temperate, is also pious and just. Here he reverts to a formulation also found, as I have shown, in Euthyphro: piety and human justice are two parallel domains within the larger conceptual field of justice. The mark of a well-​composed soul is to do what is just in regard to the gods and fitting with respect to fellow human beings (Gorg. 507a–​b). The same capacity to deal justly and appropriately, when observed in urgent situations, may also be described as manliness or courage (andreia; Gorg. 507b). The temperate person is courageous because he fears only what is proper to fear and acts in ways that are exactly appropriate to the moment. Thus, the manliness so prized by Callicles turns out to be a function of personal respect for limits rather than individual disregard for them. Because Socrates is able to describe several virtues—​piety, justice, and courage—​as arising from the quality of temperance, he concludes that the temperate person is not simply good in one respect. Rather, his goodness is total and fully adequate to human flourishing. The temperate man is “a completely good man” (“agathon andra einai teleōs”) who secures happiness and blessedness (Gorg. 507c). This equation has important implications for Socrates’s understanding of wisdom. The first to consider is the “unity of the virtues” in Socratic thought. In both Gorgias and Protagoras—​another dialogue in which Socrates debates a prominent sophist—​he argues that virtue is unitary. The goodness of a rhetor, Socrates argued, cannot be separated from goodness in general. What virtue he has, then, consists in his advancement of human excellence; there is no good apart from this. In the conversation with Protagoras, the great sophist persuades Socrates that virtue is teachable, but Socrates presses Protagoras to specify what is taught in the cultivation of virtue. Are virtues to be described as independent parts of a single whole (like parts of a face) or as different forms of the same thing (like different objects all made of gold)? The sticking point in Protagoras is the virtue of courage. When presented with a list of virtues including wisdom, temperance, courage, justice, and piety, Protagoras is willing to accept that four are related to one another. Courage (andreia), however, stands apart in his view

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(Prot. 349d). The similarity between Callicles and Protagoras here is noteworthy. Callicles reproaches Socrates and philosophers in general for being unmanly, identifying andreia with a certain force of personality in public affairs (Gorg. 491b). Protagoras argues similarly that courageous acts require a personal quality that is found among good and bad people alike and is thus independent of virtue: boldness or audacity (tharraleotēs). Courage proper is a function of one’s natural endowments, a strength of soul that can be cultivated (Prot. 351a). Courageous people, however, must also be bold (“symbainei tous men andreious tharraleous einai”). Boldness has clear nonintellectual sources: not only skill (technē) but also rage (thumos) and madness (mania) (Prot. 351a). In this way, Protagorean courage includes an element that places it at least partially outside the compass of the other virtues. Because courage, like temperance, is required for the exercise of other virtues, Protagoras’s insistence on boldness, if sustained, would be fatal to the unity of the virtues. Temperance would not encompass the other virtues, and something other than virtue would be required to live a just life. Unwilling to let this claim go unchallenged, Socrates begins a second line of argument that seems at first to be unrelated to the unity of the virtues. After Protagoras has explained his understanding of courage, Socrates shifts away from virtue and brings up the topic of knowledge (epistēmē). Socrates and Protagoras find common ground, specifically, in endorsing a strong view of knowledge and disdaining the common view that knowledge is merely a bit player in the drama of human life, something that can be dragged here and there by the passions like a slave (Prot. 352b–​c). They agree that this view of knowledge is unworthy, since it, along with wisdom, is supreme in human affairs. A weak view of knowledge leads to the common error according to which people are sometimes thought to be “overcome” by pleasure or pain, to act in direct opposition to what they know to be good. Socrates, however, argues that the relation between a moral agent and all putative pains or pleasures is cognitive. That is, actions involve a decision about what one believes will be pleasurable or painful. Thus, the experience of being “overcome” by pain or pleasure is ultimately rooted in what one thinks one knows. “Giving in” to an impulse is really a rational act, a calculation by which the course of action urged by the impulse is thought to yield a greater good than another course of action not so urged. Moral errors, then, are mistaken calculations that arise from ignorance. What is needed, according to Socrates, is “the measuring art” (“hē metretikē technē”), which allows people to distinguish between greater goods that appear small because they are distant and lesser goods that appear large because they are near (Prot. 356c–​357b). Just

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as the ability to judge distances is needed to navigate one’s physical environment, so too is the art of measurement necessary in the moral realm:  it is the “salvation of our life” (Prot. 356e). When Socrates brings his defense of knowledge to completion by identifying knowledge with “the art of measurement,” his words recall the famous dictum of Protagoras that man is the “measure” (metron) of all things (see Theae. 152a). Whether Socrates intends this little homage playfully or, perhaps, strategically is uncertain. Whatever the case, Protagoras follows Socrates quite willingly to the conclusion that virtue is entirely a matter of knowledge. Just when it seems that courage has dropped out of the conversation, however, Socrates reintroduces it (Prot. 359b). Having gotten Protagoras to agree that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance, Socrates demonstrates in short order that courage is ultimately a matter of fearing what ought rightly to be feared and of boldly doing what ought rightly to be done. These depend, of course, on “the measuring art,” that is, on knowledge of the good. Courage, then, is nothing other than wisdom (Prot. 360d). Protagoras, unwilling to verbalize this final conclusion, offers only a grudging concession. This brief detour into Protagoras sheds light on Socrates’s attempt to win Callicles over to the side of justice. According to Socrates, rhetors and sophists amount to the same thing (Gorg. 520a). Both advertise the ability to impart knowledge, cultivate virtue, and help others secure good lives. In Gorgias and Protagoras, Socrates sets himself apart from them by integrating knowledge, virtue, and goodness into a formidable unity that comprehends all aspects of human endeavor. Knowledge entails moral responsibility. Virtue, which cannot be identified merely with personal qualities, rests on a foundation of knowledge. Furthermore, Socrates identifies the good life that all humans seek, whether ignorantly or knowledgeably, as the life of virtue. These tight equivalencies leave no room to the sophist or tyrant for skillful manipulation of appearances or the arbitrary exercise of power. The road to happiness runs through knowledge, virtue, and goodness. Because of the way these large realms of concern overlap, it is difficult to know what this unity ought to be called. “Virtuous knowledge of the good” is both cumbersome and Socratically redundant. One word that bears a significant Socratic connection to all three things, however, is wisdom. In another dialogue featuring sophists, Socrates claims that wisdom is necessary and sufficient for the good life: whoever has it has no further need of good fortune (Euthyd. 280a–​281d). Wisdom (sophia) is often referred to as a virtue (e.g., Prot. 349b). And wisdom and knowledge are used interchangeably throughout the Socratic dialogues. “Wisdom” is also an apt designation for the Socratic unity because it connects the three within

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a larger field of vision. As Socrates tells Callicles, it belongs to wisdom not merely to prescribe human success at an individual level but also to describe how human flourishing accords with the wider world in which humans live:  Those who are wise declare, Callicles, that heaven and earth and gods and humans are held together by the shared bond of friendship, and by orderliness, moderation, and justice, and for this reason, my comrade, they call this whole a cosmos, not a disorder or a dissipation (Gorg. 508a). What Socrates commends to Callicles is not simply a temperate way of life but one that is enacted in a world “held together” by virtue, such that goodness is not simply a prudent choice but, contra Callicles, a realistic one. Wisdom claims that virtue is a solid and stable thing, backed, as it were, by the very cosmos itself. To speak of cosmic knowledge, however, is not to identify Socratic wisdom with a perspective on the world that only the gods enjoy. Socrates does not peer into “things in the heavens and things below the earth.” There may be a wisdom that is “more than human,” but as Socrates makes clear in Apology, this is not his concern. Neither is the professional wisdom of the philosophical fathers who furnish clients to Socrates in his capacity as midwife. What, then, does the humanly appropriate wisdom of Socrates amount to? One option suggested by Socrates’s profession of ignorance is to identify the wisdom of Socrates, in formal terms, with a disciplined, perennially open-​ended search for truth. In her analysis of Meno, Roslyn Weiss points to a difficulty with the Socratic unity described above: the moral knowledge associated with virtuous action—​a set of definitive, geometry-​like conclusions about what is good, proper, and right—​seems to be humanly unattainable.38 Weiss argues that full and accurate moral knowledge is, in Socrates’s view, sufficient for virtue but not necessary.39 Failing a god-​like knowledge of what is just in every case, Socrates traces out an alternative path to virtue:  true opinion arrived at through the hard work of elenctic moral inquiry.40 There is no doubting the importance of the elenchus to Socrates’s wisdom. It is not only a means of clearing away error and adopting better opinions; it is also an index of one’s moral disposition. Imperviousness to the elenchus, which is never praiseworthy, is a sign of one’s unwillingness to pursue and grasp the good. In Meno, Socrates himself suggests that some come by true opinion nonelenctically. Political leaders, soothsayers, poets sometimes guide others to virtue by way of what he calls “god-​granted true opinion” (Meno 99c–​d).

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They are neither knowers nor moral inquirers but, Weiss argues, simply fortunate individuals, blessed by the gods with a “knack for saying and doing the right thing,” which creates “an illusion of human greatness” while masking “human deficit.”41 This affirmation of divine arbitrariness casts a shadow over the quest for wisdom, rendering it in (potentially) tragic tones. This is because the distribution of “true opinion” among actual people in the world does not correspond to those who put forth the appropriate moral and intellectual effort. Many seem wise who are not. Even worse is the prospect that those without virtue may acquire reputations for wisdom that give them power over those who are virtuous. To see Socrates in this light, as a champion of virtue in tune with the cosmos but at odds with those in power, is to open a second possibility: Socrates as moral hero. The wisdom of Socrates thus comes into focus as a particular attribute, something that allows his moral knowledge to come to fruition in a virtuous life. Lorraine Smith Pangle concludes her insightful book Virtue Is Knowledge:  The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy in the following way: Virtue will be unified likewise in the harmony of insight and strength that governs everything [the philosopher] does, giving him the capacity to grasp clearly, rank correctly, and hold steady his knowledge of what is good and to follow the divine reason that he himself possesses. Virtue is a single whole in him because it is the single, unbroken grasp of the good that is of concern to him in its entirety and its full context. Virtue is more than knowledge, but it is nothing more or less than complete wisdom.42 This summary qualifies the straightforward judgment that “virtue is knowledge” by introducing a third term, “wisdom,” to illuminate the relation between virtue and knowledge. In Pangle’s analysis of wisdom, the accent falls on character, particularly a sturdiness of soul that may be identified with strength, steadfastness, and steadiness.43 It is a constant “power” in the soul to act appropriately, according to “a correct assessment of what everything is worth.”44 In this way, wisdom is a personal quality that dynamically unites action appropriate to virtue with knowledge upon which virtue is based. Socrates’s commitment to virtue and his strength in embodying it recall the Homeric heroes. Pangle points, for example, to two moments, one in Apology and the other in Protagoras, where Socrates is compared to Achilles and Odysseus, respectively. Standing before the Athenian jury, Socrates presents

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himself “as the new Achilles, who gives no thought to death or danger as he pursues his just and divinely appointed mission.”45 And in Protagoras, Socrates arrives at the house of Callias and looks on the sophists gathered there just as Odysseus surveyed the shades upon arriving at the underworld (Od. 11.601; Prot. 315c). Like Odysseus—​and unlike Protagoras—​Socrates will show the steadfastness needed to learn what he needs for a “satisfactory homecoming.”46 It seems clear, whether one adopts a formal or material understanding of Socratic wisdom, that it cannot be explicated as a theory of virtue independent of social, political, and cosmic realities. Wisdom includes an understanding of what it means for virtue, arising from intellectual and moral effort, to orient the self toward the good under conditions that actually obtain in the world. These include the oddities and enormities that result from the unpredictable distribution of “god-​granted true opinion” in the world, among those who are virtuous and those who are merely lucky. Wisdom must also account for the dramatic character of human life by which people are forced to act without adequate knowledge of consequences or to face perplexing dilemmas in which all possible consequences seem equally bad. Something is needed to fasten the self to its own understanding of the good, to stabilize it against speeches, impressions, emotions, and impulses that constantly pour in. To the extent that virtue, in Pangle’s phrase, forms “a single whole” in someone, that person is wise. Wisdom includes the ability to maintain the wholeness of this singularity (or, indeed, the singularity of this whole) when it is most precarious, under threat from deceptions and enticements that separate happiness from goodness. In the life of Socrates, then, wisdom comes into focus as a form of integrity. On the one hand Socratic wisdom is supported by a cosmos held together by friendship, temperance, and justice. It thus avoids the aggressive solipsism of a Euthyphro and takes its place in a divinely administered order eminently conducive to human happiness.47 Socrates, though a “single whole,” is not wholly alone. A mark of Socratic integrity is that one “fits” in the world. On the other hand Socratic wisdom is also seen in the interstices of social disconnection, that is, in Socrates’s responses to the failed elenchoi, endless intrigues, and aporetic interludes interwoven through the dialogues. In these spaces, wisdom is embodied and enacted in Socrates’s characteristic cheerfulness and charitability, his skillful ironies, and in his irritating refusal to let go of the logos as it cuts its way through conventional opinions. When, in these cases, he indeed stands alone, the wisdom of Socrates is also manifest. Paradoxically, Socrates fits most in the world when, to all appearances, he fits least.

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Conclusion One may examine the wisdom of Socrates from many vantage points. Socratic wisdom involves a theory of knowledge, a philosophy of virtue, a path to securing the good life, and no doubt, many other things. As I have shown, it is also concerned with the divine realm: to this extent, Socratic wisdom is a kind of theology as well. Socrates included piety in the list when he attempted to persuade Protagoras of the unity of the virtues (Prot. 349b). If virtues like temperance and courage are ultimately reducible to and identifiable with wisdom, then so is the virtue of piety. The problem, though, is that piety eludes definition. How can one know what actions qualify as just with respect to the gods? What, after all, is the form of piety that makes all pious things pious? If piety remains indeterminate, as the encounter with Euthyphro appears to suggest, then this would seem to have serious consequences for the unity of the virtues and the knowledge with which it is identified. So, too, with wisdom: given the equation of virtue and knowledge with wisdom, the separation of piety from knowledge has important implications for the effort to understand what wisdom is. As argued earlier in this chapter, the most important treatment of piety, Euthyphro, does not leave the reader completely in the dark about piety. The fact that Socrates in two distinct dialogues endorsed a description of piety as doing what is just with respect to the gods (Gorg. 507a–​b ; Euthphr. 12e–​13a) suggests that this general formulation was acceptable to Socrates. The formulation presupposes that knowledge and proper action are part of piety, both of which accord with virtue. Thus, the formulation fits well with what I have said so far about Socratic wisdom. Mark McPherran has argued persuasively that Euthyphro allows one to go even farther in understanding what piety is. After Socrates and Euthyphro abandon the notion of piety as care (therapeia) of the gods, Socrates steers the dialogue toward a teleological conception of divine service, by which humans help the gods accomplish a particular goal. Thus for Socrates, “piety is that part of justice that is a serv­ ice (hyperetikē) of humans to gods, assisting the gods in their work (ergon), a work that produces some good results.”48 This description, however, is still incomplete. A full understanding of piety requires additional knowledge of what the divine ergon is. Gregory Vlastos argues that the divine work is “to benefit human beings.” Realizing this, the pious person does not act as a beggar seeking favors from the gods but rather cooperates with a benevolent divine will in seeking to help others.49 In this way, the gods of Socrates are knowable. They are good in ways that humans recognize as good, and the demands they make on human beings are “rationally

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moral.”50 To be pious, then, is to use reason to pursue the good. This definition aligns piety with the other virtues, but at the cost of minimizing the distinction between human and divine wisdom. Socrates insisted that the gods were completely good, such that no course of action contrary to justice could claim divine sanction. But moral agreement between gods and humans at this level does not eliminate the important ontological and epistemic differences between them. For all of his belief in the goodness of the gods, Socrates still claims that human wisdom, when compared to the god’s, is worthless (Apol. 23a–​b). In his life Socrates did not simply comply with a general mandate to “benefit human beings,” though he certainly aimed to do this; he also obeyed specific prohibitions conveyed to him by his daimon. There is something more than rational morality in Socrates’s obedience of the divine voice. McPherran opens a fruitful space for elements of Socratic piety that lie outside a general mandate to benefit human beings. He argues that, because of the great gulf separating gods and people, humans are not able to acquire a full and certain knowledge of the divine ergon. Intellectual humility and agnosticism with respect to the full scope of the divine ergon are fundamental. What remains to humans in their limited understanding is to perform “acts of respect, gratitude, and obedience” to the gods as a matter of “just reciprocity” for good gifts received from them.51 Socratic piety, on this view, commends a sensible orthodoxy (or, better, orthopraxy) with respect to traditional religion, which prudently observes custom while steering clear of superstition. The more substantial part of human piety, however, is philosophical activity, specifically elenctic inquiry that attains a fallible moral knowledge that is conducive to virtue and happiness and, at the same time, critically destructive of falsehoods and presumptuous beliefs. Piety, construed as philosophical activity, becomes the basis for the other virtues. Thus, in McPherran’s astute formulation, Socrates offers us “a theistically mitigated skepticism in the service of a skeptically mitigated theistic commitment.”52 Returning to Apology, we see that the piety of Socrates is indeed fundamental to his way of life. Were the jury to acquit him on the condition that he cease and desist from philosophy, he would not accept the judgment. Instead, he would reply: “men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy” (Apol. 29d). His mission is to hover like a gadfly in his city, employing the elenchus to rouse and sting into alertness the “great and noble horse” that is Athens. This, he adds, is not a matter of performing a generically good work but of being, in all that he says and does, “god’s gift” to the people (Apol. 30e). For Socrates to argue otherwise, and for the jury

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to consider his case in any other way, would be not only unjust but contrary to eusebeia and opposed to what is hosios (Apol. 35c). There is thus, in my view, no doubting the centrality of philosophical activity to Socratic piety. The speeches of Socrates in Apology make this clear. But they also bring into focus another point of connection between piety and wisdom: integrity. What is required for Socrates to fulfill his pious mission is not simply the conviction that philosophical activity accords with a divine intent to benefit humanity and a proper human intellectual humility. It is also essential that the virtue in which piety participates be an unbroken “single whole” within him. To say this is to honor the Socratic unity of the virtues. Socratic piety would certainly falter without courage and compromise itself without temperance. If Socrates were not just in his dealings with fellow men, his service to the gods would mean nothing. Conversely, if Socrates had no regard for what is hosios, what is fitting to do in a world governed by the gods, then his virtue would lose contact with a divine order that vindicates justice and goodness.53 If the goodness of virtue were confined to life on the small ship of human affairs, then it would strand moral aspiration and the yearning for higher life on a distant, unreachable shore. To speak of “integrity” in this connection is also to illuminate one final aspect of the connection between wisdom and piety. To be wise, in Socratic terms, is to remain true to one’s own god-​formed life. Socrates tells Callicles and the sophists in Gorgias that he would fare badly if his life were on trial. Though he has never said or done anything unjust toward human beings or gods, he knows that his refusal to resort to pandering rhetoric would likely prove fatal. If his final act is to speak truthfully about his own life, however, then he will “endure his death as something easy” (Gorg. 522d). Similarly, in Apology, Socrates’s failure to mount a successful defense arises from the fact that he is unwilling to pander. Yet it also derives from the great difficulty of Socrates’s task. He must give to others an account of his life as one of serv­ ice to the gods, but the god whom he obeys, his daimon, is his own. Though Socrates’s life might be described in general terms as an example of philosophical activity, Plato’s dialogues characterize it as a very particular life, one that only Socrates could and did live. Others, too, lead lives of virtue and pursue the philosophical life. Yet the example of Socrates shows that the “examined life” does not issue from one’s principles as much as it coheres in one’s personality. The piety of Socrates does not consist simply in the belief that the life he has chosen is just but also in the conviction that such a life—​g uided by the daimon, governed by elenctic truth, galvanized by love of polis—​is his own. For this reason, Socrates tells Crito, on the eve of his execution, that he will not flee unless fleeing is consistent with the logos-​oriented life he has lived to that point (Crito 46b–​47a). Socrates imagines the laws of the city

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asking him whether it would be just for a man who dwelt freely in Athens his whole life, fighting for it and raising his sons there, to repudiate Athens now. To do so would only show that Socrates’s lifelong loyalty to the laws was apparent rather than real (Crito 53c), that his life, in other words, was a sham. Though Crito initially thinks that Socrates’s submission to an unjust verdict is cowardly, he is made to understand that true courage is not hasty; it consists in the time taken to deliberate (Crito 46b) and in the consideration given to personal integrity. The strength needed to face death is a function of Socratic particularity. For this reason, Socrates should not be understood as a philosophical martyr dying sacrificially for a cause; rather, his death “was the opposite, an act of practical, individual necessity dictated by his own nature and natural desire for self-​fulfillment.”54 In this sense, his death owes not to idealism but to virtue. Yet this claim must be understood carefully. Socratic knowledge, though partial and fallible, furnishes the wise conviction that it is not enough to live a life of virtue. One must, instead, remain true to the dictates of one’s own virtuous life, enacting what Burkert called “a discerning integration into an apportioned, limited world.”55 In the end, the brave man who refused to abandon his divinely assigned post (Apol. 28e) died there. Socrates’s final words, a command to Crito to sacrifice to Asclepius (Phd. 118a), reflect pious equanimity. In the unaccountable strength of Socrates’s god-​formed life, we see, as in a flash of lightning, the formidable unity of the virtues. As readers at leisure, we glimpse dimly and briefly the strangeness of a world in which a thing as exalted as wisdom rests on something as small and inarticulate as piety.

Summary For Socrates, wisdom begins with the recognition of a moral order that identifies human flourishing with the life of virtue. In living the life of virtue, the individual lives in harmony with a world that is superintended by divine benevolence and characterized by justice. Because virtue is found in human beings to varying degrees, the social order is not necessarily ordered to wisdom and is, at times, inimical to it. Social life is the venue for a pursuit of wisdom in which human reason and rational discourse—​as opposed to power and manipulation—​ought to structure a search to realize the good. Rational discourse, however, also reveals human moral and intellectual limitations, such that any claim to know what is good must be held tentatively and kept open to revision. In the face of human ignorance and hostility, loyalty to the good is sustained by piety, or reverence for what is good, and by integrity, the refusal to give up one’s own just life.

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A Nation of Philosophers Other men in other places everywhere, Greek or barbarian, have brought a host of beautiful deeds into the light and begotten every kind of virtue. —​Symposium 209e

After defeating Darius and the Persian army at Issus, Alexander boasted that he had the power to bring the entire world under “one sun” (Diod. Sic. 17.54.5). What made this momentous was not simply the identity of the new ruler—​a Macedonian commander in place of an Achaemenid emperor—​ but the thing over which Alexander was eventually said to rule. Alexander sought to rule lands and peoples conceptualized as a single entity: what the Greeks called the oikoumenē, or inhabited world. In subsequent centuries, the oikoumenē witnessed a remarkable diffusion of Greek thought and the spread of Greek language. In the two centuries after his death, Alexander’s vision of a world characterized by the fusion of Greek and non-​Greek yielded new cultural forms. As conquered groups emulated and appropriated Greek political and religious institutions, the Greeks, whose texts and traditions already reflected an admiration for the achievements of the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Babylonians, looked toward the east with fresh interest and curiosity. Like the Romans to follow, Greek conquerors found themselves in a position of political superiority tempered by awareness of the fact that, compared to the peoples of the East, the Greeks were cultural neophytes. It is in this context that we may speak of the Greek “discovery” of the Jews. While no substantial Greek work on the Jews from the classical period survives,1 the opinions of several learned Greeks from the decades spanning the end of the fourth and the beginning of the third centuries bce were excerpted and preserved in later works. Though these opinions varied in certain respects and were somewhat distorted and misinformed, they nevertheless reflect a common judgment about the Jews. To these early Greek commentators, the Jews were distinguished as bearers of wisdom.

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The Greek discovery of the Jews in the wake of Alexander marks the beginning of what would become a momentous period in the development of Judaism. From this encounter, however, came not only a “stage” in the history of Jewish culture but a dynamic rearticulation of the ancestral way of life. Shaped as they were by the pressures and possibilities of a rapidly expanding Greek culture sphere, texts and figures associated with what we conventionally call “Hellenistic Judaism” adopted Greek language and literary forms. Whether Greek Jewish texts were written explicitly for non-​Jews is often difficult to tell. Though Josephus and Philo seemed to have written specifically for non-​Jewish audiences, other writings may have been intended for various diasporic communities. Yet even when Jews were writing for fellow Jews, they wrote with an awareness that all now lived within the oikoumenē. The wider Greek world could not be fully ignored. To a great degree, Jewish authors appreciated Greek literature and philosophy; many aimed, therefore, not only at overcoming a language barrier but also at negotiating a cultural differential between what was new, dynamic, and “modern” and what was apparently old, fixed, and traditional. Intellectually, the goal was to identify with Greek culture without surrendering to it. One striking feature of the Jewish encounter with Greek thought was the fundamental level at which the two were coordinated. Greek thought and Jewish scriptural hermeneutics were thought, remarkably, to aim at the same thing: wisdom. A synthetic mood prevailed. A  formidable complex of ideas and assumptions associated with wisdom and the comprehensive quest to live an intellectually and morally integrated life—​these were held in common by Greek and Jewish sages alike. Among Jewish writers in the Hellenistic period, we witness the emergence of a new phase, in which the Jewish scriptural inheritance formed the basis for fresh attempts to present Judaism as a philosophical way of life. Belonging as they do to the early stages of the encounter between biblical and classical traditions, Hellenistic Jewish writings address and, in some cases, introduce many issues that became increasingly significant for the development of wisdom in later periods. The aim of this chapter is to examine Greek writers whose discussions of wisdom form the background for Jewish appropriations of wisdom. As I will show, Greek observers took an ethnographic interest in the Jews, identifying them with certain philosophical ideals. Fragmentary reports from the likes of Hecataeus of Abdera and Theophrastus (like Alexander, a pupil of Aristotle) shed valuable light on conceptions of wisdom in this period, especially that of wisdom as a cultural property belonging to an entire collective. To be sure, the notion of national “wisdoms” is not an innovation of the Hellenistic period, but it bears special relevance to the apologetic

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context of many Jewish wisdom texts of the period. Also essential to the new wisdom discourse was the emphasis placed on the link, forged influentially by Plato and Aristotle, between rational theology and the life of virtue. This link, perhaps more than any other feature of Hellenistic philosophies, provided Judaism with a bridge to the wider intellectual world of the oikoumenē. Jewish authors made Jewish belief and practice intelligible to Greek audiences, but their project was not simply one of translation. Recognizing an affinity between the prominence given to “theological ethics” in Stoic and Platonic thought on the one hand and Jewish piety on the other, they opened a new path for understanding the Torah and the ancestral way of life, above all, as wisdom. Conversely, they brought wisdom into focus as something greater than virtue or knowledge: wisdom as participation in the divine life, which is rooted in individual piety but also is realized fully in the particularities of a shared culture. In this way, Hellenistic Jewish wisdom represents a strikingly ambitious project, one that holds in tension natural law and positive law, universal and particular, individual and collective, human and divine. In this chapter, I will set the context by briefly examining Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of wisdom, along with some early Greek perceptions of Jewish wisdom. These form the background for ­chapter 6, in which I will take up constructive attempts by Jewish philosophers to commend Judaism in philosophical terms. A number of familiar themes recur in this chapter. Most significant is the holism of wisdom, the way an understanding of the divine realm, the cosmos, and the nature of the soul is coordinated with an understanding of virtue and the ethical life. Though piety plays a role, as I will show, in the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle, theirs is a more intellectualistic understanding of piety consistent with a high and positive view of knowledge. The accounts of Plato, Aristotle, and their followers generally lack the sense of knowledge as something that may become perilous (Homer) or self-​defeating (Gen 3; Ecclesiastes) in a wisdom-​seeking context. They also place greater emphasis on wonder than on metaphysical vulnerability as a reality basic to wisdom. In the same way that wisdom is connected with royal figures in the Hebrew Bible, notably Solomon/​Qohelet, Plato and Aristotle also associate wisdom with ruling knowledge. One important reflex of this connection in Greek thought after Alexander, then, is renewed attention to wisdom as a property of a nation or cultural group.

Wisdom in Plato and Aristotle Understandings of wisdom in the Hellenistic era reflect the influence of Plato and Aristotle. As I showed in c­ hapter 4, Socrates emphasized wisdom in its

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personal, ethical aspect. He brought the quest for wisdom into focus as the struggle to understand and embody virtue in a self-​particular, god-​formed manner. With Plato and Aristotle, however, the quest for wisdom becomes a more structured, systematic undertaking. Most significant is the clear designation of wisdom (sophia) as a particular kind of knowledge (epistēmē).2 In Republic, Plato identifies wisdom specifically with ruling knowledge.3 That is, wisdom is a stable and secure understanding of ordered reality by which leaders organize, defend, and cultivate the kallipolis or ideal city. There are many types of knowledge (for example, knowledge associated with various crafts), but only ruling knowledge possessed by a few counts as sophia in the fullest sense: Then, a whole city established according to nature would be wise because of the smallest class and part in it, namely, the governing or ruling one. And to this class, which seems to be by nature the smallest, belongs a share of the knowledge that alone among all the other kinds of knowledge is to be called wisdom (Rep. 428e–​429a).4 The context for this claim is the attempt by the Socrates character to defend the notion that the ideal city sketched in Republic 2 and 3 is fully and wholly good. For it to be completely good, the city must display the principal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice (Rep. 427e). Its goodness, furthermore, consists in a kind of harmony. To the extent that rulers rule knowledgeably, defenders defend courageously, and ordinary people live temperately, the city is a good one. The last remaining virtue, justice, is manifest when all in the city function appropriately and well in their natural roles. Wisdom, then, is the virtue identified with ruling knowledge in the context of all the virtues that belong to the ideal city. Wisdom has an additional feature, which Socrates describes as “odd” (atopon; Rep. 428b). An entire city may be considered wise if the ruling few possess wisdom. Individual citizens need not possess ruling knowledge, but if they cooperate with wise governance, then they may be considered collectively to constitute a wise city, to be a wise people. Wisdom is thus seen most clearly when it is applied to rulership. As Socrates reports in Symposium, Diotima held that “by far the greatest and most beautiful part of wisdom [phronēsis] deals with the proper ordering of cities and households” (Symp. 209a).5 Whether one has the capacity to order cities and households properly depends on whether one has the knowledge, intellectual gifts, moral disposition, and personal preparation to act in accord with wisdom. Wisdom may shine forth in the political sphere, but for it to be wisdom in the fullest sense, it must involve a good deal more than political savvy: a proper orientation toward the divine realm, virtuous character, and

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knowledge of the cosmos. Plato conveys this clearly in his proposal for the education of philosopher-​kings, those fit to rule the ideal city. Of primary importance in the training of wise rulers are the beliefs they hold about the gods. In book 2 of Republic, the Socrates character insists that the formation of the guardians begin early in life; careful attention should be paid to the stories (mythous) they are permitted to hear from educators in their youth (Rep. 377a–​c). Taking aim at Homer and Hesiod, he criticizes traditional stories for attributing shameful acts and behaviors to the gods. The issue, strictly speaking, is not that the stories are false (Rep. 376a–​377a, d). It is rather the practical effect such stories have. They undermine the inculcation of virtue:  The battles of gods and giants, and all the various stories of the gods hating their families or friends, should neither be told nor even woven in embroideries. If we’re to persuade our people that no citizen has ever hated another and that it’s impious to do so [oud’ estin touto hosion], then that’s what should be told to children from the beginning by old men and women; and as these children grow older, poets should be compelled to tell them the same sort of thing (Rep. 378c). The concern here is the cultivation of a polity in which citizens do not hate one another, but everything depends on how and why the young come to reject behaviors that lead to civil strife. The negative judgment against such behaviors is not a matter of general disdain for quarreling but of a specific conviction that hostility among citizens is “impious” (not hosios)—​a violation not merely of civil order but also of sacred order. The Socrates character goes on in book 2 to criticize two other features of the traditional stories: the notion that the gods are responsible for evil (as in the famous Homeric image of the two urns of Zeus in Il. 24.527–​532) and the suggestion that gods deal deceptively with mortals, either by disguising themselves in various forms or by lying to them in dreams or visions. In banning the poets from speaking of the gods as malicious, arbitrary, or dishonest, he prevents future rulers from shifting blame for misfortune from their own failings to divine forces beyond their control. They must be made to understand that the gods superintend a just order and stand only for truthfulness and virtue. For virtue to be fixed in the character of the young—​a matter of enduring, internalized loyalty to the good rather than external, expedient cooperation with the laws—​then it has to be good in a way that surpasses or transcends the superficial goods associated with vice. Plato’s objection to mythoi that portray the gods in immoral and vicious ways shows that, for him, one’s capacity for virtue depends on

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one’s beliefs about the gods or, put differently, on one’s grasp of the metaphysical ultimacy of goodness. Stories that are “not pious, not advantageous to us, and not consistent with one another” will be forbidden (Rep. 380c) so that “our guardians will be as god-​fearing and godlike [theosebeis te kai theioi gignesthai] as human beings can be” (Rep. 383c). Just as piety is essential to the formation of the wise ruler, it is also a feature of a well-​ordered polity. In book 10 of Laws, the Athenian argues for the legitimacy of laws prohibiting sacrilegious activities, not only temple robbery and abuse of sacred objects but also speech directed against the gods (885b). As he explains to Clinias, the laws of the city must protect and encourage correct beliefs about the gods. Equally important, legislators must be prepared to explain and defend piety against the prevailing mindset, which he describes as “a form of ignorance that causes no end of trouble, but which passes for the height of wisdom [megistē phronēsis]” (886b).6 What alarms the Athenian is a sophisticated, scientific cosmology that ignores the gods and explains celestial and terrestrial phenomena simply as elements (886d–​e; 889b) that have combined by “nature and chance” (889c). The Athenian suggests somewhat obliquely that this unfortunate doctrine arose because old, traditional stories about the gods, which were dishonest and unwholesome, gave theology a bad name (886c–​d). He does not, however, press the point. More significant is the fact that, in characterizing nature as random and godless, new scientific sages (sophoi; 886d) have provided intellectual legitimacy to the notions that the gods are “legal fictions” and that goodness has no basis in nature (889e). The result, he says, has been anomie: a might-​makes-​right attitude and “a life of conquest over others” that is falsely advertised as the “true natural life” (889e). One hears echoes of Thrasymachus and Callicles. In this way, the Athenian connects the atheism of his cultured opponents to their scorn for virtue. That he refers to this combination of theological beliefs and moral attitudes as a (putative) phronēsis propounded by (so-​called) sophoi shows clearly (though negatively, in this case) that beliefs about the gods are a key structural element of wisdom. In the remainder of book 10, the Athenian counters this false wisdom with what is intended to be a persuasive account of true wisdom. Though belief in the gods can be legislated, the Athenian concedes that it cannot be coerced (890b). In an effort to win over skeptics, he sets forth a rational theology conducive to virtue. Skeptics err because they begin with the false premise that matter is primary in the universe and that soul and everything associated with it were derived from matter at a later stage; their materialism, says the Athenian, is the “fountainhead” of all other false beliefs (891c). To consider matter fundamental is ultimately to make the mistake of thinking that the

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gods and the life of virtue may be safely set aside. To establish this point, the Athenian considers an alternative. He argues that it is not matter but motion that is primary in the cosmos, for in motion one perceives the “first cause of the birth and destruction of all things” (891e). He names the motions that animate the heavens and all beings “soul” (psychē; 892a) and argues further that soul, more specifically, is “self-​generating motion” (896a). If soul is cosmically fundamental, then lives attuned to the realities of soul are more real, natural, and substantial than lives that are not. The cosmos is not inert matter but a system of motions that reflect the “calculation of reason” and the intelligent care of “the best kind of soul” (897c). The ordered and regular movements of heavenly bodies—​sun, moon, and stars—​reflect the virtue and power of soul at work in or on these bodies. The Athenian then insists “that these souls are gods” (899b). Having established the existence of the gods on the basis of cosmic soul—​self-​generating celestial motion that imparts motion to creatures below—​the Athenian goes on to make further deductions about the gods. They are not remote beings who are indifferent to what happens on earth; their perfection entails a completeness of care and knowledge (902a) that extends even to the smallest details (902e). Human conduct, then, has cosmic significance. Thus, the Athenian chides an imaginary young libertine:  Now then, you perverse fellow, one such part [of the universe]—​a mere speck that nevertheless constantly contributes to the good of the whole—​is you, you who have forgotten that nothing is created except to provide the entire universe with a life of prosperity. You forget that creation is not for your benefit; you exist for the sake of the universe (903c). The human good consists in a life of virtue that yields cosmic fit. One must not imagine that the gods, who are virtuous above all, can be bribed by sacrifices or moved by prayers to favor one who is unjust. In a world that is governed by soul rather than blindly constituted by matter, evil is its own punishment and virtue is its own reward; injustice leads to ruin while “justice and temperance together with wisdom save us” (906b). The Athenian’s defense of the gods shows that, for Plato, piety is essential to wisdom. It also shows that wisdom arises, more specifically, from the way that beliefs about the gods, knowledge of the cosmos, and personal virtue hang together. From a proper understanding of the cosmos follows a recognition that the gods exist and that they are, as geometry and astronomy make clear, good and perfect beings. This linkage of the divine and the celestial, however, also endows the cosmos with moral significance. Though Socrates, to a great

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(but not total) extent, directed moral inquiry away from cosmology, Plato restored the cosmos to a central place in wisdom. Virtue for him was not just an imitatio deorum but an imitatio mundi. As Rémi Brague puts it: “it is the imitation of the preexisting order of non-​human, physical realities that helps man to achieve the plenitude of his humanity . . . wisdom will be an imitation of the world.”7 The point, adumbrated in Laws 10, is made more explicitly in Republic. When Adeimantus points out that those recognized as philosophers have reputations for being either useless or vicious (Rep. 487d), the Socrates character (expressing a Platonic view) agrees that many indeed are. For a true philosopher, however, the study of the heavens is ethically transformative. Not only will he possess useful, valuable knowledge comparable to the astronomical knowledge required for navigation; he will also be just and godlike: No one whose thoughts are truly directed towards the things that are, Adeimantus, has the leisure to look down at human affairs or to be filled with envy and hatred by competing with people. Instead, as he looks at and studies things that are organized and always the same, that neither do injustice to one another nor suffer it, being all in a rational order, he imitates them and tries to become as like them as he can. Or do you think that someone can consort with things he admires without imitating them? . . . Then the philosopher, by consorting with what is ordered and divine and despite all the slanders around that say otherwise, himself becomes as divine and ordered as a human being can. (Rep. 500b–​c) Here the perspective of the nonphilosophical majority is inverted. It is not philosophy that requires “leisure.” It is, rather, ordinary, competitive existence that ironically represents a leisured departure from the real business of humanity: philosophy, whereby one recognizes in the motions of the heavenly bodies the primacy of virtue and the superiority of justice (harmony) and self-​control (adherence to rational order). To understand the heavens is not merely to recognize celestial pattern but to admire and imitate it, to be drawn by it, morally and intellectually, into a divine life.8 Finally, wisdom is manifest in the individual human person. To possess wisdom is to know the order of being, which extends from the divine realm of rational soul to the regular and well-​appointed cosmos that is governed by it. This order also underlies human life, such that the polis is good insofar as its political and social organization reflects the same justice, harmony, and rationality that is evident in the world at large. Like the polis, the human soul is microcosmic. It is just to the extent that the individual’s reason harmonizes

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spirit and appetite in virtuous living (Rep. 434d–​441c). The characterization of justice as harmony, then, applies to multiple levels of reality. Plato describes the justice or harmony of the individual soul as a kind of integrity. It is, in the first instance, an ordering of the self such that one’s powers and inclinations are integrated with one another. The just person “puts himself in order, is his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts of himself ” (Rep. 443d). But it is also an integration that makes one a unified and distinct being vis-​à-​vis others:  “[justice] isn’t concerned with someone’s doing his own externally, but with what is inside him, and with what is truly himself and his own” (Rep. 443c). In this way justice is a matter not only of internal harmony but also of one’s activity in the world. Integrity makes the action of the just person truly deliberate. Someone at odds with himself acts according to whim or impulse rather than intelligent conviction. When a justly integrated person acts, however, he “believes that the action is just and fine” because it “preserves this inner harmony and helps achieve it”; he “regards as wisdom [sophian] the knowledge that oversees such actions” (Rep. 443e). Harmony of soul and the wisdom by which it is gained and enacted are, however, difficult to achieve. The central part of Republic (books 2–​7) explains what is involved in cultivating and being a philosopher, a person governed entirely by knowledge. Though a full treatment of Plato’s proposal lies well beyond the scope of this book, it will perhaps suffice here to point out that individual wisdom depends, in most cases, on having a philosophic nature and on being brought up in the right kind of city by the right kind of teachers and leaders. Not everyone is capable of living the philosophical life. Only one who is passionate about learning (Rep. 485b) and disposed toward virtue can succeed in it, that is, one who is “by nature good at remembering, quick to learn, high-​minded, graceful, and a friend and relative of truth, justice, courage, and moderation” (Rep. 487a). If such a person has the misfortune of growing up in a city not ordered by wisdom, however, his philosophic nature will not avail; like a “foreign seed sown in alien ground,” it will be overtaken by “native” plant species and fail to develop its potential for philosophy (Rep. 497b). Without appropriate instruction, the philosophically inclined person has no hope of developing his affinity for wisdom—​that is, “unless some god happens to come to [his] rescue” (Rep. 492a). On the one hand the reference here to god-​given wisdom serves a rhetorical function, highlighting the great improbability of becoming wise without wise instructors. On the other hand it points to a substantive problem in the way Plato describes the individual’s acquisition of wisdom. If wise political constitutions are needed for philosophic natures to yield genuine philosophers, what explains the presence of true sages in badly ordered

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cities? Put differently, how does a Socrates arise in a place like Athens? In the famous cave allegory of book 7, a prisoner is freed and led to the surface, where he beholds the sun (the form of the Good). As someone under the power of a bad regime, who was initially subject to falsehood and illusion, he stands and turns away from shadows on the cave wall, thus symbolizing the turning of soul (psychēs periagōgē) necessary to ascend to true philosophy (Rep. 521c). Yet the allegory is obscure on one important point: the identity of the agent(s) who freed the prisoner, compelled him to look at the light, and dragged him up the rough and steep ascent. How to break the cycle of ignorance and attain to true philosophy when one must do so without the benefit of living under a just political constitution is a difficult question, especially given the way Plato ties wisdom to political order. The origins of wisdom are obscure. Moreover, the violent conclusion to the cave allegory (the enlightened prisoner is killed upon his return to the cave) suggests a tragic or pessimistic attitude: wisdom, though true to the cosmos, may nevertheless be at odds with the city. Though the prospects for wisdom in the political sphere are dim, it is not a closed system. Plato leaves open the possibility, however narrow, that one may become wise without human instruction: “you should realize that if anyone is saved and becomes what he ought to be under our present constitutions [i.e., forms of government ill-​suited to the education of philosophers], he has been saved—​you might rightly say—​by a divine dispensation” (Rep. 492e). Aristotle’s presentation of wisdom, though less dramatic, shares many features with Plato’s account. Both regard wisdom, above all, as a form of knowledge. In book 1 of Metaphysics, Aristotle begins with a general statement about the act of knowing: “all human beings by nature stretch themselves out toward knowing” (980a).9 In making this observation, Aristotle prepares the ground for an inquiry into the nature of being. As abstruse and difficult as this study of being is, it becomes unavoidable once one reckons seriously with the ineradicable human drive to gain knowledge of the world. For the question of being arises from the natural progression from rudimentary sensation (such as infants and animals have) to experience and memory and, finally, to a grasp of reality that mature humans find intellectually satisfying. Knowledge in the fullest sense requires an understanding not only of what is but also of why things are the way they are. The desire for this knowledge belongs to human beings “by nature.” The reality of this desire is, for Aristotle, a self-​evident truth that serves as the starting point for philosophical inquiry. We find the acquisition of knowledge to be inherently good, not merely good because it furthers some other end. A “sign” that we deem the “stretching out” toward knowledge to be good in this way is that we delight in using our senses

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simply to “discover things”; the senses are cherished (agapōntai) independently of their instrumental value, their capacity to help us act purposefully (980a). Our senses, then, make us happy because of the delight we take in experiencing the world; we value sight more than the other senses because it brings out most clearly the distinctness of things. Similarly, when we stretch ourselves out toward knowing, augmenting sense impressions and experience with both “art and reasoning” (“kai technē kai logismois”), we act on a natural human tendency to grasp things in the world. The quest for knowledge is most natural when it is least useful. In another, related bid to connect the study of being to common notions and experiences, Aristotle points to our esteem for wisdom.10 If knowledge is intrinsically good, then complete knowledge is best of all. Knowledge admits of degrees. When it comes to house-​building, the craftsman knows more than the laborer, but the knowledge of the architect is higher still. In stretching out toward knowing, humans value and seek increasingly higher and more complete levels of understanding. We honor those who possess knowledge in the highest degree as bearers of wisdom. To explain what kind of knowledge wisdom is, or, as Aristotle puts it, to understand what wisdom is a knowledge of, he discusses five commonly held opinions about the wise man (sophos; listed in 982a): 1. Though he knows all things (as far as humanly possible), he does not know all things as particulars. 2. The things he knows are difficult for humans to grasp. 3. What he knows he knows precisely; he is therefore able to teach what he knows. 4. He possesses knowledge for the sake of knowing. 5. He possess ruling knowledge; he does not obey others but is himself obeyed. Having listed these, Aristotle argues that the type of knowledge that corresponds best to these expectations is theoretical knowledge of first principles and causes (“tautēn tōn prōton archōn kai aitiōn einai theōrētikēn”; 982b9–​ 10). This knowledge presupposes an understanding of concepts examined by Aristotle in Physics: topics such as causation, movement, and what it means for a thing to have a distinctive nature. When extended to include ontology, the central concern of Metaphysics, this understanding approximates the full knowledge of principles and causes that properly belong to wisdom (sophia). Aristotle’s notion of sophia is thus large and lofty. Given an earlier, more modest meaning of sophia as skill, especially the kind that is characteristic of artists and craftsmen, Aristotle’s elevation of the term

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to something like “supreme knowledge” may seem radical or revolutionary. As Joseph Owen shows, however, the real break between “wisdom as skill” and “wisdom as comprehensive knowledge” occurred earlier with Pythagoras and Heraclitus; by Aristotle’s time, “the meaning of σοφία had been transferred from the humble proficiencies of the carpenter and the flute-​player to a knowl­edge of reality as a whole, a knowledge that bore upon truth itself instead of upon a particular kind of object.”11 Aristotle, then, does not aim to redefine sophia as much as clarify and explain what this newer, more ambitious understanding of sophia involves. Also important is an understanding of what sophia does not involve. Aristotle brings his discussion of wisdom in book 1 to a close by distinguishing sophia from other kinds of knowledge, namely productive knowledge and instrumental knowledge. Those who were most intimate with sophia, the first philosophers, were compelled by wonder (982b12–​14). Aristotle imagines that their interest in natural oddities and celestial phenomena increased gradually, prompting larger and more abstract questions about being. In embracing the philosophical life, these thinkers did not seek to escape physical necessity but rather to “flee ignorance” (“to pheugein tēn agnoian”; 982b21–​22): “for it was when just about all the necessities were present, as well as things directed toward the greatest ease and recreation, that this kind of understanding began to be sought” (982b24–​26). The knowledge aimed at by wisdom, then, is the fruit of leisure. It is not directed toward the production of objects necessary to human life. Nor is it attained in order to accomplish some other objective or to guide a particular action. According to Aristotle, such knowledge is “free” (eleutheran; 982b27). By contrast, knowledge that is subordinated to a higher purpose is subservient. Aristotle draws an analogy between free knowledge and a free man. Just as a man is considered “free” if he owes nothing to others and is independent (he “has his being for his own sake and not for the sake of someone else”; 982b25–​28), theoretical knowledge depends on nothing else for its value. It is a stand-​alone good. The characterization of wisdom as “free” emphasizes another aspect of its inherent goodness. Freedom from want and constraint is desirable because it permits the free man to act according to his nature. Similarly, wisdom is the condition, so to speak, in which one’s intellectual nature is fulfilled. To locate the fulfillment of intellect in unconstrained, nonproductive contemplation is to claim, at the same time, that the natural desire to know reaches its telos by raising the sage to a godlike position. For only the gods are free and knowing in this way. As Aristotle wrote famously in book 1 of Politics, humans inhabit an intermediate position between beasts and gods. Unlike beasts, they have the power of speech, which allows them to cooperate and live in cities; unlike

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gods, they are not self-​sufficient enough to be happy and fulfilled apart from the common life of the polis (Politics 1253a27–​29). In attaining wisdom, however, humans transcend the ordinary slavishness of human nature (“hē phusis doulē tōn anthrōpōn estin”; Meta. 982b30–​31) and approximate the independ­ ence (autarkeia) of the gods. Ever attentive to popular opinion, Aristotle acknowledges the view (expressed by Simonides: “only a god should have this honor”) that it is improper for humans to aspire to godlike knowledge because such knowledge is guarded jealously by the gods (982b33–​983a3). He then dismisses the poets as liars and argues, to the contrary, that the godlikeness of theoretical knowledge is precisely why one should seek to attain it. Wisdom is divine in two respects: it contemplates the way in which the divine power is a cause of things, and it is the kind of knowledge that a god would have. Because it is not possible for the divine power to be morally imperfect (in this case, jealous), the knowledge most closely associated with the divine power should be honored rather than abhorred; “for the most divine is also the most honorable” (983a5–​6). Moreover, if wisdom begins in a natural state of wonder, then it is fitting that it give way, in due course, to its logical counterpart, theoretical understanding (983a11–​13). Therefore, nothing about wisdom should be despised. No one should disparage its roots in childlike wonder, its nonproductive character, its indifference to necessity, or its aspirations to divinity. In a particularly sharp formulation, Aristotle states that “all kinds of knowledge, then, are more necessary than this one, but none is better” (983a10–​11). This raises a puzzling question. If Aristotle values divine wisdom so highly and believes that what is most divine is indeed most honorable, why does he have so little to say about the virtue of piety? As Sarah Broadie notes, the fact that neither Eudemian Ethics nor Nicomachean Ethics contains a treatment of piety (for example, as a middle path between superstition and godlessness) is surprising.12 Rejecting the idea that Aristotle’s treatment of piety is implicit in his understanding of justice,13 Broadie argues that, for him, piety is more closely related to happiness than to justice; Aristotle, therefore, includes a “veiled” definition of piety in his discussion of ultimate human fulfillment in NE book 10.14 In that book, Aristotle identifies the highest human happiness with intellectual goods that accompany contemplation. For these are more durable than other goods. They may be enjoyed continuously, and they do not depend on circumstances or externals as other goods do (NE 1177a20–​ 27). In contemplating the order of things, the wise man enjoys a state of godlike beatitude (NE 1178b22–​24). Broadie locates the veiled definition of piety near the end of this section (1179a23–​25). Here Aristotle claims that the life of contemplation is not only godlike but god-​loved:  “the person whose activity accords with understanding and who takes care of [therapeuōn]

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understanding would seem to be in the best condition, and most loved by the gods [theophilestatos].”15 Recalling a standard (Euthyphrovian) conception of piety as that which is loved by the gods, Aristotle equates piety with a certain orientation toward theoretical knowledge. As Broadie puts it: “Aristotle is saying that piety towards god is, in its truest form, the disposition for intellectual activity engaged in as by the sophos, i.e. purely for love of the activity itself.”16 Thus, Aristotle makes piety a virtuous disposition toward contemplative knowledge. In another echo of the Euthyphro discussion, he associates piety with therapeia (“care”); only it is care of oneself, specifically of one’s intellectual life, that is in view. The pious man does not tend to the gods but to his own capacity to apprehend divine things. This intellectualistic conception of piety, then, recognizes a familiar distinction between human and divine. But where Socrates marked a sharp disjunction between “worthless” human wisdom and divine wisdom, and where Plato dramatized the divine dispensation by which salvific wisdom breaks in on human life, Aristotle bridges the distinction by generalizing the potential for wisdom. Though divine, rarefied, and difficult to attain, wisdom is achievable inasmuch as there is, within human beings, a divine element capable of theoretical knowledge. One reaches wisdom “not insofar as he is a human being, but insofar as he has some divine element in him” (“theion ti en auto”; NE 1177b28). Wisdom corresponds to a divine element in human beings, but this element is nevertheless an essential (though not universal) feature of human experience. To be pious is to cultivate precisely this potential for sophia. One of the most salient features of Aristotle’s account of wisdom is that it has two registers. The upper register, as I have shown, features the complete happiness of the sage who enjoys sophia, or godlike contemplative knowledge. The lower register, however, includes an entirely different aspect of wisdom. In book 6 of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle innovatively uses the word phronēsis (which Plato uses interchangeably with sophia) to refer specifically to practical judgment, making it fully distinct from (though still related to) contemplative wisdom. Where sophia consists in theoretical understanding of the world, phronēsis, commonly rendered as “practical wisdom,” is the ability to deliberate well in particular situations. Phronēsis, then, is an intellectual virtue by which one makes good decisions about how to act. Aristotle defines it as “a state grasping the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about things that are good or bad for a human being” (NE 1140b5–​7). With its emphasis on action, phronēsis is to sophia what an “applied” science is to its “pure” or theoretical counterpart. The analogy is helpful in showing how two forms of inquiry may be related in substance but distinct in purpose and orientation. The analogy is imperfect, however, because applied sciences aim at producing

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useful things while phronēsis aims at good actions. A more Aristotelian way of articulating this distinction is to point out that sophia, which is preeminently a form of knowledge (epistēmē), concerns “that which cannot be otherwise” (1140b31–​32). It is a grasp of what is, and it is based on the understanding (nous) of natural principles and knowledge (epistēmē) of what is derived from these principles (NE 1140b18–​19). Phronēsis, however, is concerned with skillful deliberation about things that can be otherwise; it chooses among courses of action that admit of variation. The part of wisdom that rests on knowledge is distinct from the part of wisdom that is concerned with guiding free action. It must be stressed, however, that both sophia and phronēsis are states in which humans use reason to grasp truth. The distinction between knowledge of “what cannot be otherwise” and skill in deliberating about actions that admit of variation is a not a distinction between what can be described as true and what cannot be so described. It is, instead, a distinction in the manner in which the wise man apprehends truth. Reason permits a principled grasp of what is, but it also orients human conduct when what is appears to it in time as that which is possible. In both cases, the wise man is concerned with what is objectively real. As Owen writes, “the world in which human conduct takes place is the same world that is viewed theoretically by the speculative sciences. Conduct is not separable from reality.”17 In this way, sophia and phronēsis hold together. When it comes to common notions of wisdom, Aristotle’s account is inclusive. He does justice, in this case, to two very different paragons: on the one hand the “useless” sage and on the other hand the successful man of practical affairs. By recognizing separate aspects of wisdom in each one, Aristotle reconciles these common understandings, validating both the kind of vast and impressive theoretical knowledge that Thales or Anaxogoras possess (1141b6–​ 7) and a more practical, down-​ to-​ earth effectiveness. The former is superior to the latter, because sophia is concerned, as I have shown, with what is most honorable. Moreover, it “produces happiness, not in the way that medical science produces health, but in the way that health produces health” (1144a3–​5). That is, contemplative knowledge does not bring fulfillment relative to some deficiency but fulfillment in the actualization of one’s aim or purpose. The lower position of phronēsis, however, does not diminish its significance. It is one virtue that all other virtues require (1144b19–​20) and is thus indispensable to happiness. Inasmuch as virtue is a state in which one is disposed to act purposefully and intelligently in accord with right reason, it is a state governed by phronēsis. For phronēsis is a practical knowledge that unites knowledge of what is ultimately good with an understanding of how the good may be realized in

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particular settings and situations. Like all virtues, phronēsis must be cultivated. Aristotle acknowledges a god-​g iven capacity for virtue that belongs to some by nature, but he emphasizes the role of habit in creating in young people “character suitable for virtue,” which will subsequently allow them to benefit from ethical instruction (1179b21–​27). Once acquired, phronēsis enables the individual to act with a clear view to what is beneficial. As I have shown, Plato drew a parallel between the human individual and the human social form—​that is, between psychē and polis—​making the two homologous. They share corresponding components; therefore, Plato’s formal account of virtue applied equally to the individual soul and to the city. In both cases, wisdom was a form of ruling knowledge. Similarly, Aristotle describes phronēsis as the form of wisdom by which cities are governed. The practical wisdom by which an individual deliberates well belongs to the same “state” (hexis) in which a ruler deliberates well about the affairs of the people (1141b23–​24). Political science is simply phronēsis applied to the city. In Politics, Aristotle echoes Plato in stating that wisdom is a virtue particular to rulers (1277b27–​28). The individual wisdom of the ruler is reflected in the wisdom by which the city is ruled. Moreover, the virtues of the city are the virtues of the soul writ large: “there is no beautiful deed, whether of a man or of a city, apart from virtue and good judgment [phronēsis]. And courage, justice, good judgment [phronēsis], and moderation in a city have the same power and form that every human being who is called courageous, just, sensible, and moderate participates in” (Politics 1323b33–​37).18 Much like its Platonic predecessor, Aristotelian wisdom is expansive and holistic, elevating intellectual life to a form of divine contemplation and, at the same time, rooting political life in the human capacity for virtue.

A Nation of Philosophers Whether Aristotle knew anything about the Jewish people is unclear. In none of his writings does he mention the Jewish people, culture, or religion. One of Aristotle’s students, Clearchus of Soli, however, reports that Aristotle met a Jew in his travels and was greatly impressed by him. According to this report, the unnamed Jew was thoroughly Hellenized, a Greek speaker whom Aristotle described as having “the soul of a Greek.” The Jewish man more than held his own in intellectual conversations, not just absorbing Greek wisdom but, indeed, imparting to Aristotle and his companions “something of his own.”19 Unattested elsewhere, the unlikely story reads more like a fabricated encounter than an actual one, a conventional tale, perhaps, of West meeting

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East. What the story shows, however, is that Greek thinkers in the generation following Aristotle maintained a lively interest in the Jewish people. Aristotle’s fictive appreciation for an unnamed philosophical Jew shows too that Greek impressions were positive, if not always well informed. More relevant here than a generically positive evaluation, however, are the ways in which their observations illuminate the convergence of a Greek wisdom tradition attuned to theology and political science with the self-​understanding of Jews as bearers of a unique way of life intelligible in precisely these terms. One of the earliest descriptions of the Jewish people by a non-​Jew writing in Greek comes from Hecataeus of Abdera, who flourished around 300 bce. A contemporary of both Alexander and Ptolemy I, Hecataeus wrote an admiring description of Egypt, Aegyptiaca, a work designed both to portray ancient Egypt as an ideal state and to present the new Greek rulers as heirs to the pharaohs of old.20 Though the work is now lost, excerpts have survived in the Library of History (Historike Bibliotheke) of Diodorus (first century bce). Fortunately, Diodorus preserved an excursus on the Jews that was originally part of Hecataeus’s Aegyptiaca.21 Hecataeus’s description of the Jews, which deviates markedly from the biblical presentation of ancient Israel, sheds valuable light on how Jews were perceived at the time.22 Hecataeus traces the origins of the Jews to Egypt. When a plague struck the land, the Egyptian people saw it as a form of divine punishment for neglect of traditional forms of worship. They then expelled all foreigners from the land. According to Hecataeus, two Greek mythological forebears—​Cadmus, who is connected to Thebes, and Danaus, who is connected to Argos—​were among those expelled. The leader of the largest contingent of deportees, however, was Moses. Interestingly, the Egyptian source underlying the account of Hecataeus shares with Manetho the idea that the Hebrews, instead of leaving Egypt voluntarily, were actually forced out. Where Manetho’s scurrilous exodus story was virulently anti-​Jewish, though, Hecataeus’s founding narrative idealizes the Jews. It suggests that the Jews bear the same secondary, dependent relation to Egypt, the cradle of civilization, as the Greeks do. More than this, it makes Moses the wise founder of an admirable polity, a Jewish Lycurgus at the head of an eastern Sparta. The theme of Hecataeus’s report is wisdom, specifically wisdom understood as a form of ruling knowledge. Far from being simply a Greek possession, political wisdom that ennobles civic endeavor and produces virtue in individuals is to be found in other nations as well. Lycurgus and Solon may stand out in this regard, but, as Plato observes, “other men in other places everywhere, Greek or barbarian, have brought a host of beautiful deeds into the light and begotten every kind of virtue” (Symposium 209e). Moses features in the account of

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Hecataeus as just such a begetter of virtue. He is described as a man “outstanding both for his wisdom [phronēsei] and for his courage [andreia]” (Diod. Sic. 40.3.3). Hecataeus then goes on to describe Moses in his capacity as founder of the Jewish polity. Interest in founding figures and the political institutions they created were standard features of Hellenistic ethnographic writings. Other conventional elements included reports on religious institutions, especially sacrificial systems, customs related to marriage and burial of the dead, and those traits that make up a foreign people’s “personality.”23 Hecataeus structures his brief account around these elements, integrating them into an idealized picture of the Jews. According to Hecataeus, Moses led the Jews out of Egypt to an uninhabited land, where he founded the city of Jerusalem, built the Temple, instituted the sacrificial system, and divided the people into twelve tribes. Hecataeus adds further that the Jews never adopted kingship but, at Moses’s direction, obeyed the judgments of priests who were picked men of exceptional refinement. The Jews also accord ultimate authority to a high priest, one “superior to his colleagues in wisdom and virtue” (Diod. Sic. 40.4–​5) That Hecataeus’s description differs from the biblical accounts in many respects is clear. More interesting than these divergences, though, is the fact that Hecataeus’s streamlined understanding places all aspects of Jewish life under the rational government of a single sage, at first Moses and then subsequently the high priest. Because the Temple establishment and priestly authorities remained at the center of Jewish life in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods, Hecataeus’s identification of Jewish culture with a nonmonarchic “Mosaic constitution” is understandable. Especially relevant here, though, is the way that it approximates the Platonic ideal of a philosophical ruler. Other features of the excursus fill out the philosophical portrait of the Jews. Moses did not merely institute a sacrificial system; he also established an elevated religion attuned to the heavenly realm. Moses chose to divide Israel into twelve tribes because twelve is a “perfect number” that corresponds to the number of months in the year (Diod. Sic. 40.3.3). Moses also forbade the use of images to represent God because, as Hecataeus explains, Moses held that the heaven that surrounds the earth is alone divine and that it is “lord of the whole” (“ton periechonta tēn gēn ouranon monon einai theon kai tōn holōn kyrion”; Diod. Sic. 40.3.4). Just as Moses saw to it that the Jews worshiped a single god in a rational and dignified way, he also took care to cultivate virtues appropriate to various social orders. He made provision for warfare, requiring “the young men to cultivate manliness, steadfastness, and, generally, the endurance of every hardship” (Diod. Sic. 40.3.6). Soldiers were not permitted to enrich themselves by warfare. Like the guardians described

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by Plato in Republic (416c–​417b), they served the public interest with no thought of personal gain. Civilians also exercised moderation. Hecataeus notes that the Jews were wisely forbidden to sell their allotments of land, lest some gain advantage over others, oppress the poor, and “bring on a scarcity of manpower” (Diod. Sic. 40.3.7). In this way, the personal virtue of temperance worked in favor of distributive justice. Though the social order described by Hecataeus indeed manifests the “moderation and justice” that Diotima identified with wise rulership, Hecataeus also notes the flaws of the Jewish people. Their history as exiles and their unusual form of worship contributes to “an unsocial and intolerant mode of life” (Diod. Sic. 40.3.4). With respect to their own leaders, however, the Jews are too trusting. They fall to the ground in reverence before the high priest and are generally “docile” in matters of religious observance. Hecataeus explains this further by noting a crucial aspect of the Mosaic constitution. In an apparent reference to Deut 29:1, Hecataeus notes that Moses attached a statement to the law: “these are the words that Moses heard from God and declares unto the Jews” (Diod. Sic. 40.3.6) Thus, the laws themselves include a clear statement that they originated with God rather than Moses. Hecataeus, then, attributes wisdom to the Jews by identifying Moses and the Mosaic law with an exalted conception of divinity, a just social order, and a clear program for the cultivation of virtue expressed in traditional laws. As a prominent Greek intellectual with a favorable opinion of Jewish wisdom, and one who also enjoyed a high political standing, Hecataeus was an attractive spokesperson for the Jewish way of life. In time, other writings on the Jewish people were attributed to him or connected in some way to his legacy. He came to stand, in other words, for the enlightened outsider who recognizes the moral and intellectual excellence of the Jewish nation. Thus, Josephus in his apologetic Contra Apionem cites Hecataeus, quoting excerpts of one or possibly two Hecataean works, On the Jews (CA 1.183–​205) and On Abraham (CA 2.43). Whether the Josephus excerpts were in fact written by Hecataeus, however, is disputed.24 In either case—​whether extracted from an authentic Hecataean work or assimilated to a Hecataean “tradition” of pro-​ Jewish Greek historiography—​the excerpts deployed by Josephus shed further light on what it meant for the Jews to be considered a wise nation in Greek cultural terms. According to Josephus, Hecataeus was both a philosopher and a “highly competent man of affairs” (CA 1.183).25 Unlike other Greek writers, Hecataeus did not have only a passing knowledge of the Jews; instead, he devoted an entire book to them (CA 1.183). His perspective, then, Josephus says, has the threefold advantage of being philosophically astute, practically

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oriented, and historically well-​informed. Josephus uses his Hecataean source to fill out historical and geographical details concerning such things as the migration of Jews from Palestine to Egypt, the size of the Jewish territory, and the number of priests supported by the state. What Josephus finds most valuable in the Hecataean account, though, are its insights into the character of the Jewish people. According to Josephus, Hecataeus knew a Jewish “chief priest” named Ezechias, whom Hecataeus describes in terms that evoke an Aristotelian phronimos, or wise man. Ezechias is not only a man of intelligence and eloquent speech. At sixty-​six years of age, he is also a mature and masterful figure, a man of practical affairs honored by his own people and prominent in his adopted diasporic community (CA 1.187, 189). There is also a younger man, Mosollamus the archer, who went on campaign with Alexander.26 As the story goes, when the marching army was brought to a halt one day, Mosollamus asked what was going on. A diviner explained that the army was waiting for an auspicious sign from a bird that had alighted nearby. They would remain in place while the bird stayed, advance if it flew ahead, and retreat if it flew in the opposite direction. Without saying a word, Mosollamus drew his bow and shot the bird. Uproar ensued, but Mosollamus calmly told the soldiers that if the bird could really foresee the future, it would not have come near the army, for fear of being killed by the arrow of Mosollamus the Jew (CA 1.201–​205). Mosollamus believed wrongly that augury depends on the bird’s knowledge of the future rather than the augur’s ability to discern the divine will guiding the bird’s flight. Yet this deficiency in knowledge adds, perhaps, a measure of verisimilitude to the account, since contempt (in this case, for augury) generally excludes the appreciation of nuance. More to the point, Mosollamus’s bold action is consistent with a rational and principled opposition to superstitious practices that many “enlightened” Greeks admired. According to Hecataeus, Mosollamus was not exceptional in being a man of principle. The Jewish people as a whole are willing to suffer torture and death if that is what is required to remain true to their laws and way of life (CA 1.190–​191). Hecataeus also notes the austere character of the Jewish Temple, which contains no sacred grove and is staffed by priests who abstain from wine. In the Temple’s courtyard, there is an altar of uncut, heaped-​up stones; within, a light burns day and night, illuminating a space devoid of divine images (CA 1.198–​199). The connection between the distinctive worship of the Jews and their honorable way of life, though in this case implicit, is nevertheless strong. Other descriptions of the Jewish people from the late fourth century pick up many of the same themes. Hecataeus’s contemporary, the

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philosopher Theophrastus, mentioned the Jews in a treatise on piety (now lost).27 Theophrastus, who disdained animal sacrifice, took note of what he regarded as a peculiar set of practices. The Jews do indeed sacrifice animals, but in an unusual way: For they are not feasted on sacrifices, but burning them whole at night and pouring on them honey and wine, they quickly destroy the offering, in order that the all-​seeing sun should not look on the terrible thing. And they do it fasting on the intervening days.28 Like Hecataeus, Theophrastus is mistaken about several details of Jewish practice: in this case, the performance of sacrifices exclusively at night; the application of honey to offerings; and the practice of fasting on intervening days. The essential point, though, is the characterization of the Jews as a people who maintain a traditional regimen of sacrifice while seeking, at the same time, to mitigate what he regarded as its barbarism. Offerings are performed quickly, with no opportunity for human consumption of animal flesh; they are cloaked in darkness in order to shield the ghastly spectacle from the divine watcher (ho panoptēs). For the Greeks, however, animal sacrifices were part of festive occasions on which worshipers ate and took part. Theophrastus mistakenly assumed that all Jewish sacrifices were whole burnt offerings, a rare and unusual type of sacrifice in Greek religion. He thus developed the impression, as Jacob Bernays says, that Jewish sacrifices were characterized by a “grim severity” that contrasted sharply with the free and happy environment of Greek religious feasts.29 Abstaining from food and feasting in this way, the Jews stood out to Theophrastus and other observers as models of discipline and self-​control. The second half of Theophrastus’s description elaborates this philosophical portrait of the Jews. During this whole time, being philosophers by race [hate philosophoi to genos ontes], they converse with each other about the deity, and at night-​time they make observations of the stars, gazing at them and calling on God by prayer. They were the first to institute sacrifices both of other living beings and of themselves; yet they did it by compulsion and not from eagerness for it.30 According to Theophrastus, the Jews, considered as a group, are philosophers. The word genos, rendered “race” in older translations, may be used here to speak of the Jews as an ethnic group known principally for its sages. Since

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genos may also refer to a distinct type or class of persons, however, another possibility is that Theophrastus sees the Jews as a class, a kind of priestly caste, within the larger ethnos of Syrians.31 Two other Greek observers from this period, Megasthenes and Clearchus of Soli, also identified the Jews as priestly sages. Megasthenes believed that the Jews were a caste of philosophers among the Syrians, just as the Brahmans were in India.32 Clearchus posited an even closer connection between Jews and Indians, claiming that the Jews were a philosophical group descended from Indian philosophers known as Calani, who were in turn descended from Persian magi.33 The priestly functions of the Jewish sages were certainly not lost on Theophrastus, who was keenly interested in matters of sacrifice. In addition to recognizing the importance of prayer and offerings, though, Theophrastus also understands the Jews to be philosophers by virtue of speech and thought. In what he imagines to be a kind of ongoing dialogue, the Jews “converse with each other about the deity.” Though the observation may be no more than conjectural filler in a relatively loose description of Jewish religion—​what else do priests do when they get together?—​it is also possible that Theophrastus understands the unusual customs of the Jews to reflect a unique, well-​developed theology. He is provoked, specifically, by the extraordinary adjustment of their sacrificial regimen to the perceived sensibilities of a single, divine watcher. The Jews recognize a single deity (whether it is a sun god or an invisible deity is not clear). Instead of being propitiated by sacrifice, however, this god is rather repulsed by it. The Jews thus discharge sacrificial duties unceremoniously, at night, out of “compulsion.” As Bernays suggests, Theophrastus may be trying here to reconcile what he has learned about the Jews with his knowledge of the Syrians, of whom he considered the Jews to be a subgroup.34 Theophrastus understood the Syrians, including both Phoenicians and Carthaginians, to practice human sacrifice. Like the Greeks, who Theophrastus says “recoil” at human sacrifice, the philosophical Jews eventually came to reject the ritual killing of humans. They substituted animals for humans and treated animal sacrifice, accordingly, as a grim necessity rather than an occasion for feasting.35 Because the Jews are, in this way, related to Syrians yet also clearly distinct, Theophrastus suggests that the strangeness of Jewish sacrifice reflects an uneasy compromise between older, inherited practices and the Jews’ own distinctive, elevated conception of God. The Jews sacrifice animals merely to satisfy the requirements of tradition, but they practice philosophy willingly, in keeping with their philosophical nature. Theophrastus thus notes that the Jews “make observations of the stars” and call on God in prayer. It is difficult to know whether a specific practice lies behind Theophrastus’s report that

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the Jews observe the stars or whether he simply makes a typical association between astronomical knowledge and peoples of the East.36 In either case, Jewish sacrificial piety is the point of entry into a critical understanding of the Jews. Its oddity is a clue to a story of development whereby the Jewish people integrated the virtue of abstinence and the contemplation of the heavenly bodies into a set of traditional practices, turning sacrifice into an occasion for sobriety and theological dialogue. Theophrastus thus identified the Jews with virtuous self-​mastery, enlightened opinions about the divine realm, and cosmological understanding. Despite the fragmentary quality of his knowl­ edge, this one-​time student of Aristotle recognized in the Jews a way of life that must have seemed to him very familiar. He saw in their forms of worship a reflection of philosophy itself.

Conclusion Arnaldo Momigliano claimed that the varied testimonies of Greek thinkers in the late fourth and early third centuries form a “consistent” picture: “in the first thirty or forty years after the destruction of the Persian Empire, Greek philosophers and historians discovered the Jews. They depicted them—​both in fact and in fiction—​as priestly sages of the type the East was expected to produce.”37 As I  have shown, Theophrastus’s conception of the Jews as a nation of philosophers is dependent on his understanding of their distinctive religious practices and the prominence of priests in the Jewish polity. Yet, as Michael Satlow has demonstrated, the philosophoi label is also consistent with an understanding of the Jews as philosophers in other senses: as a group with its own distinctive disciplines and forms of inquiry, as a class of public intellectuals with recognized authority, and, quite possibly, as exemplars of a philosophically pure, aniconic form of piety directed toward the heavens or, perhaps, the sun.38 Theophrastus and fellow Greeks may have garbled certain facts about the Jews (or reported the garbled facts of others), but their designation of the Jews as philosophers reflects accurately an important aspect of Judaism. If wisdom was understood holistically as a program for human flourishing encompassing metaphysical, ethical, and political commitments, then it makes sense to see the Jews collectively as a genos of philosophers. This is the case not merely because of the prominence of priestly figures but also, as Hecataeus saw, because the priestly administration appeared to be ordered by a constitutional commitment to reason, virtue, and piety. The recognition of Jewish wisdom by Greek thinkers was, in many ways, a natural reflex of Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of wisdom. As

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I  have shown, Plato saw wisdom as a form of ordering knowledge applied homologously to cosmos, polis, and individual soul (psychē). When and where wisdom rules, it brings all constituent elements into “splendid concord” (Lg. 689d) such that the life of the wise is characteristically just, harmonious, and happy. The key to effecting this sort of blessedness at any level—​whether for an individual, a polity, or the world as a whole—​is to recognize that there is but one ordering principle. A  soul ruled by reason is good and happy in the same way and for the same reason that a city governed by philosophers is both good and happy. In conformity with the hierarchy of being, the superior commands and controls the inferior. What Plato argued for in Laws and Republic was an extension of this principle to its logical and ontological limits. He insisted that wisdom involves a recognition of the fact that ultimate reality itself is differentiated. Human life is embedded in a particular kind of cosmos, one in which soul rather than matter is primary and a rational divine benevolence is supreme. Virtue is nothing but the personal appropriation of cosmic order and the imitation of divine goodness. Wisdom, then, begins with the recognition of divine order at the metaphysical level and extends, as it were, “all the way down.” Oriented similarly toward wisdom as a full and final account of reality, Aristotle placed the contemplative knowledge of the sophos at the pinnacle of human achievement. By recognizing this sort of knowledge as divine, Aristotle understood piety to consist in the cultivation of intellectual receptivity to the mystery of divine order, something that humans know least but love best. Unlike Plato, though, he drew a distinction between “free,” contemplative knowledge that is good for its own sake (sophia) and the wise ability to deliberate well about human action (phronēsis). Sophia discerns the order of being and the hierarchy of human goods, while phronēsis allows humans to act in accordance with it. Together they encompass two vital dimensions of human excellence, the intellectual and the practical. This added emphasis on the pragmatic aspect of wisdom brought political science—​which Aristotle described simply as phronēsis applied to the polity—​into focus as a domain of wisdom, such that Aristotle’s heirs could speak of wisdom as the property of a people (as indeed Plato did). Seen in terms of Platonic-​Aristotelian wisdom, the Jewish way of life had much to commend it:  a single founding figure known for philosophical acumen; a central law of divine origin; cultic practice pruned of superstition and ordered to a rational understanding of God; and an ordinary population characterized by the extraordinary virtues of courage, moderation, justice, and practical wisdom. In time, however, esteem for Jewish wisdom gave rise to what Momigliano refers to as the “myth of the Jewish philosopher.”39 He describes it as a “myth”

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because early Greek observers like Hecataeus and Theophrastus praised the Jews as sages without knowing very much about them. He argues further that this myth was dispelled when the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek in the middle of the third century failed to engender the interest and attention of the pagan intelligentsia. Given its moment to shine, the Greek Bible failed to impress; when read directly from its textual source, Jewish wisdom appeared to be negligible. If this dispelled the so-​called myth of the Jewish philosopher, it also formed the background for the rise of actual Jewish philosophers. Low regard for the Bible and tensions between Jews and Greeks in subsequent decades put Jewish thinkers on the defensive, prompting them to present the ancestral Jewish way of life in “ecumenical” terms, that is, in language and categories accessible to the oikoumenē at large. At stake was the viability and coherence of this way of life as a distinctive path to wisdom, its ability both to engender the loyalty of assimilated Jews and to win the recognition and support of their Gentile neighbors. When Theophrastus recognized the Jews as a nation of philosophers, it was because, as a Greek, he himself belonged to one. It would fall to later Jewish sages to determine whether the judgment of Theophrastus would endure or merely become, as Momigliano suggested, part of a discredited myth. It is to the Jews themselves that I turn in the next chapter.

Summary Plato and Aristotle provided clear, systematic accounts of wisdom in which personal virtue and ruling knowledge are keyed both to rational theology and to a scientific understanding of the cosmos. To be wise is to understand ethical and political life in a specific way, not as isolated venues for power, pleasure, and desire but rather as aspects of human life that accord with reality as a whole, understood in its profoundest metaphysical and ontological dimensions. Disciplined knowledge of what is real, though difficult to attain, may be brought to bear, then, on questions and problems of every sort. This profoundly holistic understanding of wisdom yielded a kind of wisdom template, according to which other forms of life—​including the distinctive way of life belonging to the Jews—​could be understood and evaluated as wisdom programs. Greek thinkers like Hecataeus and Theophrastus did precisely this, opening a new path for Jews to present themselves, collectively, as bearers of wisdom.

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The School of Solomon I perceived that I would not possess wisdom unless God gave her to me—​and it was a mark of insight to know whose gift she was. —​Wisdom of Solomon 8:21

One ancient author, a learned Jew from the great city of Alexandria, describes an extraordinary scene. In it, the king of Egypt is a successor to Alexander, an heir to his empire, and one of the most powerful monarchs in the world. In his hall are seated sages and scholars from among the tribes of Israel, men chosen by the high priest for their character, knowledge of the Torah, and mastery of philosophy. During banquets held on seven consecutive days, the king shows himself to be a most zealous student of theology, ethics, and political philosophy. He poses question after question to individual members of the Jewish delegation while his own court philosophers look on. It is not a dialogue but an interrogation. The king directs to his guests a series of rapid-​fire questions that range in difficulty from the profound to the virtually unanswerable. How may a king triumph in war? How can one be free from sorrow? Can wisdom be taught? What kind of life is most worthy of admiration? How can one get along with a woman? Without wavering or hesitating, every one of the Jewish scholars provides an answer that meets its mark. Each of the seven days ends in a royal acclamation of the Jews followed by celebrations and toasts to their health. Recognizing that they are in the presence of superior sages, even the court philosophers join in the festivities. At the end of seven days, the scholars are conducted to an island where they produce a translation of the Law that makes their extraordinary wisdom, the wisdom of the Jews, available to the nations. So goes the famous Letter of Aristeas, a remarkable composition that purports to describe events surrounding the creation of the Septuagint in the third century bce. Though the Letter of Aristeas should not be taken as a straightforward historical report of the events it describes, it nevertheless

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has great value as a witness to Jewish self-​understanding in the Hellenistic period. The seven-​day banquet is a metaphor for Jewish aspirations. The king, symbolizing the worldwide oikoumenē, has power and authority, but he lacks the complete knowledge necessary to live and govern wisely. In the Letter, Israel is not represented by a single individual but by the totality of the tribes. Six men from each tribe answer the call. The seventy-​two (often abbreviated to seventy, thus: LXX) recall the seventy elders of Israel, who were filled with the Spirit when Moses grew weary of leading (Num 11:25). There are no distinctions among them. Each one, bearing a divine charisma, answers a question from the king, and all their answers comport beautifully. Thus, the Jews as a people are recognized for their wisdom in an atmosphere of mutual appreciation and conviviality. The banquets also represent Jewish hopes for the Septuagint. The king does not address the scholars as Jews; he does not preface questions with “In your culture . . .” or “In your tradition . . .” His interests are philosophical, not anthropological. Thus he addresses perennial, universal questions to the Jews as fellow men, expecting responses that answer to his situation. The scholars are willing and able to oblige. So, too, are the Jewish scriptures offered to the world as a response to the moral and intellectual challenges posed by philosophy. In this chapter, I will examine works from the Jewish Alexandrian cultural milieu out of which the Septuagint emerged. The first is a set of fragmentary texts attributed to the Jewish philosopher Aristobulus. The second is the well-​known Wisdom of Solomon, a pseudepigraphic work that became especially influential among Christian writers. Both were written in the same apologetic vein as the Letter. As such, they seek not merely to render Judaism intelligible in Greek philosophical terms but also, more specifically, to explain how and why knowledge, virtue, and national identity cohere by means of wisdom. The understanding of wisdom sketched in ­chapter 5 was, to a great degree, appropriated by Aristobulus and Wisdom of Solomon. Both acknowledged the theological, political, and ethical contours of wisdom in ways that Hecataeus and Theophrastus would have recognized. What remains to be seen are the specific ways that Jewish writers themselves articulated the relation between the wisdom of the nations and the ancestral way of life. Though Aristobulus does so by describing Judaism as piety attuned to a properly philosophical understanding of God, Wisdom of Solomon coordinates the traditions and experience of Israel to wisdom principally in terms of wisdom’s national (rather than metaphysical) domain. This makes sense, certainly, in light of the fact that the Jews understood themselves as a distinctive, divinely chosen people. It is also intelligible in terms of the long-​standing connection, examined in earlier chapters, between wisdom and piety.

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Aristobulus The earliest examples of Jewish apologetic writings come from the work of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Aristobulus, who flourished in the middle of the second century bce. A close analysis of fragmentary writings attributed to him suggests not merely an exegetical project that coordinates the Bible with Greek culture but something, I believe, more ambitious. In articulating a common source for biblical ideas and true philosophy, Aristobulus identifies the ancestral way of life with a philosophically eclectic form of piety. Not much is known about Aristobulus, despite the fact that in antiquity his was a name to conjure with. In 2 Macc 1:10, he is described as belonging to “the family of the anointed priests” and as “the teacher of King Ptolemy” and of “the Jews in Egypt.” The editor of the most recent edition of the Aristobulus fragments, Carl Holladay, identifies this Ptolemy with Ptolemy VI Philometor (180–​145 bce).1 If correct, then Aristobulus was active in the early to middle part of the second century. His reputation as “teacher of King Ptolemy” likely arose from the fact that the principal work for which he was known—​and the one excerpted by later Christian writers—​was apparently structured as a question-​and-​answer session between a Jewish philosopher and a young king interested in the Jews’ scriptures and way of life. Other traditions about Aristobulus come down to us from the likes of Eusebius, Clement, Origen, and Anatolius, bishop of Laodicea. Origen, not surprisingly, was interested in Aristobulus’s use of allegory. Though one source (Anatolius) connects him to the LXX translation committee, Aristobulus’s own references to the Greek translation and his use of it suggest that the LXX predated him. A good many of the testimonia refer to Aristobulus as a Jewish philosopher or a “wise man of the Hebrews” and, often, as a Peripatetic philosopher. Five fragments of Aristobulus’s putative question-​and-​answer dialogue have survived as excerpts in patristic texts, especially the Praeparatio evangelica of Eusebius and the Stromateis of Clement. They reflect a minute knowledge of the Torah, broad familiarity with Greek literature, and the influence of Platonic, Pythagorean, and Stoic thought. Despite the fact that he was sometimes called a Peripatetic, Aristobulus does not seem to have been, in any strict sense, a follower of Aristotle. Instead, he drew on texts and ideas from a variety of Greek sources, in ways suited to his particular purposes. Aristobulus’s philosophical work takes its place alongside other Jewish works in the period that were written not only in the Greek language but also in accord with Greek literary and historiographical conventions. Second-​ century examples include the dramatic rendering of the exodus story by Ezekiel the Tragedian and the chronology of the Bible created by Demetrius,

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a work that, according to Elias Bickerman, sought to turn “the epic of the Bible into ordinary history.”2 At a formal level, texts such as these were works of cultural translation; they were examples of history, poetry, tragedy, and so on designed to present the Jewish cultural inheritance in a new Greek idiom. This development was no doubt related to the rapid adoption of Greek and the decline of Hebrew and Aramaic in the Alexandrian Jewish community in the third century. But it would be a mistake to think of works by Jewish authors simply in terms of cultural assimilation. Many were also apologetic works aimed at explaining the distinctiveness of the Jewish people and even defending claims to greater prestige and antiquity. Referring to efforts by conquered easterners to do just this, John Collins describes the histories of Manetho, Berossus, and their Jewish counterparts as examples of “competitive historiography.”3 Writing in Greek, these authors sought to contest Greek cultural hegemony and to document the greater antiquity and superior wisdom of their own peoples. In fragment 3, Aristobulus tries his hand at this. He argues that Plato borrowed his philosophy from Moses. It is clear that Plato followed the tradition of the law that we use and he is conspicuous for having worked through each of the details contained in it. For before Demetrius of Phalerum, before the dominion of Alexander and the Persians, others had translated accounts of the events surrounding the exodus from Egypt of the Hebrews, our countrymen, and the disclosure to them of all the things that had happened as well as their domination of the land, and the detailed account of the entire law, so that it is very clear that the aforementioned philosopher had taken over many ideas; for he was very learned, just as Pythagoras, having borrowed many of the things in our traditions, found room for them in his own doctrinal system.4 The link was apparently literary: Plato got hold of some early Greek translations of the Torah, which were made sometime before the conquests of Alexander. Plato pored over them very carefully and appropriated their teachings, just as Pythagoras before Plato had incorporated Mosaic ideas into his own doctrinal system. Interpreted ideologically rather than historically, this claim is significant. In making it, Aristobulus captures the complex relation between old and new. On the one hand there is continuity. Aristobulus’s comment suggests that Greek philosophers hold doctrines that are fully consistent with Mosaic law. There is no real novelty there. On the other hand there is an implicit value judgment: Plato and Pythagoras can only offer imitations of what is taught in Jewish law. To the extent that they seem innovative, they are, in

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actual fact, derivative. In this way, Aristobulus leverages the appeal of Greek philosophy, managing shrewdly to endorse it without submitting to it. If, as Bickerman puts it, “God gave philosophy to the Greeks as their peculiar covenant,” then how did Aristobulus succeed in “uniting the Hebrew and the Greek covenants”?5 Much depends on what is meant by the “uniting” of the two “covenants.” Aristobulus did not argue that the two were interchangeable or that they amounted to the same thing. His was not a unity predicated on sameness or identity. Rather, the unity of the two is genealogical, like the kinship of an older sibling to a younger one. Unity consists in the fact that both share a common source. Both are traditions ultimately derivable from something more fundamental than Plato or Moses: philosophical piety. What allows Aristobulus to appropriate Plato as a latter-​day proponent of biblical tradition is the conviction that traditions themselves are relative and contingent. Interpreted properly, traditions give way to a mode of being in the world identified above all with “wisdom.” In fragment 5, Aristobulus makes a passing comment, all the more revealing for its brief, ancillary character. In this fragment, he is concerned principally to show that the Sabbath is not a peculiar Jewish institution but, as he says, “an inherent law of nature that serves as a symbol of the sevenfold principle established all around us through which we have knowledge of things both human and divine.”6 The seventh day represents a state of wisdom in which one’s perception of the cosmos forms the basis for a virtuous life. Picking up an image known from Aristotle and Stoic sources, he compares wisdom to a lamp that lights the path to sagely tranquility or ataraxia: And the same thing could be applied metaphorically to wisdom as well, for all light issues from it. And some members of the Peripatetic school have said that it occupies the position of a lamp; for, by following it continually, they will remain undisturbed [atarachoi] their entire life. But Solomon, one of our ancestors, said more clearly and more eloquently that it was there before heaven and earth.7 The last sentence in this excerpt is important. Aristobulus adds parenthetically that one finds the nature of wisdom expressed yet more clearly and more beautifully by Solomon, who said that wisdom existed before the heavens and the earth were created. The remark is undoubtedly a reference to the famous declaration of Woman Wisdom in the book of Proverbs: “the Lord made me [Wisdom] the beginning of his ways for his works; he established me in the beginning before time, before he made the earth” (LXX 8:22–​23) For Aristobulus, the essential compatibility of wisdom personified in Proverbs with the sophia of the Greek philosophers is simply self-​evident, a statement requiring neither

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explanation nor support. This linkage between Solomon’s wisdom and the sophia of the Greek philosophers is essential to all that follows. It makes possible all subsequent claims concerning the nature of Judaism as philosophical piety. Of the five Aristobulean fragments, fragment 4 is the most substantial. It is found in book 13, section 12 of Eusebius’s Praeparatio, sandwiched between two other Aristobulus fragments: fragment 3 on the theft of philosophy and fragment 5 on the significance of the seventh day. Eusebius marks the beginning and end of fragment 4 with editorial comments informing the reader that he has passed over intervening material. I believe, then, that fragment 4 is a coherent passage, one that includes a beginning, middle, and end. Aristobulus introduces a clear theme for this section in the first paragraph. He then includes excerpts from two poetic compositions that reinforce it, and finally he recapitulates this theme in the final paragraph. The theme of fragment 4 is the nature of divine speech. Given that the original Aristobulean composition was probably an apologetic, question-​and-​answer dialogue and that Aristobulus elsewhere provides allegorical interpretations of anthropomorphic references to God (fragment 2), it seems reasonable to suggest that fragment 4 aims to explain another anthropomorphism: the notion that God employs an audible voice. It is not difficult to see how this notion might be philosophically embarrassing when compared to the cosmic divinity of the Stoics or the lofty perfection of divine being in Platonic thought. To imagine that God is a being who speaks distinct words in an audible voice to human beings is to revert to what Aristobulus derisively calls in fragment 2 a “mythical, popular way of thinking” about God.8 The burden of fragment 4 is to explain how Jewish sacred texts, which refer to the divine voice, do not fall beneath the dignity of philosophy. Aristobulus’s first move is to deny the ordinary sense of the divine voice as spoken language: “for it is necessary to understand the divine ‘voice’ not in the sense of spoken language [rhēton logon] but in the sense of creative acts, just as Moses in our lawcode has said that the entire beginning of the world was accomplished through God’s words.”9 Scriptural references to the divine voice must not be taken literally to mean the utterance of audible words. The voice of God, when employed, does not result in sounds but in things, or, as Aristobulus says, in creative acts or “constructions of works” (ergōn kataskeuas). If we assume that Aristobulus is commenting on the Torah, then this discussion of the divine voice was likely prompted by descriptions of God’s voice at Mount Sinai during the giving of the Law (Exod 20:18; Deut 4:12, 33; Deut 5:23–​26). It must be remembered, however, that the Law, though undeniably verbal, was nevertheless attended by great signs, notably fire and thunder. In fragment 2, Aristobulus points to these as metaphors for divine power. In fragment 4, he understands the divine voice, similarly, in a metaphorical sense.

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It stands for God’s ability to do things at will, to act without any constraints. He thus points out that the creation account in Genesis describes God not merely as creating things but as speaking them into being. The divine voice, then, is a metaphor for God’s sovereign creativity in fashioning the world. An important implication of this understanding is that it shifts one’s perception of the divine voice from the realm of the auditory to the realm of the visual. One does not hear the divine voice; one sees it. Interestingly, there seems to be textual support for this view. In Exod 20:18, the Israelites are said to “see” (“kai pas ho laos heōra”) the “voices” of thunder on the mountain. In the Greek version, however, “voices” is singular (phonēn; compare Heb. qolot), thus yielding the statement that “all the people saw the voice.”10 If the divine voice is “visible,” then it must be visible in God’s wonders or creative acts. And if this is so, then Aristobulus has a way of connecting Moses to the Greek philosophers. Now since Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato investigated everything thoroughly, they seem to me to have followed [Moses] in saying that they hear God’s voice by reflecting on the cosmic order as something carefully created by God and permanently held together by him.11 Drawing on a Platonic theme, Aristobulus makes vision a function of the intellect rather than the eyes. To the extent that Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato contemplate the cosmic order as something regular and constant—​if they attain an intellectual vision or theōria of it—​they may be identified as “hearers” of the divine voice. Hearkening to the divine voice is an essential aspect of piety, both for Socrates and for Moses. The ethical overtones of this inference should, therefore, not be missed. As it turns out, then, Plato and Pythagoras did not really need to make a thorough study of the Greek Torah. Because the cosmos manifests the divine voice, it is, for Aristobulus, Torah enough. The next section of fragment 4 includes two poems that expand on the theme of divine speech. The first is a Jewish composition preserved in Christian sources and attributed to Orpheus, who was regarded in Hellenistic times as a kind of prophetic figure with esoteric knowledge. In introducing the Orphic poem, Aristobulus describes it as an exposition of God’s power and sovereignty. As in the opening lines of fragment 4, recognition of God’s power is identified with “seeing” the divine word. Consider these lines from the Orphic poem quoted by Aristobulus:  But once you have seen into the divine word [eis de logon theion blepsas], stay close to it,/ guiding aright the heart, the intelligent vessel

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of the mind. Walk unwaveringly upon/the path, and look only toward the immortal one who molds the universe.12 Once more, insight into God’s peerless control of the world is the basis for piety:  a heart rightly guided, and a course of life kept unwaveringly. The Orphic poem, however, presents the connection between knowledge and piety in a rather distinctive way. The God described by Orpheus is utterly transcendent. Because he is “complete in himself,” the world bears no necessary relation, no essential connection, to him or his character. The earliest recension of the poem even went so far as to put God beyond moral reckoning, making him the dispenser both of good and of evil. The present version, however, attempts to undo this and make evil incidental to God’s gracious activity.13 In any event, God is, in his essence, radically unknowable. Given this particular understanding of God, the proper human response is to move from the contemplation of the heavens to reverence for their creator. This is not an intellectual ascent by which one gains knowledge of God but rather an insight into the cosmos that ends with the formal recognition of God’s authority. The great model for this in the poem is Abraham. Picking up on the idea that Abraham, as a man with Babylonian roots, possessed astronomical knowledge, the poem credits him with making the proper inference from the observation of celestial regularities to belief in a celestial ruler. Moses is also mentioned in the poem, but he is unexpectedly marginal. Abraham overshadows Moses, who is reduced to a scribe and tucked into the poetic equivalent of a footnote. The second poem included in fragment 4 is taken from the opening lines of Aratus’s Phaenomena, one of the most celebrated poems in antiquity.14 Let us start with God, and may men never leave him Without mention. But all the streets are full of God And all market-​places of men; the sea is full And the harbors, and all of us need God in every way. For we are his offspring and the gentle God Shows men signs of good fortune. He stirs people to work, Reminding them of the means of living. He says [legei] when the best clod of earth Should be given over to oxen and mattocks. He says [legei] when seasons are favorable To plant a circle of trees and to sow the various seeds.15

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It offers a very different portrait of divinity, nearly the opposite of what we find in the Orphic poem. Here Aratus speaks of Zeus (glossed as “God” by Aristobulus) in familiar, even homely terms, as dwelling among humans in their everyday lives. Whether on the street or in the harbor, Zeus is present. His presence is deeply relational: we all “need” him, and we are his “offspring.” The image of God in the Orphic poem was royal and juridical: God is “established firm over the vast heaven on a golden throne” and nothing can endure “his mighty force.” Here, though, Zeus is a gentle counselor concerned to encourage success in small endeavors: going to work, plowing, and planting. Aratus, who studied with Zeno in Athens, is often described as a Stoic poet. His Zeus, therefore, is not the Zeus of Homer. For Aratus to say that Zeus is everywhere, then, is to claim that the entirety of the cosmos is held together by a rational principle (logos) symbolized by Zeus. The poem sheds light on the human experience of this cosmos. In these lines, we see that the divine logos manifest in the world is not the object of cold contemplation for detached thinkers but rather the warm and vital reality in which we live out our lives. To need Zeus is to recognize one’s moral and intellectual aspiration to live a virtuous life. To heed Zeus is to live such a life on a scale appropriate to one’s allotted portion. Why did Aristobulus include these lines in a discussion of the divine voice? One reason, perhaps, is that Aratus also refers to divine speech; he says twice in these lines that Zeus speaks. In the Aratus excerpt, Zeus says (legei) when one ought to plow and when one ought to plant. Yet a good farmer makes decisions about plowing and planting based on the best available knowledge; he does not wait to be prompted by an actual divine voice. In what sense, then, can Zeus be said to “speak” about agricultural best practices? Like the God of Genesis, his speech is known in the “construction of works.” Thus, the farmer who listens to reason, one who fits his life and activities into the larger order of things, may be described as one who “hears” the divine voice. Aristobulus concludes fragment 4 on a triumphant note. He has taken two very different poems, with vastly different theologies, and, as he says, he has used them to demonstrate “clearly that the power of God permeates all things.”16 But how well has he answered the initial question about the nature of the divine voice? In the opening paragraph, he argued that the divine voice, unlike a human voice, registers in creative acts rather than audible sounds, thus making students of cosmic order, like Plato, “hearers” of the divine word. Second, the Orpheus poem identified “seeing into the divine word” with the act of recognizing the sovereignty of an utterly transcendent God. Third, the

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Aratus poem, by contrast, described a familiar, immanent God whose voice reaches us through the gentle promptings of reason. Though it may seem as though he has offered not one but three ways to understand divine speech, Aristobulus suggests that there is an essential unity among them. Whatever else might be said about these specific construals of divine speech, all such attempts—​to the extent that they are genuinely philosophical—​posit a crucial middle term: an intelligible cosmos. The cosmos is a middle term specifically because it is, to this way of thinking, something that is addressed to human understanding. In this way, the world itself is understood as “speech” originating in divine intelligence and directed to minds capable of forming lives in accordance with it. The metaphor of a “divine voice” thus provides a rather neat way of expressing the mutual relation between knowledge and piety that is so characteristic of Hellenistic philosophies. To know the world is ultimately to receive a divine message that makes ethical demands. After noting that one may substitute God for Zeus in these sources, Aristobulus states that “all philosophers”—​ Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, and the Stoics—​agree on an important point: All philosophers agree that it is necessary to hold devout [hosias] convictions about God, something which our school [hairesis] prescribes particularly well. And the whole structure of our law has been drawn up with concern for piety, justice, self-​control, and other qualities that are truly good.17 That is, they are concerned with formulating sound opinions about what is hosios (“holy; pious”). As Socrates demonstrated in his famous conversation with Euthyphro about this very word, it is no easy matter to define the form of justice that takes proper account of divine authority. Yet it is a first-​order philosophical task all the same, one at which Aristobulus and fellow Jews excel. As he says, the Torah is concerned with piety, justice, and all the rest. It serves well the cosmic quest for virtue, allowing Aristobulus and his “school” (hairesis) to take their place among fellow philosophers.

National Wisdom Of all the works that survived from the Alexandrian Jewish community in the Hellenistic period, none is more illustrious than Wisdom of Solomon. The work was cited by Christian writers as early as the late first century (Clement) and mid-​second century (Irenaeus, Tertullian) and went on to influence later patristic authors. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that

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the book was consulted by Palestinian or non-​Alexandrian Jews before the medieval period.18 Though its fame rests on its prominence in Christian tradition and eventual inclusion in Christian biblical canons, it nevertheless sheds valuable light on the Jewish encounter with Greek culture, specifically Greek wisdom. Wisdom of Solomon is a complex and confusing work that has proven resistant to clear categorization. Is it a protreptic work exhorting readers to follow a philosophical way of life, or is it an encomium, a work written to praise and celebrate wisdom?19 Is it best understood as a representative of the biblical wisdom tradition, or—​given its clear depiction of a final divine judgment separating the righteous from the wicked—​should it also be identified with apocalyptic texts?20 What philosophical and religious currents influenced the author—​Platonism, Stoicism, Middle Platonism, devotion to Isis, and so on—​and in what way?21 The aim here is not to weigh in on these specific questions but rather to consult relevant backgrounds in an effort to connect the book, specifically, to the wisdom discourse outlined in this chapter so far. That the book was written by a member of the Jewish community living in Roman Alexandria sometime around the turn of the era seems clear. As such, it reflects “internal” and “external” social realities belonging to this context:  on the one hand anxieties about the assimilation of fellow Jews to elite Greek culture and on the other hand tensions between Jews and Egyptians living under Roman rule. In two different but related ways, then, concern for the integrity of the Jewish way of life serves as a background. Taken as a whole, the book may be understood as a work that, as its traditional title suggests, is organized by and oriented toward the concept of wisdom. To the formidably large topic of wisdom, however, Wisdom of Solomon takes a very specific approach. Though its wide-​ranging treatment considers many aspects of wisdom, it ultimately explicates wisdom in national terms, as a divine gift by which individual ethnē attain to virtue and immortality. In doing so, it participates in the effort to commend Judaism along Theophrastean lines, that is, as the way of life belonging to a nation that embodies wisdom. The book has two audiences. To Jews tempted to lapse or apostasize, it is an encouragement to hold fast to a way of life in no way inferior to those afforded by non-​Jewish philosophies. To those outside the Jewish ethnos, it is a bid to gain approval for the Jewish cause and an invitation to learn what makes Jewish wisdom not only distinctive but compelling.22 The book’s nineteen chapters divide into three sections. Section 1 (­chapters 1–​6) is presented as an exhortation to the rulers of the earth to pursue wisdom and embrace righteousness, in light of

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the fact that all will face a final judgment in which the vanity of wickedness and the unending blessedness of the just will be revealed. Section 2 (­chapters  7–​9) contains the first person reflections of King Solomon, who reinforces the earlier exhortation by commending the beauty, power, and desirability of wisdom. Section 3 (­chapters 10–​19) offers Israel as a paradigmatic example of national wisdom, describing the earliest stages of sacred history in terms of wisdom’s supervention (­chapter 10) and the paideia of a “holy nation” (Wis 17:2) set in opposition to its idolatrous pagan oppressors (­chapters 11–​19).23 To some, this brief summary and the “nationalistic” thesis it expresses will seem wrongheaded. Wisdom of Solomon nowhere refers by name to Egypt, Canaan, or Israel or, indeed, to any biblical personae, including Solomon. It is clear, for example, that section 2 relies heavily on biblical accounts of Solomon’s reign from 1 Kings and 1 Chronicles and that section 3 is a rehearsal or, as commonly noted, a relecture of events described in Exod 1–​17. Yet these sections of Wisdom of Solomon avoid all proper nouns, speaking of events in a generalized way. By refusing to name names, the author drains from these passages all superficial indications of ethnic particularity. This, among other things, has led to the judgment that the author of Wisdom of Solomon is programmatically committed to an account of wisdom that disdains “nationalism” and transposes wisdom to a higher key. According to David Winston, the author aims to render wisdom in “individualistic, humanistic, and universalistic” terms, building a “bridge” designed to move the discourse beyond the “exclusive nationalist tradition of Israel” to “the universalistic philosophical tradition.”24 Similarly, John Collins credits Wisdom of Solomon with an attempt to evince a sincere and admirable “humanistic ideal,” according to which ethical evaluation reflects universal morality rather than “peculiarly Jewish customs.”25 Unlike Winston, though, Collins judges the attempt to be only a partial success. In spite of a belief that God loves all nations equally (Wis 11:24), the author backslides into particularism and reverts, as Collins says, to “ethnic animosities” that reflect a vestigial ethnic chauvinism and an irresistible (though understandable) inclination to anathematize Egyptian persecutors.26 The problem with this view is that it seeks to understand the book in terms of a polar opposition—​particularism versus universalism—​that is, to a great extent, alien to the author’s way of thinking and the discourse in which he participates. It is more a reflection of modern analytical categories than

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a structural feature of the book’s wisdom theory. Collins is surely right to argue that if the book in fact aspires to a “universal” wisdom, one that regards national particularities as peculiarities and thus aims to transcend national identity, then the book is not fully successful. On this view, the book as a whole is incoherent, and the author is a confused figure, torn between his commitment to a pacifistic, humanistic ideal and his experience of ethnic conflicts that incite his (and others’) nationalistic passions. Though this characterization is plausible given certain assumptions, the book comes into clearer focus if one begins with a different polar opposition, one that is vital to both classical and biblical traditions: human wisdom versus divine wisdom. The distinction between human and divine is crucial, as I have shown, to the Socratic quest for wisdom, and gives dramatic vertical thrust to the Platonic and Aristotelian accounts as well. Moreover, the fragments of Aristobulus attest an understanding that draws eclectically on Greek and biblical sources in order to frame a contrast between the wisdom of God and human ignorance. Similarly, Wisdom of Solomon maintains that wisdom belongs to God (9:9) and the “reasoning of mortals,” by contrast, “is worthless” (9:14). The author, then, aims not at universal, deethnicized wisdom but at divine wisdom. Though the categories “universal wisdom” and “divine wisdom” may seem to overlap or, indeed, to amount to the same thing, there is an important difference. While it is true that monotheistic outlooks entail beliefs with “universal” scope, it does not follow from this that the “nation,” as a human social category, necessarily becomes problematic or dispensable as a result. In Wisdom of Solomon, the sought-​after appropriation of divine wisdom corresponds or “maps onto” the particularities of human life. This structure includes human intellectual capacities; therefore, wisdom involves knowl­ edge of the cosmos. The structure also includes the moral life of the human individual. For this reason, wisdom includes a program for the cultivation of virtue. And to the extent that a human is, as Aristotle argued, a “political animal,” the structure of divinely appropriated wisdom must include human social and political forms. For Plato, this meant the relatively small unit of the polis; in the Hellenistic period, however, the polis was replaced by the national kingdom as the basic sociopolitical unit of wisdom theory.27 This shift is reflected in the importance placed by Wisdom of Solomon on the ethnos, whether identified with a “people,” “nation,” or “kingdom.” To describe the aspirations of the book as “universalistic,” then, is to misunderstand it. It is also to lose sight of the fact that, for the author, the nation is a crucial element in the wisdom structure. In supposing that a philosopher-​king reaches wisdom under the guidance of a wise constitution, Plato made the political

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unit central to wisdom. In a similar way, Wisdom of Solomon considers the nation essential to the quest for wisdom, making it the principal site for the entry of divine wisdom into the human sphere. In other words, divine wisdom has a national form. The book’s opening words recognize the sovereignty of God over a human realm divided into nations. Though the first verse suggests a global audience, it is addressed to rulers of nations rather than to humanity in general: “love righteousness, you rulers of the earth, think of the Lord in goodness, and seek him with sincerity of heart” (1:1). Section 1, then, opens with a call to rulers to rule justly and seek God (1:1), and it concludes in c­ hapter 6 with an exhortation of these same rulers to gain the wisdom needed to rule justly. The intervening chapters set up a contrast between the false wisdom of the nations by which rulers oppress the righteous and the reality of a higher divine justice by which unjust rulers themselves will ultimately perish. 1. Exhortation to rulers to rule justly (1:1–​15) 2. The false wisdom of ungodly rulers (1:16–​2:24) 3. The true immortal destiny of righteous individuals living under bad regimes (3:1–​4:19) 4. A final judgment in which God vindicates the righteous (5:1–​23) 5. Exhortation to rulers to gain wisdom (6:1–​25) Section 1, then, frames the prospect of human wisdom as a matter of political leadership rather than an individual’s piety or knowledge. Its concern is the unrighteous wisdom by which kings and judges wield power and exercise authority. Their wisdom, articulated artfully in 1:16–​2:24, resembles the false wisdom criticized by Plato in book 10 of Laws and in Phaedo, in that it makes the soul inferior to and dependent on the body for its existence. In the particular version of materialism described in Wisdom of Solomon, humans come into existence randomly (autoschediōs) and cease to exist at the point of physical death (2:2). This article of belief then forms the basis for an ethical program that is attuned, above all, to pleasure: the purpose of our short lives is to enjoy as much as we can. The pursuit of pleasure faces two chief obstacles. The first is time itself. One must seize the day. Hedonists refuse to let the “flower of spring” pass them by, saying to one another: “let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither” (2:7–​8). The second obstacle is people. In the narrow view of the pleasure-​seeker, consideration extended to the needy—​ especially to widows, the poor, and the aged (2:10)—​only hampers enjoyment and burdens those who are strong and free with the inconvenience of caring

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for others. The dictates of a life devoted to pleasure require that one judge others according to their capacity to contribute to one’s own enjoyment. By this standard, those who are weak are useless (2:11). But people can also function as obstacles to pleasure in another way. The righteous man hinders the pleasure of hedonists simply by speaking against it. Even if he takes no real action to prevent others from attaining pleasure, the mere fact that he lives differently, criticizes their ways, and roots his criticism in a “knowledge of God” (2:13) is enough to make the righteous man odious and, indeed, onerous; he is a living “reproof of our thoughts,” the rulers say, and “the very sight of him is a burden to us” (2:14–​15). This scornful attitude may seem more like a bit of personal animus than an example of (unwise) public policy. Yet the point of section 1 is that the two are closely related. To find the point of connection between “private” beliefs and “public” policy is to identify the larger wisdom that underlies them both. In this case, the ideas that death is ultimate and that “might makes right” (2:11) form the basis of their wisdom, bearing implications both for personal conduct and governing philosophy. Pleasure-​seeking rulers are guilty of oppressing those who stand opposed to their way of life and who, moreover, identify as “children of the Lord” (2:13). Oppression of the righteous on a wider social scale results not from amoral political judgments but is treated here, instead, as something that is continuous with “private” belief. Unjust rule is the fruit of a philosophy espoused by the rulers, one rooted in fundamental mistakes concerning the nature of God, death, justice, and happiness. The righteous, though, embody a very different wisdom. They appear in section 1 as the “ruled” and not as rulers. Because they do not occupy positions of authority, they are not addressed directly. They are instead described in the third person, as though the narrator were directing the attention of rulers to the nameless, voiceless many who suffer under their rule. The rulers demonstrate their lack of wisdom by pursuing ways of life in which strength and pleasure, rather than justice and eternal consequence, guide moral reasoning. By contrast, the righteous identify their good with “immortality” (3:4) and God-​likeness. In a formulation that recalls both the Hebrew scriptures (Gen 1:27) and Plato (Theae. 176b), Wisdom of Solomon states that humans were “created for incorruption” and made “in the image of [God’s] own eternity” (2:23). Accordingly, the righteous endure affliction patiently (3:5) and cultivate virtue (4:1). In the final judgment, the vanity of the rulers’ wisdom will be exposed. The ultimate demise of the rulers and their passage into nothingness will follow as the logical consequence of lives directed toward perishable ends. The righteous, however, will be rewarded with an immortality

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fully consistent with their pursuit, in earthly life, of immortal things like virtue and divinity.28 In the eschaton, the ruled will become rulers in their own right: “they will govern nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever” (3:8; 5:15–​23). Things, then, are not as they seem. The righteous lead short pitiable lives (4:10–​15) and die without progeny (3:13–​19). Yet they are blessed with immortality and rulership. The rulers act according to their pleasure, in total control of their subjects, and they boast “prolific brood[s]‌” (4:3) to carry on their names. Yet their lives amount to nothing, and in the end, their legacies revert to their weaker subjects. In ­chapter 6, the final part of section 1, the narrator resumes his exhortation of rulers, calling on them to embrace a wisdom that will allow them to see beyond appearances and become legitimate authorities. The narrator addresses kings (basileis; 6:1), judges (dikastai; 6:1), and monarchs (tyrannoi; 6:9). In speaking to rulers as those who “delight in thrones and scepters,” he leverages the rulers’ own desire to rule, encouraging them to “honor wisdom” so that they “may reign forever” (6:22). As the author says, “the desire for wisdom leads to a kingdom” (6:20). Notice here that wisdom is not commended to the hoi polloi, to “ordinary” people who populate the world’s kingdoms, but is instead offered to those in positions of power. Given the perennial connection of wisdom to kingship in both biblical and classical traditions, this is not surprising.29 Wisdom is what will allow kings to withstand the application of divine justice: For the Lord of all will not stand in awe of anyone, or show deference to greatness; because he himself made both small and great, and he takes thought for all alike. But a strict inquiry is in store for the mighty. To you then, O monarchs, my words are directed, so that you may learn wisdom and not transgress (6:7–​9). The most striking feature of wisdom in this chapter is its accessibility. The bar to entry is low, as wisdom is “easily” found and discerned by those who seek her (6:12). The “beginning” (archē) of wisdom is merely a “most sincere desire for instruction” (6:17). In promising to disclose all that is essential to wisdom, hiding nothing and making everything clear (6:22), the narrator extends philanthrōpia to fellow rulers. He does so because wisdom itself is kindly. In an echo of Aristotle’s claim that the gods do not begrudge their wisdom (Meta. 982b33–​983a3), he writes that “envy does not associate with wisdom” (6:23). The idea, then, is that wisdom will have its effect in the world—​it will become a human reality—​to the extent that human rulers possess wisdom. To

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this point in the book, the narrator has not identified himself; he relates his background and “wisdom credentials” in the next section. What is clear here, however, is that he is qualified to speak authoritatively about wisdom and to commend her to his royal peers among the nations. The point in doing so is not simply to help them become successful in some narrow sense but to bring benefit to all of humanity. As he says: “the multitude of the wise is the salvation of the world, and a sensible king is the stability of any people” (6:24). The author, then, envisions a world in which human life flourishes or, rather, is “saved” from ruinous injustice by a fraternity of kings who choose rationally to rule their own lands with justice and piety, each one aware that he is subject to the “Lord of all.” Section 2 (­chapters 7–​9) shifts attention to a king who has become precisely this type of ruler. Though Solomon is not actually named in this section, he is its central figure. Section 2 includes an autobiographical, first person account of Solomon’s desire for understanding and his prayer to God for wisdom. In moving from section 1 to section 2, the author narrows the book’s focus from a worldwide perspective on human rulers to a single man and his transition from ordinary human king (7:1–​6) to one endowed with divine wisdom (7:7). Solomon’s wisdom contains elements familiar from descriptions of wisdom in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The first and most obvious point of connection is the notion of a philosopher-​king. In book 5 of Republic, Plato pins the hope for human happiness on cities run by philosophers, polities in which “kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophize” and “political power and philosophy entirely coincide” (473c–​d). As a ruler who prefers wisdom to “scepters and thrones” (7:8) and “uncounted wealth” (7:11), Solomon fits the Platonic prescription. His greatest aspiration is not to rule or to benefit from power but rather to enjoy goods proper to wisdom herself: friendship with God (7:27); immortality (8:17); and the pure delight of a wisely lived life (8:18). As with Aristotle’s nonutilitarian sophia, Solomon’s wisdom is intrinsically good. It includes cosmic knowledge: an understanding of “what exists” that extends to physical elements, the patterns of celestial bodies, animals, humans, and plants (7:17–​20). This passage enlarges the description of Solomonic wisdom in 1 Kgs 4:33 to include standard elements of Platonic and Aristotelian natural philosophy, notably physics, ontology, and astronomy. Just as the wise man embodies the virtues, so Solomon gains temperance (sōphrosunēn), practical wisdom (phronēsin), justice (dikaiosunēn), and courage (andreia) (8:7). This list of four virtues corresponds to Plato’s four cardinal virtues (Rep. 433b). To become a philosopher, one who is knowledgeable and virtuous in the highest degree, one must be, as Plato argued in

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book 6 of Republic, naturally disposed to both things (Rep. 487a). Despite the fact that Solomon ultimately attributes wisdom to God, he nevertheless describes himself as someone Platonically predisposed toward wisdom: “as a child I was naturally gifted, and a good soul fell to my lot; or rather, being good, I entered an undefiled body” (8:19–​20).30 As one who has a “good soul,” Solomon is a viable wisdom “candidate.” What completes his path to wisdom is not the rigorous paideia outlined for rulers in Republic. The essential step in Solomon’s attainment of wisdom is prayer rather than education. Though this may seem like an important departure from Greek wisdom theory, it must be remembered that piety played a significant role in earlier, philosophical accounts of wisdom. As I  showed in ­chapter 5, Plato required that rulers be as god-​fearing as possible, trained from youth up to hold pious (hosios) convictions about the gods. It does not appear that prayer or sacrifice, though tolerated in the context of civil religion (Lg. 909d–​910c), were integrally connected to wisdom in Plato’s writings. Nevertheless, Solomon’s identification of wisdom with the divine realm and his reverential attitude toward the divine are compatible with Plato’s approach to wisdom. Aristotle, for his part, claimed that the wise man was the most God-​ loved (NE 1179a23–​25). This description nicely matches Solomon’s statement that “God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom” (7:28). Elsewhere in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identifies sophia, as I  have shown, with the “divine element” in human beings (1177b28). And in a general discussion (book 7) of character conditions to be avoided, Aristotle mentions three states: vice, incontinence, and bestiality. To be like the animals in one’s conduct is certainly to fall below the human good. At the opposite end of the continuum, though, is a divine sort of virtue, what Aristotle calls “virtue superior to us” (1145a20). As a bestial person is rare, so too is a “divine man” who possesses this sort of superior virtue. Solomon is not a “divine man” with respect to his nature. As he recounts, he was born of human parents in the usual way. Yet the text emphasizes the divine origin of his wisdom and makes his request for wisdom an instance of intellectual virtue: “I perceived that I would not possess wisdom unless God gave her to me—​and it was a mark of insight to know whose gift she was” (8:21). Here the possibility of being a “divine man” is extended to include the prospect of becoming one through prayer.

Divine Law Solomon, then, is wise in ways that are compatible with Greek thought. It remains to ask how the book’s presentation of kingly wisdom in c­ hapters 7–​9

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relate to Israelite national identity. What makes Solomon, king of Israel, a distinctively compelling figure in terms of the wider Hellenistic wisdom discourse? To begin once again with the obvious, Solomon is a “real” figure rather than a theoretical construct. That is, the book presents him as a historical personage who actualized a wisdom program and ruled over a great nation at some point in the past. The appearance of Solomon in section 2 and, as I will show, the career of Israel as a “holy nation” in section 3 are placed on a historical continuum that reaches to the author’s own contemporary situation. In this way, Jewish wisdom is staked on national experience in a way that the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle are not. One example of this is the book’s brief mention of the Temple in ­chapter 9. In that chapter, Solomon prays to God to “send forth” wisdom “from the holy heavens” (9:10). In presenting the background for this request, Solomon alludes to the fact that he has built the Temple at God’s command: “you have given command to build a temple on your holy mountain, and an altar in the city of your habitation, a copy of the holy tent that you prepared from the beginning” (9:8). This detail is important because it is the only reference in the book to Solomon’s historical legacy, the only example of an achievement traceable to Solomon that had consequences for Israel. Without the mention of the Temple, the wisdom received by Solomon would be a historical “loose end,” something wonderful in its own right but without actual implications for the people beyond his own generation, for he is not a founder or legislator like Moses. Moyna McGlynn describes well the connection between the Temple and Solomon’s celebrated wisdom: the Temple “is a concrete symbol of the historical and continuing relationship between God and his people. It has become an instantiation of God’s idea of a holy nation, made possible by the activity of divine wisdom as the possession of Israel’s king.”31 As she notes, the Temple concretizes Solomon’s wisdom, and it does so by uniting the holy nation and establishing the covenant it represents in time and space. In this way, Solomon’s royal wisdom, which might otherwise appear simply to linger in the past as a remote, individual achievement, has become, in the form of the Temple, the very embodiment of Israelite identity. This raises a further question. If the goal is to vindicate Jewish wisdom by revisiting its foundations, then why focus intensively on Solomon and the Temple? Why not pay greater or at least equal attention to Moses and the Torah? To an outsider like Hecataeus, the Jews owed their wisdom entirely to the constitutional innovations of Moses, who framed not only civic life but the basic principles of religious life as well (Diod. Sic. 40.3). And within Judaism, the roster of works in the Hellenistic and Roman periods that

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identify Jewish wisdom with Moses and the Torah is impressive:  Sirach, 4 Maccabees, and the works of Philo, to name a few. In Wisdom of Solomon, however, Moses is only a minor figure. Section 3 begins with a description of wisdom’s role in the lives of individuals from Genesis and Exodus (Wis 10). Moses appears toward the end of this sequence: wisdom “entered the soul of a servant of the Lord, and withstood dread kings with wonders and signs” (10:16). Though wisdom is personified throughout this chapter as an active presence in sacred history, the only activity attributed to wisdom in the case of Moses is that of entering Moses’s soul. No mention is made of the Torah. The “wisdom history” in ­chapter 10 ends with the Red Sea crossing and thus excludes the giving of the Law at Sinai. Chapters 11–​19 rehearse the plague narratives from Exodus. In a sequence of seven antitheses or diptychs, the author frames a series of contrasts between the deliverance of the holy nation and the judgment visited upon the sinful nation. Moses appears at the beginning of this sequence as a “holy prophet” through whom wisdom “prospered” the people (11:1), but he virtually disappears from the book after this brief mention.32 Moses’s role as an intermediary is effaced, as God deals with the two nations directly. And just as c­ hapter 10 breaks off before the giving of the Law, the seven diptychs in section 3 end with the Red Sea crossing. The book as a whole stops short of Israel’s arrival at Sinai. Though it may seem odd for a book devoted to Jewish wisdom to circumvent Moses and the Torah in this way, it is nevertheless true that Wisdom of Solomon does not accord the written law revealed at Sinai a significant role in the national wisdom of the Jewish people. The theater of wisdom’s activity is markedly, deliberately pre-​Sinaitic. The book presents itself as a Solomonic work, one in which the king commends the divine gift of wisdom by recourse to his own experience and that of the nation. It is significant that Solomon looks back, specifically, on the birth of the nation, reviewing its life, so to speak, avant la loi. In light of the fact that the author has taken pains to steer around the Torah, it is unlikely that mentions of “law” (nomos) in Wisdom of Solomon are, as some believe, references to the Mosaic law.33 The relevant distinction as far as the book is concerned is not between Mosaic law and non-​Mosaic law. The word nomos occurs in nine different verses in Wisdom of Solomon, both in the singular (2:11, 12; 6:4; 14:16: 16:6; 18:4, 9) and in the plural (6:18; 9:5). In these verses (with the possible exception of 18:4), the relevant distinction is, in terms that Plato would recognize, a contrast between divine law and human law.34 As Christine Hayes has demonstrated, Jewish texts from the Hellenistic period reflect a variety of strategies for “bridging the gap” between the two rival notions of divine

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law found in classical and biblical traditions.35 In biblical tradition, divine law is divine because “it is the expression of a personal being’s will, which can take the form of detailed written instruction and legislation.”36 In classical tradition, however, divine law is not susceptible to written form. It is instead identified with unchanging, universal truth accessible through reason, while human law takes the form of concrete, written rules that are changeable and arbitrary.37 That the two understandings of divine law are at odds with one another is clear. When the author of Wisdom of Solomon refers to law, he does so almost exclusively within the classical paradigm outlined by Hayes. With the possible exception of 18:4, the book’s references to law reflect clearly the classical dichotomy between arbitrary laws, which originate with human rulers, and divine law, which governs the world according to reason and justice. In book 4 of Laws, Plato distinguishes between divine and human law in the following way. On the principle that the superior rightly governs the inferior, human life should be ordered by something higher than itself. The Athenian argues that we ought to “order both our homes and our States in obedience to the immortal element within us [hosion en hēmin athanasias], giving to reason’s [nous] ordering the name of ‘law’ [tēn tou nou dianomēn eponomazontas nomon]” (713e–​714a).38 The rational faculty that lies within is the point of contact with what is divine and immortal; thus, the “ordering” prescribed by one’s grasp of immutable truths is rightly regarded as authoritative. The Athenian points out, however, that human laws do not normally function in this way. In a bit of dialogue that recalls the conversation with Thrasymachus in book 1 of Republic, the Athenian introduces Clinias to the notion that laws are most often drafted to serve the interests of the stronger, that is, to perpetuate the power of those who rule (714c). Such laws are rooted in the self-​interest of the powerful (whether within a dictatorship, oligarchy, or democracy is irrelevant); these laws are not formulated with regard for the good of the state as a whole. When greedy and unscrupulous leaders find even these laws inconvenient, they trample them (714a). By contrast, law worthy of the name—​law that corresponds to the “immortal element” within human beings—​leads to the prosperity of the state (715d). Because it is continuous with an underlying metaphysical order that connects goodness with divine blessedness and evil with godless misery,39 divine law cannot be ignored with impunity. Neither can it be cynically “trampled” by those who are greedy for power and pleasure, for justice will ultimately prevail. The Athenian describes the ultimate authority behind the law as a just and powerful deity: “there is a god who holds in his hands the beginning and end and middle of all things, and

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straight he marches in the cycle of nature. Justice [dikē], who takes vengeance on those who abandon the divine law [tou theiou nomou], never leaves his side” (715e–​716a). Put in mythological terms, Dike is the paredros, or throne-​ attendant, of Zeus who stands ready to enforce divine justice at his command. For Plato, then, divine law is a rational ordering of human affairs consistent with a just moral order. Human law, by contrast, originates in human perception, is not reliably rational, and is subject to the vagaries of human character. This contrast informs the presentation of nomos in Wisdom of Solomon. The author refers to human law as something dependent upon human judgment. In some cases, the author refers disparagingly to human law that is unjust (2:11) or idolatrous (14:16). In other cases, he refers to human law(s) in neutral terms, as a kind of cultural norm or expectation (2:12) or as judgments that kings are expected to produce as a matter of course (9:5).40 More important to the author’s argument is the role of divine law. In Plato’s presentation, divine law is enforced by Dike, portrayed as a mighty, vigilant paredros stationed beside the divine throne. In two places, Wisdom of Solomon employs similar paredros imagery, in 9:4–​11 and 18:14–​16. The book, however, makes a key substitution, placing Wisdom rather than Justice beside the divine throne. In the first passage, Wisdom instructs Solomon in the divine law; in the second passage, which describes the death of the Egyptian first-​born, Wisdom is the “all-​powerful word” (18:15) that visits death upon the unrighteous nation. In both cases, Wisdom is an “officer” of the divine law. Given this connection between Wisdom and divine law, the references to nomos in c­ hapter 6 (6:4; 6:18) may be understood as the divine law that unwise rulers ignore at their peril (6:4) and wise rulers keep to their everlasting benefit (6:18). The remaining instances of nomos are found in the retelling of the plague stories in section 3. Because all three verses (16:6; 18:4; 18:9) reflect a positive relation between nomos and the Israelites, it is tempting to see these as references to the Mosaic law. Given the fact that the plagues took place before the giving of the Law, however, any references to the Mosaic law that operate within the literary present tense would violate the logic of the book. It makes more sense, then, to see these as references to divine law in the Platonic sense, specifically to the inexorable divine law that rewards goodness and punishes evil. In 16:6, the righteous are saved from attacking snakes by the bronze serpent, which is described as a “symbol of deliverance to remind them of your law’s command.” The Israelites are not “reminded” of the Torah, which had not yet been revealed; instead, they are reminded of the divine law that assures the salvation of the righteous. In 18:9, the Israelites sacrifice the Passover lamb: “in secret the holy children of good people offered sacrifices,

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and with one accord agreed to the divine law, so that the saints would share alike the same things, both blessings and dangers.” Here the author refers explicitly to “divine law.” In stating that the Israelites agreed to it, the author does not signal their acceptance of Mosaic legislation but, as he explains, their collective willingness to submit to divine justice without making distinctions among themselves. It is their unity, their desire to “share alike the same things” that is lauded. Of all verses containing nomos, Wis 18:4 is the best candidate for a reference to the Mosaic law. In describing the plague of darkness, the author sees it as fitting that the oppressors were deprived of light, for “they kept your children imprisoned, through whom the imperishable light of the law was to be given [ēmellen . . . didosthai] to the world.” The explicit reference to a future time, as indicated by the verb mellein, makes it possible that the verse contains a proleptic reference to the giving of the Law at Sinai and the special vocation of Israel to bring the light of the Torah to the nations. The fact that the future tense is clearly indicated, however, makes it the exception that proves the rule. Divine law is best described as a background concept in Wisdom of Solomon, an assumed understanding of the world by which other things like wisdom, virtue, and immortality become intelligible. It names the order of things by which ethical, political, and cosmological realities are governed. Human laws, by contrast, are not inherent in the world. They are drafted by rulers or lawgivers. Though some may be drafted skillfully and well, others are irrational and unjust. Their relation to wisdom is therefore contingent and unstable. The contrast between divine and human law informs the use of nomos in Wisdom of Solomon. Wisdom, of course, is the book’s main theme: it is ruling knowledge that kings must have (­chapters 1–​6) and that Solomon received through prayer (­chapters 7–​9); it is also what guided the righteous nation throughout its history (­chapter  11) and acted as an agent of divine justice during the exodus (­chapters  12–​19). But wisdom and law are essentially related. If reality “obeys” a divine law by which the righteous attain immortality and the wicked perish, then wisdom is both the recognition of this reality and the active, divine power by which life is aligned with goodness. In a manner of speaking, nomos is the metaphysical “backstop” for the book’s sapiential program and, at the same time, the standard by which human rulers, societies, and nomoi are measured. As for the written Law of Moses, Wisdom of Solomon does not comment on its relation to nomos—​ except, perhaps, obliquely. Seen from the perspective of the Israelites awaiting deliverance in Egypt, the giving of the written Law may be described as a light on a distant horizon, by which the divine law will one day shine forth on the

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nations, an “imperishable light” emanating from the holy nation but shed, in due course, upon the entire world (18:4). Wisdom, as I have shown, is of special concern to rulers. Section 2 of the book presents Solomon as a “paradigm man” with respect to wisdom and immortality.41 He is a man who shares in the human condition; yet by seeking and receiving wisdom from God, he becomes a wise ruler fit for immortality. The pattern is both repeatable and transferable; any ruler can become wise in this way. The language used to describe this process is significant. Wisdom, who is situated beside God as paredros (9:4), descends and takes a parallel position beside the king: “send her forth from the holy heavens, and from the throne of your glory send her, that she may labor at my side, and that I may learn what is pleasing to you” (9:10). From this position, Wisdom instructs the king in “all things” (9:11); in Platonic terms, she causes him to understand the divine law that governs all things. In section 3 of the book, however, Solomon disappears from the narrative. He is, perhaps, still a narrator, but section 3 does not refer directly to his person or experience. The focus in c­ hapters 10–​ 19 shifts to Israel, variously described as “a holy people [laos] and blameless race [sperma]” (10:15), a “holy nation [ethnos]” (17:2), or simply “your people [laos]” (12:19; 15:14; 15:18; etc.). The “holy nation” is nowhere named as Israel. Neither are Israelite distinctives such as circumcision, Sabbath-​keeping, or dietary laws ever mentioned. The effect is to make Israel’s experience in Egypt generalizable. As Solomon was the “paradigm man,” so Israel is, in section 3, the “paradigm nation.”42 In this way, the book extends its treatment of wisdom to include, indeed, to culminate in an exposition of wisdom’s national form.

The Universe Defends the Righteous This emphasis on the national form of wisdom relates to a curious feature of the book. Solomon drops from the narrative at the end of section 2. After 11:1, so too does wisdom. There is no explicit reference to wisdom throughout the extensive rehearsal of the exodus and plague stories in section 3. Where then did wisdom go? Though it appears as though wisdom is no longer in view in this part of the book, the wisdom commended to rulers in section 1 and received by the king in section 2 is in fact central to section 3. In this section, wisdom withdraws as an object of contemplation in order to appear as an operative force in the life of the nation. This claim must be understood carefully. Given the connection between wisdom and kingship, it is perhaps not surprising that the author’s description of wisdom in Israel’s early history is oblique. If wisdom is manifest, above all, in rulership, then the attempt to mark its presence among an unformed group of Hebrew ex-​slaves will

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necessarily require adjustment. To return to the “paredros pattern” described above, Wisdom descends from God’s side to the king’s side. But without a human king to “host” her, Wisdom herself assumes the royal functions of defending the people against external enemies and training citizens in virtue. This is clear, for example, in the paredros imagery of 18:15–​16, where Wisdom is depicted in Athena-​like terms as a “stern warrior” who “leaps” from her position beside the divine throne to punish the wicked.43 Without a king to administer justice, Wisdom herself descends from heaven to do so. It is in relation to this idea that section 3’s remarkable characterizations of divine punishment may be understood. Far from being arbitrary, punishment is rational and reflexive: “one is punished by the very things by which one sins” (11:16). In this sense, Wisdom defends the righteous nation by enforcing an impersonal principle of justice. Idolaters who worship animals (15:18) are tormented by animals (16:1). The nation that imprisoned the holy nation itself became the prisoner of darkness (17:1). Those who resolved to kill the children of the “holy ones” saw their own children destroyed (18:5). And so on. The plague narratives show clearly in the fittingness and proportionality of judgments that divine punishment is but the reflex of a rational, moral order. In other words, it is wise. The defense of the righteous is also attributable to wisdom in a different, though related sense. Not only does wisdom encompass a just moral order; as I  have shown, it encompasses the natural or cosmic order as well. When the holy nation is threatened by its enemies, then, nature itself participates in the defense. Drawing on Stoic cosmology, the author characterizes nature as a “closed entity” that nevertheless “admits of internal variation.”44 As such, natural elements may be enlisted to serve in the cause of justice. The conformity of cosmic order to moral order (and vice versa) is, as I have shown, a mark of Greek wisdom theory. According to Plato, the contemplation of celestial regularity is conducive to virtue. In Wisdom of Solomon, though, the relation is more dynamic. The cosmos bestirs itself to moral action. When God determines to punish the wicked, “creation will join him to fight against his frenzied foes” (5:20). Yet nature is not only a menace. The elements can also accommodate themselves to the needs of the righteous, as when manna provided by God changed itself to suit individual tastes (16:25). The most dramatic example, of course, is the crossing of the Red Sea: at that time “the whole creation in its nature was fashioned anew, complying with your commands, so that your children might be kept unharmed” (19:6). In a particularly concise formulation, the author declares that “the universe defends the righteous” (16:17). To align the cosmic and moral orders in this way is to understand events in terms of wisdom, that is, in a way unique to wisdom’s holistic grasp of reality.

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Wisdom not only defends the holy nation; she also trains it in virtue. The plague narratives as reworked in section 3 set up a moral contrast between the holy nation and the unrighteous nation. The author creates a series of seven diptychs or antitheses that set the two side by side. The theme of the diptychs is virtue.45 Their purpose is to illustrate the effectiveness of Wisdom as a teacher of virtue in Israel’s national experience. Each diptych focuses on a specific virtue: First diptych (11:1–​14). Justice. As punishment for the unjust decree to slay the infants, a water source was turned to blood. For the righteous who called to God for help, the flinty rock became a source of water. Second diptych (16:1–​4):  Temperance. Those who participated in idolatrous revelries were made to lose their appetites, while the righteous who suffered hunger patiently were made to partake of delicacies. Third diptych (16:5–​14):  Piety (1). The unrighteous fell to locusts and flies, while the righteous faced serpents. The righteous were not saved from biting serpents by ordinary cures but by turning to God as Savior of all and acknowledging his power over life and death. Fourth diptych (16:15–​29): Piety (2). In refusing to acknowledge God, the ungodly were punished by fire and water. The righteous, though, were given manna so that they would learn that man is not sustained by crops but by the divine word. Fifth diptych (17:1–​18:4):  Courage (1). A  plague of darkness plunged the unrighteous into irrational terror and “ridiculous fear” of illusory things, but the righteous enjoyed light and did not “surrender the helps that come from reason.” Sixth diptych (18:5–​25): Courage (2). When the unrighteous came face to face with death, they were assailed by unexpected fears and troubling dreams. When the righteous faced a deathly plague, they rallied behind a blameless man who conquered it by his word, “appealing to the oaths and covenants of the fathers.” Seventh diptych (19:1–​9):  Prudence. After begging them to depart, the unrighteous reached the “foolish decision” to pursue the righteous who had fled their land. They were destroyed in the sea, but the righteous escaped through the sea on a “grassy plain.”

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In a kind of postscript to the diptychs, the author draws attention to another moral failure of the unrighteous nation: the failure to show hospitality. He explains that they were punished for practicing a “bitter hatred of strangers” and for enslaving guests whom they initially welcomed to their land (19:13–​ 16). In this way, the dramatic events of the exodus, which might otherwise appear to be an example of divine favoritism rather than divine justice, are explicated in terms of virtue. They are thus identified with the moral education, the paideia, of a young nation on its way to wisdom. Of all the virtues treated in Wisdom of Solomon, none is more central to the book’s account of wisdom than philanthrōpia:  “wisdom is a kindly [philanthrōpon] spirit” (1:6; see also 7:23). As the exhortation to rulers in ­chapter  6 makes clear, Wisdom is generously available to those who search for her and turns no one away who seeks her earnestly. In this, she mirrors the divine philanthrōpia. In a section of the book devoted to the question of divine justice (11:15–​12:27), the author asserts that God’s power is one with his benevolence:  But you are merciful to all, for you can do all things, and you overlook people’s sins, so that they may repent. For you love all the things that you have made, and detest none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it. How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved? You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living (11:24–​26). Mercy and love are fundamental to the divine character. They “precede” justice, such that the punishment of peoples must be understood in the context of God’s philanthrōpia for all (12:13, 16). Justice is restorative. It is a series of patient, measured efforts (conducted “little by little” 12:10) to restore the wayward to goodness and help them reach their telos, described by McGlynn as “likeness to God and the immortality of his nature.”46 God’s rule over the nations is just because it is benevolent; therefore, his judgments are unimpeachable (12:12–​14). In dealing mercifully with the nations, God teaches the people that those who are righteous (dikaion) must also be benevolent (philanthrōpon) (12:19). The experience of divine mercy is the basis for human kindness:  when it falls to the people of the holy nation to exact justice in their own right, they meditate not on past grievances but on divine goodness

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(12:22). Philanthrōpia, then, extends “all the way down,” from the divine character to the human sphere and the realm of wisdom in between. Wisdom of Solomon is certainly not alone in valuing philanthrōpia and in basing human kindness on a higher metaphysical reality. As Collins points out, this virtue was also prized by the Stoics and the Cynics, who based it on the fact that humans share reason and, in this, a kinship with the cosmos and its organizing principle (logos).47 They believed that a version of human solidarity based on kindness and reasonableness was incompatible with notions of unity (or division) based on ethnic distinctions. In Wisdom of Solomon, though, philanthrōpia is mimetic; it is an imitation of God’s love for humanity and the created world. In praising philanthrōpia, the book nowhere suggests that this virtue is inconsistent with a recognition of national boundaries. It rather assumes that humanity was and is organized, as a matter of course, into national or ethnic groups, whether indicated as an ethnos (“nation”; 17:2), sperma (“race”; 10:15, 12:11), or laos (“people”; 6:21, 9:7, etc.). As noted earlier, the book is not addressed to humanity in general but rather to rulers, such that its “wisdom program” is tiered, directed to humanity at two distinct levels: the ruler and the collective over which he exercises authority. Once wisdom is attained by the ruler, it becomes the basis for the “salvation” and “stability” of the people (6:24). The author expects this arrangement to continue into the future, even beyond the eschatological vindication of the righteous: “in the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble. They will govern nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever” (3:8). What makes the eschatological situation ideal is not that national boundaries will be abolished but that the nations themselves will be subject to divine rule. Divine philanthrōpia will be manifest in the benevolent rule of the righteous over their “nations” and “peoples.” The primacy of philanthrōpia means, above all, that wisdom, though embodied at a national level, is not nationally proprietary. Because God, the source of wisdom, loves all, each nation has equal access to it. The quest for wisdom is not a competition among the nations, a zero-​sum game with winners and losers, for the goal of wisdom is not earthly power but shared immortality. Wisdom of Solomon thus has in common with Stoic philanthrōpia a sense that wisdom is ultimately marked by human cooperation and fellow feeling. For the author of the book, wisdom is national without being nationalistic. One final feature of the book merits comment. It purports to be a commendation of wisdom to the nations by King Solomon, yet it takes the dramatic events of Exodus as its principal illustrations. This literary framing makes sense in certain ways. The early chapters of Exodus fit nicely with the author’s

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own first-​century context, a setting in which Jews suffered persecution and the stripping away of their rights at the hands of their Egyptian neighbors (19:16). And as the Bible’s closest analogue to philosopher-​king, Solomon is an obvious choice for a work on Jewish wisdom. It is the combination of the two, however, that seems strange. The juxtaposition of Solomon and the events of the exodus seems odd, especially since Wisdom of Solomon breaks off before the construction of the Tabernacle, the essential premonarchic counterpart to Solomon’s Temple. It also seems odd given the Deuteronomic portrait of Solomon as a monarch who maintained a lavish court life and magnificent royal stables at the Israelites’ expense (1 Kgs 4:22–​28), one who precipitated the division of the kingdom by imposing on the people “hard service” (“douleias sklēras,” LXX 1 Kgs 12:4; see Exod 6:6). Solomon is thus an unlikely spokesman for freedom from oppression. Seen another way, though, the literary framing of the book is surprisingly appropriate. The book presents itself as a king’s retrospective on the kingless period of his own people’s history. Yet it is not a historiographic work but a theological one; its purpose is not to document the past but to make sense of the present. The events of the exodus may be taken as paradigmatic for a kingless nation in need of wisdom’s protection. They fit well the situation of a people striving for virtue, seeking justice, and pursuing blessedness. Solomon, in turn, may be understood (to borrow an Arthurian phrase) as the “once and future king.” As a “son of David” known for his knowledge, stature, and wisdom, he is the paradigm of a messianic ruler.48 He is not simply the builder of the Temple and an erstwhile recipient of divine wisdom. The messianic son of David is also the one by whom divine rule will be established in the world. Wisdom does not enable him simply to govern his own people justly (9:12), as the humble request of Solomon in 1 Kings 3:9 suggests. In Wisdom of Solomon, Solomon expects a good deal more. Upon receiving wisdom, Solomon speaks unexpectedly of a future time: “I shall govern peoples, and nations will be subject to me; dread monarchs will be afraid of me when they hear of me; among the people I shall show myself capable, and courageous in war” (8:14–​15). For such a ruler a people living in precarious times may indeed dare to hope.

A Wisdom of the People Alongside Wisdom of Solomon stands another great sapiential work of the Hellenistic period: Wisdom of Ben Sira (also known as Sirach or, in Christian tradition, Ecclesiasticus). Sirach was written much earlier, perhaps two hundred years before Wisdom of Solomon, composed in Hebrew by a scripture

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scholar named Jesus ben Sira who was living in Palestine. Only later was it translated into Greek. The translation was completed in Alexandria by the author’s grandson, who had traveled to Egypt at some point in the late second century bce.49 As he tells it, “when I came to Egypt in the thirty-​eighth year of the reign of Euergetes and stayed for some time, I found opportunity for no little instruction. It seemed highly necessary that I should myself devote some diligence and labor to the translation of [my grandfather’s] book . . . for those living abroad” (prologue to Sirach). The precise sentiment expressed here is unclear, but something about his encounter with the vibrant intellectual culture of the Jewish community there convinced him that it was “highly necessary” to make this older, more traditional book—​one that would resonate strongly with rabbinic literature—​available to the diasporic communities. Though there is no doubting the fact that Sirach, like Wisdom of Solomon, reflects the cultural pressures and influences of Hellenism, Sirach outlines an approach to wisdom that differs considerably from the one described by Wisdom of Solomon. Where Wisdom of Solomon addresses rulers and offers wisdom to judges, kings, and monarchs, Sirach’s wisdom is the wisdom of the scholar (sophia grammateōs) at leisure (scholē) (38:24). No one who makes his living at the plow, anvil, or potter’s wheel has the freedom to devote himself to the kind of study required for wisdom. Instead of being “easily discerned” (Wis 6:12), wisdom in Sirach is elusive, something that must be hunted with skill and persistence (14:22), as only one properly trained in wisdom can do. As in Wisdom of Solomon, prayer is essential (39:5), but so is a willingness to puzzle out the obscure meanings of prophecies, sayings, and proverbs (39:1–​3). Having done so, the wise man does not himself rule but instead “serves among the great and appears before rulers” as a counselor (39:4). In Sirach, wisdom is tied to virtue. Yet, in contrast to Wisdom of Solomon’s careful illustrations of justice, courage, piety, and prudence, Sirach unifies the virtues into a single way of being that is identified with “fear of the Lord.” The fear of the Lord is both the beginning (1:14) and the fulfillment (1:16) of wisdom. All moral and ethical guidance is ultimately derivable from the injunction to fear the Lord, to adopt as one’s basic life orientation an attitude of humility, self-​control, respect for limits, and loyalty to God. The phrase appears some thirty-​eight times in Sirach but not at all in Wisdom of Solomon. Perhaps the greatest contrast between the two books lies in the relationship of the Torah to wisdom. As I  have shown, Wisdom of Solomon takes a clear, non-​Sinaitic perspective on wisdom, tracing its operation in the exodus narratives and portraying Solomon as its royal host. The nature of wisdom is clearly seen in figures and narratives that stand on either side of the Sinai revelation. In Sirach, however,

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there is no mistaking the fact that wisdom was ordained by God to dwell with Israel—​not just within the Temple precincts in Jerusalem (24:10–​11) but, more important, in “the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the congregations of Jacob” (24:23). Put simply, for Sirach, wisdom and the Torah are one. Exactly why the translator of Sirach thought he needed to make this particular articulation of wisdom available to the diasporic communities remains a matter of speculation. Perhaps he believed that the philosophical approach of thinkers like Aristobulus, by then a well-​known figure in Alexandria, was in some way wrongheaded and in need of correction. For example, why recognize an array of virtues when only one is necessary? As Sirach says: “the whole of wisdom is fear of the Lord, and in all wisdom there is the fulfillment of the law” (19:20). Why turn to Aratus and Orpheus for an understanding of divine power when one has Moses? Aratus spoke movingly of Zeus but, seeing him everywhere, failed to identify him clearly. Orpheus recognized a transcendent God but perceived the divine power only dimly. Moses, however, received the commandments when “face to face” with God, imparting to the people in unmistakable terms “the law of life and knowledge” (45:5). The book of Sirach retains not only the vocabulary and essential norms of the biblical wisdom tradition; it also weds them to a piety that is fully consistent with Deuteronomic thought and the central place it assigns to Torah observance. By this light, any treatment of wisdom that does not take full account of both wisdom and the Law is necessarily inadequate. Yet it is also possible that the translator of Sirach saw his work in more constructive terms, as a contribution to the Alexandrian wisdom proj­ ect. The translator may have discerned important continuities between his grandfather’s work and, for example, the Aristobulean notion that Judaism was a way of life that belonged to the Jews as representatives of a particular hairesis or philosophical “school.” Aristobulus allegorized the Law in order to bring out its philosophical meanings, but he nevertheless saw true philosophy as an ancestral inheritance. In the same way, Sirach uses botanical imagery to characterize wisdom as something that grows or develops out of the laos, or “people.” Wisdom is a tree that “took root in an honored people” and, over time, grew tall, graceful, fragrant, and fruitful (24:12–​17). In other words, wisdom is not reducible simply to a revealed law but is understood as the form of life shaped by the Law and fortified through experiences that show forth the durability and beauty of wisdom over time. With its “praise of famous men” (44:1) and its strong affinity for Israel’s traditions, Sirach shows that his wisdom is reflected in culture and history. When the author of Wisdom

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of Solomon looks back on the exodus, when he remembers Solomon, builder of the Temple, he too sees wisdom as something older and richer than the maxims or speculations offered by philosophy. For him, the wisdom that aspires to divine immortality nevertheless has its roots in the life of the people.

Conclusion Wisdom of Solomon balances several aspects of wisdom. No less than the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, the book recognizes wisdom in its metaphysical and cosmic aspects. The activity of wisdom, portrayed as divine paredros, is identified with the recognition and application of an unerringly just divine law. Wisdom thus assures the connection between blessedness and righteousness; it leaves no room for the ultimate success of self-​interested personal maneuver, however clever or cunning. Instead, it makes virtue a matter of conforming to the will of God who rules the cosmos. Far from being indifferent to morality, then, the world so ruled is a moral structure. Nature is not neutral, for “the universe defends the righteous” (Wis 16:17). Wisdom specifies a virtuous way of life that runs with the grain of a universe under divine direction. Given the universal scope and transcendent orientation of wisdom in Wisdom of Solomon, emphasis placed on the category of the nation may seem odd or inconsistent. To make human collectives like “people” or “nation” a unit of wisdom theory, however, is to recognize something vital about wisdom. Wisdom must be enacted and embodied in the world for it to be recognized as such. It is manifest not merely in theoretical understanding but in the well-​ordered city and the well-​ordered soul. Otherwise, it fails to appear in its essential character as that which guides, directs, and governs. It falls short of wisdom. For wisdom to guide life in this way, it must not only cultivate human understanding of the good; it must also engender loyalty to a way of life consistent with this understanding. The “nation” becomes a wisdom category inasmuch as the cultivation of this understanding is a task that belongs to a society. It is the fruit of an entire culture rather than an individual quest for enlightenment. Every “nation” embodies a way of life that depends for its vitality on the participation of individuals. A “nation” calls forth the moral commitment of its own people and makes claims on their understanding of and action within the world in ways that cosmic order and personal vocation do not. It thus occupies a distinct stratum of a tiered universe, one in which wisdom becomes the basis for solidarity, shared experience, moral purpose, and what Richard Rorty called “social hope.” A wise nation galvanizes and elevates the moral

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endeavor of its people. Yet, as with other wisdom strata, the “nation” may also serve as the venue for folly. In Wisdom of Solomon, the unrighteous nation goes astray by embracing materialism and idolatry. There is also the possibility that the loyalty to the “holy nation” commended in the book may devolve into chauvinism. These failures, however, do not vitiate the importance of “national” wisdom. In fact, they reinforce its importance by making clear how important it is to order human loyalties well. To speak of national wisdom is not to engender nationalism but to articulate what binds a nation together and to hold this bond open to criticism, revision, and improvement. It is to make national life accountable to something larger than itself, to hold it up, in other words, to the imperishable light of wisdom.

Summary Aristobulus and the author of Wisdom of Solomon conceived of wisdom in much the same way that earlier Greek, non-​Jewish thinkers did: as knowledge of the whole—​of things human, cosmic, and divine—​that underlies, requires, and informs the life of virtue. Moreover, they readily identified sophia with wisdom as it is propounded and illustrated in the Jewish scriptures, especially in the figure of Solomon and in the Pentateuchal narratives. Their engagement with the scriptures yielded a wisdom program centered on rational monotheism, the cultivation of the virtues, and the hope of immortality. This program, however, was also characterized by a strong emphasis on the national form of wisdom. For wisdom to benefit people, it cannot merely be an individual attainment. In its capacity as ruling knowledge, it must also belong to human leaders and, in a different way, to the collectives over which they rule. Understanding wisdom in these terms, as that which brings the metaphysical, cosmic, social, and personal into harmony, Hellenistic Jews commended their way of life to the nations.

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An End to Wisdom I thought of my Lord Christ only as much as I  would of a man of outstanding wisdom, to whom none could be compared. Most of all, I thought his miraculous virgin birth to be an example of how things temporal are to be despised for the sake of gaining immortality . . . but as for the mystery of the Word made flesh, at that I could not even guess. —​augustine, Confessions 7.19.25

Paul’s second missionary journey included a momentous border crossing. Beckoned in a dream by a “man of Macedonia,” Paul traveled from Asia Minor to the city of Philippi on the European mainland. There he and his companion, Silas, ran afoul of local business owners by exorcising a demon from a slave-​girl. As a result, they were charged with disturbing the peace before being flogged and imprisoned. Next, in nearby Thessalonika, Paul and Silas hid from a mob directed by the city’s Jewish leaders, who accused the two of proclaiming, seditiously, the rule of a rival emperor (basilea heteron) and of “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6–​7). And when Paul went from there to Athens, he failed to impress, seeming to the local Stoics and Epicureans to be a strange, religious babbler. In the Athenian Areopagus, Paul was scarcely intelligible, let alone persuasive. To judge from the book of Acts, the earliest encounters between the Hellenes of Europe and the bearers of the new Christian message were not auspicious. Hardly anyone in those Greek cities, it seemed, was prepared to receive Paul as a sage or to identify his preaching with the pursuit of sophia in any conventional sense. From the perspective of wisdom, the European debut of the Christian evangelion was a failure. In these episodes from the book of Acts, the preaching of Paul brought social disruption rather than civic harmony. It was marked as a form of political deviance rather than a viable path to ruling knowledge. To the wise men of Athens, it was an object of scorn or, perhaps, of curiosity, but

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it did not seem to amount to very much in the way of philosophy. As the first chronicler of the Christian movement, Luke sees the beginnings of the Christian movement more as a series of conflicts with Jews and Greeks than as the introduction, in their midst, of a complementary or consummate form of life. To judge from Acts, the mode of relation between the first generation of Christians and existing cultures was, in crucial ways, disjunctive and oppositional. Specific attention to wisdom brings this disjuncture into focus more specifically as a bid on the part of Christians not so much to challenge Greek thought or Temple-​or Torah-​centered Judaism as to replace them. What the inauguration of the Christian era portends is not, in Christian self-​ understanding, the rise of a rival wisdom but, in a certain sense, an end to wisdom as Jews and Greeks had come to understand it. This is not to say that the New Testament writers were ignorant of or hostile to familiar understandings of sophia and ḥokmah. There is no disputing the fact that themes and vocabulary associated with wisdom in the Hebrew Bible, Second-​Temple Judaism, and the wider world of first-​century Hellenistic culture form the background for the writings of the New Testament. Much indeed has been gained by careful studies of the influence of Jewish and classical wisdom texts on the New Testament writers. Yet it is difficult to escape the impression that the New Testament claims more for Jesus and the Christian movement than inherited language about wisdom can say. The familiar pursuit of wisdom comes to an end for followers of Christ because Christ brings wisdom, along with law and prophecy, to its end or fulfillment (see Matt 5:17). To mark an end to wisdom is not to say that the New Testament writers were “antiwisdom” in some simple sense. It is rather to take seriously their claim that “wisdom” as it was then known and understood had to be fundamentally reconfigured. What David Ford says of the Emmaus passage in Luke 24 may be applied more broadly: New Testament authors created “the conditions for what one might call a new beginning of wisdom in response to what is beyond its previous conceptions.”1 It would be a tedious and unnecessary task to reproduce the kind of genealogical inquiry that others have undertaken concerning the influence of Jewish and Greek wisdom texts on New Testament authors. The aim of this chapter is, instead, to explain in broader terms the form of life proclaimed and commended by the authors of the New Testament. Its purpose is to understand how proponents of the Christian “way” (Acts 9:2) reconceived realms of human concern—​metaphysical, cosmological, political, and ethical—​in response to Jesus and the kērygma of the apostles. Language about wisdom

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was only one of many things that, according to New Testament authors, had to be reunderstood in light of Jesus’s messianic identity and mission. Their goal was not only to show wisdom traditions in a different light but also to recast political realities associated with Roman rule and to reconceive entirely cultic institutions associated with the Jerusalem Temple. Perhaps most significant, New Testament authors called for a reevaluation of the entire complex of beliefs and practices related to Jewish identity, God’s covenant with Israel, and the Mosaic Law. So instead of undertaking a literary-​critical or historical-​critical analysis of the New Testament’s engagement with earlier wisdom materials, this chapter aims at an explication of wisdom oriented toward the New Testament’s own holistic reconfiguration of life in its multiple dimensions. It seeks to articulate what counts as wisdom, what stands as a viable program for human flourishing, in a world that now includes the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For it is this, and not traditional wisdom in any limited sense, that occupies and animates Paul and the four evangelists. That Jesus taught and embodied wisdom they did not deny. That he was made by God to endure a painful and humiliating death on behalf of others only to be raised from the dead, however, demands, in their view, that what Jews and Greeks regarded as “wisdom” give way to something new. This first half of this chapter will examine the relation between Jesus and wisdom in the Gospels, in part by contrasting it with the presentation of Jewish martyrs in 4 Maccabees. The second half turns to Paul’s programmatic discussion in 1 Cor 1–​4, a passage rightly regarded as a locus classicus for the study of wisdom in the New Testament. Several themes from earlier chapters also emerge in this one. The first is what Plato referred to as an “odd” feature of wisdom (Rep. 428b), its quality as something that can belong both to individuals and to collectives like a polis or, as Hellenistic authors maintained, to whole ethnē. For New Testament writers, it is wisdom in the latter sense—​the “wisdom” by which the Christian collective (in contrast to other collectives) is ordered—​that is most prominent. As I have shown, the author of Wisdom of Solomon saw Jewish distinctiveness in terms of the governing role of wisdom in the life of the Jewish people. The New Testament writers are concerned, similarly, to present the “kingdom of God” or the “churches” as a single sacred and social reality ordered by wisdom (albeit wisdom fully manifest in Jesus). Socrates and Euthyphro failed to identify the divine “work” (ergon) at which piety aims. Paul, however, refers to the creation of the Christian collective as a divine ergon that orients the pursuit of virtue in new ways and calls for a new understanding of human leadership. Yet, despite the fact that he heralds an end to wisdom, Paul both commends

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and embodies aspects of wisdom familiar from earlier chapters, namely piety, integrity, and a sharp awareness of human limitation.

Something Greater Than Wisdom The canonical Gospels contain only a few explicit references to wisdom, and they offer even less in the way of abstract, systematic discussions of wisdom. Given the readiness with which Jewish authors in this era engaged and appropriated the wider, eclectic Hellenistic wisdom discourse, this is at least mildly surprising. By comparing the Gospels to a similar Jewish text from the same time period, it is possible to appreciate the extent to which the evangelists pursued a distinctive path, a wisdom road not taken, so to speak. A remarkable composition, 4 Maccabees likely originated in the first century, in a community within the wider orbit of Palestinian Judaism. If, as Moses Hadas argues, the book originated in Antioch, then its cultural proximity to the early Christian movement would have been very close indeed.2 Written in Greek, 4 Maccabees is comparable in length to the Gospel of Mark. At the heart of the book are the stories of Jewish martyrs. These included several men and one woman who were tortured and killed in the persecutions carried out under Antiochus Epiphanes between 167 and 164 bce. Their deaths punctuated the great political and religious crisis that ultimately precipitated the successful Maccabean revolt. The story, which is also reported in 2 Macc 5–​7, is elaborated skillfully and purposefully in 4 Maccabees. According to the book, Antiochus broke off his Egyptian campaign against the Ptolemies and moved against Jerusalem in order to bring the Jewish people to heel and, with the help of the high priest Jason, eradicate the Jewish way of life. He ordered his soldiers to round up Jewish citizens and force them to indicate their rejection of the Law by eating pork and food sacrificed to idols. After an old man from a priestly family, Eleazar, chooses torture and death over disobedience to the Law, seven young brothers follow the example of Eleazar and experience gruesome punishments and horrible deaths. Finally, the mother of the seven brothers, after witnessing the ordeal of her sons, defiantly casts herself into the fire before the soldiers can lay impure hands on her. The book has much in common with the Gospels. As in the case of the four evangelists, the author of 4 Macc abees has a remarkable story to tell and a clear, programmatic interest in telling it. The basic situations are similar, as both the Gospels and 4 Maccabees portray Jews who, living under foreign rule in politically volatile circumstances, seek to keep faith with the God of Israel, despite being at odds with the priestly establishment in Jerusalem. As in the New

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Testament, the path to greater fidelity is opened initially by an exceedingly wise and virtuous man. Prompted by others to save himself by renouncing his identity and way of life, Eleazar offers passive, principled, and nonviolent resistance before he is, like Jesus, publicly flogged and executed by pagan authorities. The death of this man inspires a band of brothers who, taking the first man as an example, call Eleazar their “instructor” and follow him in accepting death and torture as the price to be paid for true piety (9:6; see Acts 5:41). Moreover, the text portrays the deaths of the martyrs as consistent with a scriptural pattern of courageous self-​offering that recurs in the Jewish scriptures (see Luke 24:44)—​for example, in the ordeal of the three youths in the fiery furnace and the steadiness of Isaac under Abraham’s knife (13:9–​17)—​or in the examples of Abel, Joseph, Phinehas, Daniel and the prophecies of Isaiah, David, and Ezekiel (18:11–​19). At stake here is the question of who deserves to be called a true descendant of Abraham (17:6; see John 8:39; Luke 3:8). The executions not only confirm the genuineness and righteousness of the martyrs; they also shame the authorities, unmasking them as unjust powers, preparing the way for their downfall, and “paralyz[ing] the tyranny” of Antiochus (11:24; see Col 2:15). In their encounter with the authorities, the martyrs win everlasting reward for themselves while showing that their tormentors fully deserve the unending punishment that is in store for them (9:9; 10:10–​11; 12:12). The author of 4 Maccabees reserves his highest praise for the greatest martyr of all: the mother of the seven sons who not only witnessed her sons’ deaths but encouraged them to die nobly. Within the “council chamber of her own soul,” she overcame her own maternal instincts and urged her children to follow Eleazar in choosing death over defilement (15:25). In this, she became, also, the “mother of the nation, vindicator of the law and champion of religion” (15:29). Just as Mary the mother of Jesus would be pierced in her soul (Luke 2:35) and made to stand witness to the death of Jesus (John 19:25–​27), the noble and pious woman of 4 Maccabees witnesses and shares in the sufferings of her sons. Perhaps the most significant similarity between the characterizations of the martyrs’ deaths in 4 Maccabees and the death of Jesus in the New Testament, however, is the shared use of atonement language.3 The last words of Eleazar contain a moving prayer to God, in which he asks that his blood purify the Jewish people: You know, O God, that though I  might have saved myself, I  am dying in burning torments for the sake of the law. Be merciful to your people, and let our punishment suffice for them. Make my blood

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their purification [katharsion], and take my life in exchange for theirs [antipsychon autōn labe tēn emēn psychēn] (6:27–​29). As David deSilva demonstrates, the description here of Eleazar’s blood as something freely offered as a substitute (antipsychos) for others resonates with sacrificial language in the Greek Bible (e.g., LXX Lev 17:11), as well as Greek tragedy and later martyr literature.4 The blood of Eleazar is not effective merely because it inspires others to die for the Jewish cause; in addition, it is spilled before God, as it were, as an effective sacrifice that “changes something in the way God relates to the nation.”5 Toward the end of the book, the narrator describes the deaths of the martyrs as a “ransom [antipsychon] for the sin of the nation” (17:21). And in a second reference to blood, the author attributes the ultimate preservation of Israel to sacrificial death: “and through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an expiation [hilasteriou], divine providence preserved Israel that previously had been afflicted” (17:22). Though the precise connotation of hilasterion as “propitiatory gift” or “atoning sacrifice” in this verse has been debated, both options amount to the same thing: “on the basis of the martyrs’ loyalty to God unto death, God’s anger turns away from Israel, and God turns again to Israel with a favorable disposition so as to deliver her from her enemies.”6 Points of contact between these two passages in 4 Maccabees and descriptions of Jesus’s death throughout the New Testament are significant. As the martyrs secured the defeat of Israel’s enemies, so Jesus, in the prayer of Zechariah, is identified as a savior who will preserve Israel and rescue her from her enemies (Luke 1:74). Jesus’s life is offered as a ransom (lutron) for many (Mark 10:45; Matt 20:28), and his blood is shed for the forgiveness of sins (Matt 26:28). In Rom 3:25, Paul uses the word hilasterion in reference to Jesus, describing him as one “whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.” Though Paul coordinates the efficacy of Jesus’s expiatory sacrifice to “faith” rather than to Eleazar-​like fidelity to the Torah, the blood of Jesus is shed, as Eleazar’s was, for the people of God. Though there are, of course, important differences between the atonement theologies of 4 Maccabees and those of the New Testament writers, these basic similarities suggest a complex of shared themes, contexts, attitudes, and vocabulary. Once the topic of wisdom is introduced into the comparative analysis, however, a large and important difference emerges. For the author of 4 Maccabees, the remarkable story of the martyrs’ sacrificial, atoning deaths is ultimately intelligible in philosophical terms. It is distilled into a particular thesis made up of elements readily familiar to wisdom-​seekers in “mainstream”

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Stoic, Platonic, or Peripatetic traditions. The author states this thesis in the very first verse of the book and returns to it again and again: he is concerned, above all, to prove that “devout reason [ho eusebēs logismos] is sovereign over the passions [autodespotos estin tōn pathōn].” From the author’s perspective, there is a great deal at stake in whether a rational perception of the good is able to overcome human passions—​for example, lust, gluttony, fear, and malice—​and yield virtuous actions in the life of the individual. Against the Stoics, who sought complete freedom from the passions, the author adopts an Aristotelian position, whereby the ongoing and inevitable influence of the passions is acknowledged but held subject to reason.7 To suppose that humans are creatures of passion and that reason is the servant rather than the ruler of the passions would be utterly unphilosophical and fatally skeptical toward the possibility of virtue. For philosophy to produce a life characterized by wisdom, reason must be strong enough to galvanize the self against irrational impulses. On this point, the author of 4 Maccabees agrees with major Hellenistic schools of thought. The book’s specific contribution, however, lies in the argument that reason is best fortified to rule when educated by and directed toward the Torah. The goal, put simply, is the life of wisdom (sophia; 1:16). Wisdom, as the Stoics taught, is knowledge of divine and human matters—​but what speaks more reverently about divine matters and more advantageously about human affairs than the Torah? (1:17) Wisdom, as all philosophers know, is manifest in the four cardinal virtues (phronēsis, dikaiosunē, andreia, sōphrosunē; 1:18). Yet one need look no farther than the Jewish martyrs to see living proof of reason’s sovereignty. In doing so, one will also see the crucial role of the Law in producing the virtues to which philosophy aspires: Now when God fashioned man, he planted in him emotions and inclinations, but at the same time he enthroned the mind among the senses as a sacred governor over them all. To the mind he gave the law; and one who lives subject to this will rule a kingdom that is temperate, just, good, and courageous (2:21–​23). The Law curbs natural human inclinations and encourages mastery of appetite and desire, from dietary matters (1:33–​34) to human relations (2:8–​13) to the inner life of the individual (2:5–​6). It unifies a life, engendering the kind of integrity expounded by Socrates in Crito:  even if the Law is not divine, it is shameful to abandon in death what one has taken for guidance during the whole of one’s life (5:16–​18). Taken together, the first three chapters of 4

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Maccabees form a preface to the martyr stories in which the author, explicitly and remarkably, stakes the value of the martyrdoms on their vindication of philosophy and virtue.8 Even within the martyr stories themselves, Antiochus and Eleazar debate the nature of true philosophy and its relation to Judaism before Eleazar is put, savagely, to the rack (5:1–​38). To read 4 Maccabees is to see how one skilled author portrays a critical episode in the life of the Jewish people as a triumph of philosophy. He assimilates essential “religious” matters—​the nature of fidelity to the Torah, the vagaries of Judaism under foreign rule, the durability of the covenant in times of crisis, the meaning of sacrifice—​to what is, at least ostensibly, a program of philosophical research concerning reason and the passions. The book, then, stands as an example of how familiar elements of the Hellenistic wisdom discourse may be enlisted in the cause of Jewish piety and historiography. When juxtaposed to the New Testament writings, however, it forms an instructive contrast. All four Gospels begin not with a thesis “of utmost importance to philosophy” (“philosophotaton logon”; 4 Macc 1:1) but with the identity of Jesus. Matthew begins with a genealogy connecting Jesus to Abraham, David, the kings of Judah, and the exile. Mark takes the proclamation of Jesus’s evangelion as his starting point, while Luke sets up an account of Jesus’s public ministry with a skillfully wrought narrative of the births of Jesus and his prophetic forerunner, John. Echoing the creation account in Genesis, the beginning of the fourth Gospel presents Jesus’s entry into the world as the incarnation of the divine logos. That the four Gospels take different perspectives on the identity and mission of Jesus is clear. Yet they are alike in their clear and insistent focus on Jesus and the story of his death and resurrection—​and alike, too, in their refusal to articulate its significance in terms of abstract concepts like wisdom, virtue, or “devout reason.” Eleazar is a Christlike figure in 4 Maccabees, a righteous man and exemplary figure who sheds his blood on behalf of the people, in order to liberate them. Instead of according unique significance to Eleazar in se, however, the author sees the death of Eleazar in abstract terms. This is clear from the fact that the meaning and value of Eleazar’s death derive from an underlying pattern. Eleazar’s death is eminently repeatable: when the young brothers and their mother defy Antiochus and perish, they reproduce, without alteration or remainder, what is good, noble, and meaningful in Eleazar’s death. They are martyrs as much as he. And all martyrs are praiseworthy to the extent that they exemplify virtuous and rational mastery of the passions. In the Gospels, the story of Jesus is also “patterned,” fitting the arcs and movements of the Jewish scriptures. Yet the pattern, instead of resolving into a philosophical

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thesis with broad applicability, matters because it conforms to the life and death of Jesus—​not the other way around. Jesus’s story is less an illustration of truth than a revelation of it. The fact that wisdom is not a matter of central, explicit concern for the evangelists (as it is for the author of 4 Maccabees) does not mean that earlier wisdom texts bear no relation to the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels. They clearly do. Yet because the Gospels are not programmatically sapiential, their relation to wisdom is oblique. This is clearly seen in the fact that fundamental questions about the relation of Jesus to wisdom remain resistant to clear resolution. James Dunn, for example, captures nicely the uncertainty of this relation when he asks, pointedly, whether the Gospels portray Jesus as a teacher of wisdom or as wisdom incarnate.9 He is ultimately right to argue that this long-​standing question should not be formulated as a binary because “the two halves of the question need not be mutually exclusive alternatives.”10 It is possible to recognize in Jesus’s position as didaskalos, his relation to the disciples, and his use of parables the status and stature of a wisdom teacher. Jesus relies on sharply formulated sayings and vivid stories to convey difficult truths; he engages in debates and dialogues with learned men on topics of great import. Luke, for example, bookends the story of a youthful Jesus astounding teachers at the Jerusalem Temple with the statement that Jesus grew in wisdom (Luke 2:40; 2:52). It would thus be difficult to deny that Jesus fits the description of a wisdom teacher. The second proposition, the notion that Jesus is wisdom incarnate, is more difficult. What exactly does it mean for wisdom to be incarnated—​not merely exemplified or instantiated but actually enfleshed? Though the notion is hard to comprehend, scholars agree that a careful reading of the Gospels shows that this is indeed what is claimed for Jesus. In her work on Matthew’s Gospel, for example, Celia Deutsch, progressing from a metaphor connected to the Torah to one identified with “Jesus-​Wisdom,” marks a transformation of Lady Wisdom.11 Similarly, Ben Witherington marks a trend whereby wisdom in the Second Temple period is identified increasingly with “the particularistic traditions of Israel’s history and a focus on God’s elect people and their future direction,” such that the movement from Torah-​as-​wisdom to Jesus-​as-​wisdom is, in important ways, continuous with earlier developments.12 Witherington’s extensive analysis of the influence of earlier wisdom materials on the Gospels makes it clear that when Jesus spoke he did not merely speak in the name of wisdom but, more accurately, as wisdom itself.13 A slightly different approach would be to attend to the ways that each of the four Gospel writers conceived the relation between Jesus and wisdom. Stephen

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Barton argues that the canonical Gospels, by describing wisdom both as a traditional body of knowledge and as a “way of seeing which attends to what lies hidden,” offer distinctive presentations of wisdom.14 Like Witherington, who refers to Matthew and John as “Gospels of Wisdom” because of their strong affinities with wisdom texts, Barton sees these two Gospels as forging the strongest links between the person of Jesus and all that conceivably belongs to wisdom. In both Gospels, the great power and authority identified with Jesus as wisdom incarnate is allied (surprisingly) with humility, meekness, and servanthood, such that wisdom takes on an ironic and even subversive character.15 It should be noted (and Barton does note it) that John’s Gospel nowhere contains the word “wisdom.” This does not vitiate Barton’s analysis, but it does strengthen the impression that wisdom’s presence here is somewhat elusive and indirect. What is to be made of the fact that wisdom goes unnamed precisely when it is said to be revealed? According to Barton, elusiveness, which is an essential rather than accidental feature of wisdom, is deliberately emphasized in the Gospel of Mark. There we learn that wisdom is “hidden” and “requires special discernment”; those who look for it in conventional ways, guided superficially by custom and standard markers of honor and prosperity, are bound to miss it.16 Its mysterious quality is open only to those who follow the way of the cross and receive the “mystery” identifiable with Jesus himself. The disciples do not merely understand the “mystery” as Matthew says (Matt 13:11); in Mark’s Gospel, they have it in the person of Jesus (Mark 4:11).17 Luke also emphasizes the givenness of wisdom when he characterizes wisdom as a gift of the Holy Spirit in the new eschatological age inaugurated by Jesus himself.18 Luke is not alone in connecting the ministry of Jesus to a new era in the life of the world, an age in which Jesus fulfills the earlier prophecies in unexpected ways. The other three Gospels also do this. The eschatological character of Jesus’s preaching leads to what is, I  believe, an essential point about the relation of Jesus to wisdom in the Gospels. Though it is possible to recognize some familiar features of traditional wisdom in the Gospels, the evangelists ultimately claim more for Jesus than inherited language and ideas about wisdom can say. To the extent that Jesus goes “beyond” wisdom in this sense, the usefulness of wisdom in understanding Jesus must be qualified and, in being qualified, is likely diminished. Dunn, for example, argues that Jesus did not simply fulfill traditional prophetic expectations. Rather, “an implication is evident in his teaching that what was happening in and through him transcended these expectations. Not only was there a degree of eschatological completion in what he said and did, but also a sense of something more, an eschatological plus.”19 Dunn’s algebraic

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formulation is apt. The Gospels identify Jesus with wisdom, but not merely so. It is not that Jesus equals wisdom but rather that Jesus equals wisdom plus x. Jesus affirms this “plus” when he compares himself favorably to the great exemplar of wisdom, King Solomon: “the queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, and see, something greater than Solomon is here!” (Matt 12:42; Luke 11:31). This statement against the scribes and Pharisees (“this generation”) only works if Jesus is like Solomon in having wisdom but also greater than Solomon with respect to wisdom. The open-​ended way that this superiority is expressed (“something greater than Solomon is here”) is all the more intriguing for being vague. Its effect is to suggest that the difference between Jesus and Solomon is so great that it is best expressed as a variable, a “something greater,” a value that must be acknowledged but provisionally left unspecified. The greater x is, however, the less significant wisdom as a property of Jesus becomes. The question, then, is how great x is. When Dunn and others claim that Jesus is “wisdom incarnate,” this is tantamount, I believe, to saying that the value of x is infinite. Whether one considers wisdom to be an exalted, preexistent being who was present with God at creation (Prov 8:22–​31), a spirit given by God to guide righteous rulers (Wis 7:7), or rarefied knowledge of the divine (Meta. 983a), wisdom is intelligible as an apprehension of, a point of contact with, a higher order of being. It assumes that the human realm is both lower than and distinct from the divine realm. Yet it also maintains that there exists between the two a “line” of vertical relation, an invisible axis that is scaled (to varying degrees) by moral and intellectual effort (both human and divine). Wisdom operates in this in-​between space as an ongoing discourse about the precise ways that the “higher” and the “lower” may be correlated to produce frameworks capable of guiding human life to good and satisfying ends. Part of what makes wisdom difficult to analyze is that there are various ways to construct these frameworks, and many conflicting ones can seem plausible, or partially plausible, at any one time. For this reason, wisdom is contested; it is something that seems to include, almost as a matter of course, a space for deliberation and judgment, dialogue and debate, claim and counterclaim. Thus, rhetoric is traditionally a close companion of wisdom. To claim that wisdom is incarnated in a particular person, however, is to alter radically the architecture of wisdom. Doing so unites the “higher” and the “lower,” collapsing the axial structure of wisdom and eliminating the deliberative (indeed competitive) space in which the sagely work of anthologizing, philosophizing, and speechifying takes place. To merge the divine and human

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poles of the wisdom axis is, in effect, to bring the pursuit of wisdom to an end, to bring the wisdom state of affairs to finality. To take a C. S. Lewis quote out of context: “when the author walks on to the stage the play is over.”20 The author bears a relation to the “reality” of the play that is altogether different from that of the actors. The appearance of the author on the stage where the play is performed is conceivable before the play starts, or at the end, but not in the middle. With respect to wisdom: if Jesus is wisdom incarnate, then the drama of discovery and deliberation must give way to the reality of “God with us” (Matt 1:23), making conventional wisdom language, with its provisional and metaphorical character, something like a candle that burns in broad daylight.

Wisdom of the Kingdom The “end” to wisdom that is described here is not different in kind from the “end” to law or the “end” to prophecy also identified with Jesus in the Gospels. Barton does not speak explicitly of an “end to wisdom,” but what he says about Jesus and wisdom is marked by finality: “the four Gospels express in narrative, biographical form the conviction that the ancient quest for wisdom finds its true goal in Jesus the Christ and that henceforth it is Christ who provides the measure of what constitutes wisdom.”21 By speaking of wisdom as a quest with a goal, and by claiming that the Gospels portray Jesus as that goal, Barton marks not merely the end but also the fulfillment of “the ancient quest for wisdom.” Whatever might be regarded as wisdom after this fulfillment has taken place is measured by a single standard of judgment, to wit, by a single judge. A related example of end-​as-​fulfillment may be found in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matt 5:17, Jesus declares that he has come “not to abolish [katalusai] the law and the prophets but to fulfill [plērōsai] them.” In this verse, abolition and fulfillment are opposites. To abolish something is to bring it to an end, but to do so, specifically, by destroying it. To fulfill something, however, is to bring it to an end in an entirely different way. It is to bring it to a state of completion by providing what is lacking in it. Jesus fulfills the Law, bringing it to completion by reinforcing the sanctity of the commandments (Matt 5:19), setting aside certain interpretations of them, and reorienting observance toward a higher “righteousness” (Matt 5:20) that attains “completeness” by imitating the enterprising, indiscriminate love of God (Matt 5:43–​48). In numerous “you have heard . . . but I tell you” statements (Matt 5:21–​22, 27–​28, 31–​32, 33–​34, 38–​39, 43–​44), Jesus presents himself as the final authority on the nature and purpose of the Law. The Law remains, but Jesus’s “fulfillment” of it alters the disciples’ relation to the Law. It shifts their

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loyalty from the Law as such to Jesus himself as arbiter and perfecter of the Law, so that everything ultimately comes to depend on hearing and acting on the words of Jesus (Matt 7:24). Tellingly, the one who obeys Jesus not only conforms to the Law: he also deserves to be called “wise,” while those who reject Jesus’s words are “foolish” (Matt 7:24–​26). Jesus, then, brings an end to wisdom by making obedience to his words wisdom’s chief criterion. Forms of guidance and understanding once identified with the traditional quest for wisdom are now available in a direct, unmediated way in the words and deeds of Jesus. This does not mean, however, that the Gospels abolish the category of wisdom altogether. On the contrary, the Gospel writers retain a strong interest in the four domains of wisdom—​the metaphysical, political, cosmic, and ethical—​and insist, as the sages of old did, that they hang together and relate to one another in mutually reinforcing ways. The fact that they cohere in a single person rather than an abstraction is enormously consequential, as I have shown, but it does not mean that the Gospels deny the legitimacy of wisdom’s essential concern for flourishing in multiple dimensions of life. Instead, the Gospels reorder the domains of wisdom in light of Jesus’s mission and identity and, in doing so, put forward a new wisdom program that rests, above all, on the proper recognition of these two things. The starting point for this program lies in the realm of the social and political. One’s prospects for wisdom depend to a good degree on the group by which one was formed and in which one lives. As I have shown in preceding chapters, the laos and polis functioned in Greek and Jewish thought as venues for wisdom (for example, wisdom “takes root in an honored people”; Sirach 24:12) and as a key unit of wisdom theory (for example, Plato’s kallipolis). Far from being something that belongs only to individuals, wisdom is externally discernible and internally accessible in the particular collectives in which individuals live out their lives. To the extent that Jesus himself was the starting point for a new wisdom program, it was fitting that he institute a new collective: in Gospel parlance, “the kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven.” According to Bruce Chilton, “in all Jesus’ teaching, no single concept is more important, more central, or more resonant than the Kingdom of God.”22 Despite the familiar rendering of basileia in this context as “kingdom,” it should be remembered that basileia could also denote an “empire” and basileus, correspondingly, an “emperor” or “imperial ruler.”23 The idea of a divine empire was not unknown in earlier Jewish literature, as the phrase indicated an eschatological order in which God, as sovereign ruler of the nations, restored the fortunes of the Jewish people, liberated them from foreign rule,

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and also vindicated the righteous after death.24 In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Jesus’s first public words are the announcement that the “kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:14; Matt 4:17). What is in view here, then, is the imminent arrival of an anticipated reality, one with a distinctly imperial configuration. That Jesus himself is the leading and central figure in the divine empire is clear from a variety of Gospel texts. At Jesus’s birth, the angelic herald uses imperial titles to acclaim the newborn Jesus: he is “savior” (sōtēr) and “lord” (kyrios) (Luke 2:11). He is also the mysterion at one with the kingdom (Mark 4:11): the one who holds the keys to the kingdom (Matt 16:19), understands its strange and paradoxical nature (Matt 13), and decides who is worthy to enter it (Matt 7:21). Agents of the Roman basileia like Pilate cannot recognize Jesus’s royal identity, not because Jesus has no kingdom but rather because Jesus’s kingdom is “not of this world” ( John 18:36; see Matt 25:53). Having “come near,” the kingdom includes the twelve apostles as its first members. The twelve correspond in number to the twelve tribes of Israel, suggesting that the empire begins with a new Israel led by a new son of David (Matt 1:1; 10:1–​4). If so, it is a reconstituted Israel that is assembled at the behest of Israel’s God under the authority of Jesus, the son of God (Matt 16:16). For the twelve become apostles specifically by responding to the call of Jesus, while others are excluded either because they are not so called (Mark 5:18–​ 19), are unwilling to heed the call (Mark 10:21–​22; Matt 8:18–​22), or fall into the mysterious category of those who are called but not chosen (Matt 22:14). In this way, the new Israel, much like the first, is a chosen people. And like the first Israel, the twelve, who include unlettered Galileans, a “zealot,” and a tax collector, are a group marked by a lack of power and earthly distinction (see Deut 9:1–​7). Their unlikely assemblage highlights the fact that the kingdom is preeminently a work of divine initiative rather than human aspiration and effort. It is, moreover, a collective that is predicated on the adoption of a second identity by its new members. The “natural” or given state of being, which is idealized in Cynic and Stoic thought, is not similarly prized in the kingdom of God. One birth is not enough; a second is required ( John 3:3–​7). How Jesus’s small band of followers—​individuals entering into “second” lives as disciples—​may be understood plausibly to constitute a new empire is unclear. The question is not answered directly in the Gospels but is instead the subject of many parables. Indeed, the kingdom of God is the subject of most of Jesus’s parables, suggesting that the character of the basileia is, in some fundamental sense, veiled and mysterious. It is not what it seems to be. To some appearances, it is a “kingdom” only in a moral or ethical sense, a program for

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virtuous living propounded by an itinerant sage.25 Yet the public preaching of Jesus is like the indiscriminate sowing of seed (Matt 13:1–​23; Mark 4:1–​20; Luke 8:4–​15). Once sown, the seed makes clear what kind of ground it has fallen on. When and where it takes root, it yields a bountiful harvest that will only be apparent much later. What begins in the proclamation of “word” ends, eventually, in a distinctive polity: a large, self-​reproducing community of righteous followers. Time is also an important element of other kingdom parables. As the tiny mustard seed eventually becomes a mighty tree in whose branches the birds of the air build their nests, so the ministry of Jesus will, in time, yield a great empire (Matt 12:31–​32; Mark 4:30–​32; Luke 13:18–​19; see Dan 4:10–​12; Ezek 17:22–​23). Hope in a future basileia large and powerful enough to eclipse the existing empires of the world yields a form of life characterized by patience, sobriety, and diligence. What counts as wisdom in the new reality of the kingdom—​which was initiated by Jesus but will only be completely realized in the future—​is to live in expectation of its full and final arrival. The element of time, so important to Jesus’s agricultural parables, is reinforced in other parables that describe situations of delay. The bridegroom delays in arriving at the wedding banquet (Matt 25:1–​13). The “wise” bridesmaids prepare for the delay by bringing extra oil for their lamps, while the “foolish” bridesmaids, expecting his imminent arrival, do not. When the bridegroom returns at a late hour and the bridesmaids with their lamps are needed, the wise bridesmaids’ extra oil cannot be shared. After making a futile attempt to get more oil, the foolish bridesmaids are shut out of the wedding banquet. What distinguishes the five who are wise from the five who are foolish is not their actual knowl­ edge of the bridegroom or his schedule; it is rather that the former were prepared to fulfill their role whether he chose to arrive early or late. Similarly, the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14–​30; Mark 13:34; Luke 19:11–​27) describes a situation in which the owner of a large estate entrusts money to his servants while he is away, charging them to “trade” (Luke 19:13) and increase his wealth in his absence. Those who do so are “good and faithful,” while the one who does not is “wicked and lazy.” In the divine basileia, the space for virtue is a temporal space, one that lies between the bestowal of talents and the final reckoning of accounts. Virtue is measured against the time one is granted to prepare for the master’s return; it is evaluated solely in terms of enterprising work undertaken to fulfill the master’s purposes. The collective into which followers of Jesus are integrated is a gathered community, an incipient basileia bound together by the adoption of new, shared identities within a distinctive

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temporal space. In a very particular way, then, wisdom is a function of one’s orientation toward time. That Jesus refers repeatedly to the new collective as a basileia has another implication for the character of the collective. Though conceptions of the divine basileia in Second Temple literature varied, “the common denominator of all eschatological formulations of the kingdom . . . was the rejection of foreign rule.”26 Inasmuch as loyalty to God includes belief in God’s willingness and power to establish his rule on earth, then anticipation of the divine basileia entails a repudiation of existing earthly empires and any claims they might make on ultimate human loyalties. In no respect can a human basileia stand as a final authority for those actively awaiting the kingdom of God. Just as the experience of time is conditioned by loyalty to Jesus as kyrios and thereby given new meaning and direction, so too is participation in social and political life. Caesar has a right to expect what is due him, but so does God (Matt 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25). The statement is all the more effective for leaving its clear implication unstated: the latter greatly exceeds the former. For followers of Jesus, the character of political life is dualistic, marked by a distinction between rival human and divine powers. This sentiment is far removed from the conviction of other first-​century writers, who saw a convergence between righteousness and good citizenship. The author of 4 Maccabees, as I  have shown, held that life lived in fidelity to God and the Torah is a boon to philosophy and culture, while Josephus argued that Jews who are faithful to the Law are, for this reason, model citizens of the empire (Contra Apionem 2.16–​ 42). The collective formed by Jesus has the coherence of an ethnos or laos with its own distinctive form of life (though the Gospel writers do not use these terms), but it is ultimately oriented toward a divine basileia that has entered human life only to remake it. As such, it requires the disciples to maintain a tentative and somewhat oblique relation to social and political arrangements not instituted by Christ. To the extent that Jesus’s followers constitute a new kind of collective, Gospel wisdom is both particularistic and communal. Yet, in lacking any specific earthly patria, it is nonpatriotic.27 Like any other bayit (“house”) or ʿam (“people”) in the ancient Near East, the new collective is bound together by the authority of an ʾab (“father”). And like Israel, it is ultimately subject to God as “father” (Deut 32:6; Isa 63:16, 64:8; Mal 2:10). In the Gospels, Jesus’s favorite way of referring to the one God, the God of Israel, is as “father.” By speaking of God to the disciples both as “my father” and “your father,” Jesus reconfigures the traditional metaphor, affirming the disciples’ subordination to divine (rather than human) authority and, at

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the same time, emphasizing his own priority within it. The disciples’ claim on the coming kingdom is thus dependent upon Jesus’s mediation of divine authority: “I confer on you, just as my Father has conferred on me, a kingdom” (Luke 22:29; see Luke 12:32). In this way, Jesus connects another vital wisdom domain, the metaphysical, to the creation of the basileia. The basileia is fundamentally a divine endowment. The kingdom is, above all, the kingdom of Jesus’s God, the venue for the establishment of divine authority on earth by Jesus himself. It is crucial in this connection to mark a difference between God as a deity in some universal, generalized sense and the singular God with whom Jesus is one ( John 10:30) and by whom Jesus was sent into the world (e.g., John 8:18). The new divine empire, with its distinctive temporal and political qualities, is embodied in the words and the works of Jesus, such that the authority of Israel’s God is exercised in a way that is both familiar and unfamiliar (Luke 4:16–​30). What is clear, though, is that, as a new social and political reality, the kingdom is ordered strictly to the will of the Father. For this reason, Jesus teaches extensively about God the Father as one whom the disciples, through Jesus, must now come to know. Like the author of Wisdom of Solomon, Jesus in the Gospels places significant emphasis on divine kindness, describing God as the one who loves humankind. To love one’s enemies is to imitate God who bestows his gifts on all, on those who love him and those who do not, for he “makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt 5:45). Indeed, Jesus presents his own appearance in the world as the ultimate indication of God’s love for the world and his intent to save it ( John 3:16). The Gospel writers suggest that God’s love for humanity transcends the distinction between Jew and Gentile. The divine basileia will bring blessing to all. Luke, for example, suggests this early on in his Gospel, tracing Jesus’s genealogy to Adam rather than Abraham and describing Jesus’s birth, in terms befitting an emperor, as an event of worldwide significance (Luke 2:10–​11). In the face of hostility at Nazareth, Jesus points out that God did not restrict the prophets’ ministry to the people of Israel; instead, Elijah “was sent” to a widow in Zarepath in Sidon, and Elisha was empowered only to heal Naaman, a Syrian (Luke 4:26–​27). Though Luke’s Jesus extends special care and compassion to the “lost” (Luke 15) and despised of Israel (Luke 7:36–​50, 19:1–​10), the rejection of Jesus by his own people will lead ultimately to the gathering in of the Gentiles at the messianic banquet (Luke 14:15–​24; see Matt 22:1–​ 14). Balanced against this emphasis on God’s kindness is an equally clear emphasis on divine judgment. Where the Prophets (e.g., Isa 2:4; Jer 25:31; Ezek 34:17–​31) and the Writings (e.g., Pss 82:8, 94:2; Eccl 12:  14) identify God

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as the judge of Israel and of all the nations, the Gospels transfer the role of judge from God the Father to Jesus the Son: “the Father judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son” ( John 5:22). In the Matthean depiction of the final judgment, Jesus does not preside over an undifferentiated mass of humanity. Rather, like an emperor or “king of kings,” he is described as one who presides in judgment over “the nations” (ta ethnē), separating one ethnos from another (Matt 25:32). Yet he does so with explicit divine sanction. Those who are judged to be worthy are “blessed by [the] Father” (Matt 25:34), while those who are not are “accursed” (Matt 25:41). In accord with Jesus’s teaching concerning the centrality of kindness to the divine character, the standard that Jesus will use to judge the nations is the care afforded to the materially disadvantaged and socially disenfranchised in their midst (Matt 25:35–​45). As judge, Jesus enforces the “philanthropic” will of God. Without revisiting the complex christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, it is perhaps sufficient here to note that the Gospels furnish the basic polarity around which later debates revolved, namely that Jesus is subject to the authority of the Father ( John 14:28) and, at the same time, fully identifiable with the Father ( John 14:7). This requires, at a minimum, that any division between what Jesus does and what is intended to make the Father known be held somewhat tentatively, for Jesus’s express purpose is to carry out the will of the Father. The Gospels have as much (or more) to say about what Jesus did as they do about what he said. The deeds, wonders, and miracles performed by Jesus, then, also shed light on the nature of God’s kingdom. They must be construed theologically, as enacting and realizing the Father’s will to “bring good news to the poor” and “proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–​19; see Isa 58:6, 61:1–​2). When Jesus casts out demons, for example, it is not a random act of kindness but a programmatic realization of the divine basileia, an extension of God’s rule by which he reclaims those held in thrall to darkness by the power of Satan. When Jesus heals the sick and raises the dead, he says something about God’s regard for bodily existence and God’s will to restore the body to health, soundness, and, ultimately, resurrected life. The body is not merely a dispensable shell for the spirit. It is not an obstacle to the divine life but a participant in it. Similarly, Jesus’s compassion for the hungry (Mark 8:2; Matt 15:32) and leaderless (Mark 6:34; Matt 9:36) multitudes may be understood as the basis for a larger, divine initiative to gather into the kingdom of God the lowly who are dominated, neglected, and exploited by human regimes. When it comes to the metaphysical or transcendent aspect of wisdom, the actions of Jesus

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speak more loudly than his words. For his final action, the most significant one that he performed, was wordless: Jesus endured the cross where he was silenced in death. The next section of this chapter will examine the meaning of the cross and its relation to wisdom, but it will perhaps suffice here to note that Jesus went to his death in obedience of the Father (Matt 26:39; Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42; John 12: 27). Thus, the death of Jesus on the cross is also to be regarded as essential to the evangelists’ understanding of God and the kingdom initiated by Jesus as Son of God. In addition to the political and the metaphysical, wisdom is concerned with the ethical realm. The Gospels generally steer clear of virtue language found in some Hellenistic Jewish writings. What belongs to the ethical realm, then, is framed not in terms of rational continence or particular states of the soul but rather in terms of life lived under divine authority, in the context of the kingdom. In the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5–​7) and the parallel Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:17–​49), Jesus orients the conduct and motivation of the disciples toward the reality of the kingdom. It is the “poor” (Luke 6:20) or “poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3) to whom the kingdom will belong. Other “reversals” of this kind include the elevation of the meek, merciful, persecuted, and wronged to positions of “blessedness” in the kingdom. A consistent theme in these pronouncements and the teachings that follow is the ultimate vindication of a form of life characterized by humility, simplicity, and passive resistance to evil. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus criticizes human regimes in which leaders “lord it over” their subjects and dominate them; in the divine basileia, however, those who want to be great must become the servants of all (Mark 10:43; Matt 20:26; Luke 25:26; see John 13:12–​17). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus counsels a deliberate renunciation of human advantage. He commends the pursuit of a particular kind of “righteousness,” one that, in leaving one vulnerable to mistreatment and the loss of certain goods, effects a transferral of effort from the vain strivings of the nations (ta ethnē; Matt 6:32) to full attainment of the kingdom of God (Matt 6:33). As in the epilogue to Job, forgiveness and reconciliation are essential to personal righteousness; they are absolute requirements for life in the kingdom (Matt 18:21–​35). In insisting that this righteousness be free of hypocrisy—​that observance of the Law include the orientation of the heart as well as external action (e.g., Matt 5:21–​30) and that religious duties be performed without regard for human praise (e.g., Matt 6:1–​6)—​Jesus makes integrity a touchstone for ethical behavior. The ethical life of the disciples is overseen by the Father “who is in secret” (Matt 6:6). Thus, true piety avoids attracting the attention of others. One prays in private rather than public,

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gives alms without fanfare, and grooms oneself appropriately so as not to look haggard while fasting. Inasmuch as piety is offered to God alone, it is discreet and single-​minded. The most profound expression of integrity, however, is to die for one’s beliefs. This kind of integrity is praised and celebrated, as I have shown, in 4 Maccabees, and it is also the consummation of Socrates’s own bid to live an integrated life. Integrity, expressed in the willingness to die for that which unifies one’s life, is also important in the Gospels, although integrity takes a distinctive shape there. Integrity has a variety of reflexes in situations where one’s life and dignity are at stake. The disciple’s ethical life requires conformity to divine kindness, such that one must refrain from retaliation for personal wrongs and show love to one’s enemies. In practice, this resembles the Socratic principle that it is better to suffer injustice than to perpetrate it (Gorg. 469c). To mark another similarity: Socrates was forced to appear before the authorities, but he refused to devise an effective defense beforehand, offering instead a plain-​spoken, truthful account of his divine mission (Apology). Similarly, the disciples are told to expect persecution by the authorities. They are instructed not to consider in advance what they will say but to rely instead on the inspiration of the Spirit (Matt 10:19–​20; Mark 13:11; Luke 12:11–​12). To preserve their own lives at such a time, in the presence of earthly kings, would be to violate their integrity as subjects of the divine emperor. Instead, they must rely exclusively on words given to them by God. There is, however, one symbol of integrity that is unique to the Gospels: the cross. In parallel passages, Matthew and Luke record a logion in which Jesus identifies an absolute condition for discipleship: “whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27; Matt 10:38). The Gospel accounts are shaped powerfully by the memory of Jesus’s death on the cross, influencing the evangelists’ portrayal of all that Jesus said and did. Nevertheless, Matthew and Luke report that Jesus uttered this saying while still very much alive. Though the saying anticipates Jesus’s death on the cross, its location outside the passion narratives suggests that the call to carry the cross had a more general resonance as well. This statement about carrying the cross is not a general platitude about the inevitability of suffering, a recognition that “everyone has a cross to bear,” or, in the softer language of Longfellow: “into each life some rain must fall.” It is rather a statement about the shape and direction of one’s life. Jesus’s listeners would have understood that one who “carries the cross” has already been sentenced to die by the authorities. What remains of his life is only a short path to certain death. The cares of ordinary life—​the fortunes of one’s children, responsibilities

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to one’s parents, the struggle to stay ahead in the world—​no longer have a claim on the prisoner. He thus “hates” his relatives “and even life itself ” (Luke 14:26; see Matt 10:37) because his condemned state prevents him from giving attention to the obligations that once structured his life. He is functionally indifferent to them. His many obligations have dwindled to one. The idea is not merely to follow Jesus unto death (though this too is required) but to follow Jesus single-​mindedly because, ultimately, it is only life in the coming kingdom that matters. The fourth realm of wisdom is the cosmos. Cosmological thinking does not bulk large in the Gospels as it does, for example, in the works of Plato (Timaeus) or Philo (De opficio mundi). It bears only an indirect relation to the form of life commended in the Gospels. Contemplation of cosmic order plays no role in the effort to attain wisdom, which, as I have shown, arises instead from one’s relation to the divine basileia. The magoi of Matthew 2 are perhaps the exception that proves the rule. Their astronomical inquiries yield wisdom only inasmuch as a star leads them to the newborn Jesus (Matt 2:9–​10). Just as the empires of the world are subject to Jesus as kyrios, the cosmos is subject to Jesus as well. It does not lie open to the gaze of the sage, inducing virtue, modeling ethical harmony, or vindicating the exalted status of reason. Instead, the cosmos functions in the Gospels as a witness to the establishment of the covenant just as it did in earlier times. Heaven and earth, for example, are described in Deuteronomy as the venue for God’s instruction of Israel: “from heaven he made you hear his voice to discipline you; on earth he showed you his great fire, while you heard his words coming out of the fire” (Deut 4:36). Appropriately, then, “heaven and earth” are called on to bear witness to the punitive stipulations of the covenant (Deut 4:26). Natural objects are a kind of audience for God’s dealings with Israel. A stone serves as a witness to Joshua’s renewal of the covenant, because it “heard” what God commanded Israel ( Josh 24:27). When God brings suit against Israel for its violations of the covenant, he impanels a jury consisting of mountains, hills, and the “foundations of the earth” (Mic 6:1–​2). Natural elements do not only witness the covenant; they are also enlisted to enforce it. When the Israelites enter the land, farmers will be forced to depend on rain rather than irrigation; God will thus give the rain as a blessing for obedience or withhold it as punishment for idolatry (Deut 11:10–​17). Rain and storms are also subject to the word of the prophets in their capacity as “officers” of the covenant (1 Samuel 12:17–​18; 1 Kgs 17:1). Wisdom of Solomon generalizes the susceptibility of nature to covenantal dynamics when it affirms that everything in the world cooperated with God’s

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will to rescue Israel:  “the whole creation in its nature was fashioned anew, complying with your commands, so that your children might be kept unharmed” (Wis 19:6). Or, put even more generally (and concisely): “the universe defends the righteous” (Wis 16:17). In the Gospels, the universe does not so much defend the righteous as attest to the righteousness and, therefore, the power of Jesus to establish a new kingdom and a new covenant. In the prologue to John’s Gospel, Jesus is identified with creation’s “beginning” (archē) and the coming into being of all things ( John 1:1–​3). He is thus more akin to the Creator who commands than to the creation that is commanded. Jesus is the one who “walks on the sea” (Matt 14:25; Mark 6:48; John 6:19) and causes “the wind and the sea” to obey him (Matt 8:27; Mark 4:41; Luke 8:25). Nature bears witness to Jesus in death as it obeys him in life. As Jesus hangs on the cross, the sun grows dark and its light fails (Matt 27:45; Mark 15:33–​39; Luke 23:44–​45), and an earthquake accompanies the death of Jesus (Matt 27:51). Given Jesus’s power over the cosmos, it is not surprising that nature cooperates with his work in establishing the divine basileia. Water turns into wine at his command ( John 2:1–​11), fish gather themselves into nets (Luke 5:1–​11; John 21:4–​8), and chronic illnesses and conditions give way to health in his presence (e.g., Luke 8:43–​48; John 9:1–​7). Even death, the final and “natural” state of humanity, is reversible (Luke 7:11–​17, 8:49–​56; John 11). In an unusual miracle aimed at destruction rather than restoration, Jesus withers a fig tree that had failed to yield fruit (Matt 21:18–​19; Mark 11:12–​14). The act is both an object lesson for the disciples and an indication that God will grant the disciples similar authority to command (Matt 21:20–​22; Mark 11:20–​26). Instead of being an independent and autonomous reality, then, the realm of nature is allied with and subject to the divine basileia. Nature is not self-​interpreting or self-​authenticating. Though communicative, the world is not, in itself, revelatory.

Two Wisdoms Whereas the evangelists suggest that the traditional quest for wisdom reaches its appointed end in Jesus, Paul, who envisions the “end of wisdom” in adversarial terms, gives wisdom a much rougher treatment. For Paul, wisdom is not so much fulfilled by Christ as nullified by him (1 Cor 1:19). In the most extensive and most programmatic discussion of wisdom in Paul’s writings, 1 Corinthians 1–​4, Paul appears to make human wisdom a kind of emblem for opposition to God, a catchword for a mode of life inimical to the Christian gospel. Because of its focus on the topic of wisdom and its clear

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pronouncements on the failures of sophia, this section of 1 Corinthians figured importantly in later debates concerning the relation of philosophy to Christian faith. Some, like Clement of Alexandria, restricted the sense of these chapters to specific philosophies and so left open the possibility that Paul and Christian theology more generally may reject bad philosophy while accommodating philosophy that is truthful and sound. Others, like Tertullian, saw in the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians a general condemnation of philosophy that places human bids for wisdom beyond the pale of Christian faith. Whether in the second century with Clement and Tertullian or in the twentieth with Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, Paul’s discussion in the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians has remained central to an ongoing debate about the ultimate value of human wisdom.28 As Francis Watson argues, though, interpreters need not commit themselves to one side of a binary and decide whether Paul in this text is either “for” or “against” philosophy; to do so would be to risk oversimplification and reduce unnecessarily the range of possibilities for understanding this section.29 In 1 Cor 1–​4, Paul registers strong opposition to “the wisdom of the world” (1 Cor 1:20), but the thrust of the passage need not be restricted to “philosophy.” The word does not appear in these chapters, and the Pauline discussion of wisdom goes well beyond assessing the value of rational, systematic intellectual inquiry. He uses the word sophia to capture the totality of a distinctive form of life. Though he addresses a range of specific, concrete problems in the Corinthian Christian community in the letter, he grounds his diagnoses and his prescriptions in the contrast between ultimate accounts of human life, in the contest between competing wisdoms that frame all aspects of being. Accordingly, the point here is not to examine 1 Cor 1–​4 with a view to evaluating philosophy, explicating “the theology of Paul,” or to reconstructing the situation in first-​ century Corinth (as fascinating as that must have been). It is rather to probe these ultimate accounts and to understand thereby how wisdom both comes to an end and a new beginning in Christian thought. The opening chapters of 1 Corinthians indicate that Paul understands the factionalism of the Corinthians in terms of a larger network of assumptions, beliefs, and practices that, taken together, reflect a particular wisdom. He notes the division of loyalties directed to leaders like Paul, Cephas, and Apollos, and he decries “quarrels” (erides; 1:11) and “boasting” about leaders (“mēdeis kauchasthō en anthrōpois”; 3:21), which now characterize the community. Yet Paul does not address the material disagreements that have yielded divisions; nor does he mention the specific issues that have given rise to various schismata (1:10), let alone arbitrate among them. Because Paul does

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not provide a substantive account of the Corinthians’ theology, the precise nature of his opposition to what is going on in Corinth has been the subject of intensive examination and vigorous scholarly debate. Scholars on both sides of this debate disagree as to whether Paul’s criticism of the Corinthians’ wisdom is better understood as an attack on a particular philosophy or theology (for example, overrealized eschatology, proto-​Gnosticism, or an incipient form of halakic Judaism) or instead as an attack on “Greco-​Roman” elitism manifest in a preoccupation with social status, rhetorical excellence, and intellectual sophistication.30 The question of whether Paul targets certain theological propositions or particular social values, dangerous philosophy or manipulative rhetoric, bad content or bad form, is difficult to resolve. But, if one prescinds from the historical-​critical task of reconstructing Paul’s first-​ century context, one may also find it unnecessary to resolve this problem. In this influential passage, Paul takes the mere fact that divisions exist in the community to be an indication that the Corinthians have defected from the authentic Christian gospel. In arguing this, Paul turns to sophia and introduces a distinction between opposing wisdoms. With an eye toward the later theological resonance of this text, one may read 1 Corinthians 1–​4 flexibly, then, as an attack on all that pertains to human “wisdom” broadly understood—​a denunciation of both “philosophy” and “rhetoric,” of plausible beliefs as well as certain forms of life that, in the end, do not reckon appropriately with “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2). Paul’s decision to frame his discourse universally, in terms of “the wisdom of God” and “the wisdom of the world,” not only makes a broad reading possible; it seems rather to require it. Just as the “kingdom of God” is the venue for divine wisdom in the Gospels, so the ekklēsia, the local Christian assembly, is, in Paul’s writings, the most immediate context for understanding and living the form of life inaugurated by Jesus. When Paul refers to the kingdom of God, as he does on a few occasions, he denies a place in the coming kingdom to those guilty of particular vices (Gal 5:20–​21; 1 Cor 6:9–​10). In another passage, he speaks of the kingdom of God as something that has not yet been fully realized, a future state of affairs in which Jesus returns, defeats the cosmic powers, and hands the kingdom over to the Father (1 Cor 15:24–​28). That the kingdom will ultimately include Jews and Gentiles united under God’s authority is also clear (Rom 11:26–​28). Just as preparation for the kingdom frames moral exhortation in the Gospels, so, too, in Paul’s writings an expectation of full divine rule, one already commenced by the Messiah, shapes ethical life (e.g., Rom 15:7–​12). Despite the eschatological prominence of the kingdom, Paul’s instructions are directed, for the most part, to churches.31 It is in the context of particular

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local Christian communities, some of which were founded by Paul himself (e.g., the churches in Corinth, Thessalonika, and Galatia), that true wisdom is successfully or unsuccessfully embodied. These too must be understood in eschatological terms as the gathering of God’s people “on whom the ends of the ages have come” (1 Cor 10:11). Yet, for Paul, the ekklēsia is a decidedly local and concrete reality. He habitually refers to the Christian collective as the ekklēsia in a particular city (e.g., Rom 16:1; 1 Cor 1:2) or in a household (e.g., Rom 16:5; Philemon 2); he also refers more broadly to a group of ekklēsiai in a certain region (e.g., Gal 1:2; 1 Cor 16:19). Like other ekklēsiai, the Corinthian ekklēsia, however, is not simply an association of like-​minded individuals, the local “chapter,” as it were, of a messianic organization. It is rather a singularity corresponding to an underlying ontological reality brought into being by God. For this reason, Paul tells the Corinthians that they are the “field of God” (1 Cor 3:9), akin to the divine vineyard of Isa 5:1–​7.32 Raising the stakes even higher, Paul identifies the Corinthian ekklēsia with the Temple itself (3:17). To the extent that divine wisdom is spoken “in mystery” (2:7), the life of each local ekklēsia bears witness to the strangeness and power of the divine plan to redeem and dwell with a renewed humanity. This explains why, for Paul, so much is at stake in the restoration of order and unity to the Corinthian ekklēsia. It also makes clear why Paul sees strife and disorder in the community as a first-​order problem rooted in the Corinthians’ total way of being. Far from being irrelevant to their relation to God, the ethical and political life of the Corinthians is integrally related to their place in the metaphysical order. For Paul, schisms are not reflexes of discrete problems to be managed by arbitrating among leaders. Rather, it is schism itself that indicates a radical failure of wisdom on the part of the Corinthians. As noted above, Paul is troubled by reports of quarrels, factions, and politicking in the church. He quotes back to the Corinthians their own slogans, repeating egō multiple times:  “I belong to Paul”; “I belong to Apollos”; “I belong to Cephas” (1:12).33 In this way, he highlights the way in which party loyalties are a stronger indicator of individualism than of public-​ spiritedness. There is, however, more to the failed wisdom of the Corinthians than individualism. Individualism is expressed, specifically, in a way that demonstrates a fundamental misconstrual of the Gospel. Instead of sharing the same “mind” and “purpose” (1:10)—​which is also the “mind of Christ” (2:16)—​the Corinthians see one another as rivals in a competition to win as many as possible to their champion’s vision of life. The result is “jealousy and strife” (3:3), a struggle for power within the church to claim the mantle of rulership that comes with being “wise in this age” (3:18). The difficulty lies

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not with the leaders themselves in this case but rather with the people who fly their banners and fall to boasting about human leaders (3:21). The word that Paul uses to characterize and criticize this behavior is physioō (or physaō), “to blow, puff up, distend.” In 1 Cor 4:6, he uses a passive form of the word to warn the Corinthians against being “puffed up in favor of one against another” (“mē eis hyper tou henos physiousthe kata tou heterou”). The ethical problem here is not simply the arrogance of one person toward another but rather the specific swelling of the ego that inevitably attends partisan political activity. It is the all-​too-​familiar act of inflating oneself, of acting like an obnoxious know-​it-​all while advocating “in favor of ” (hyper) one leader and, at the same time, arguing “against” (kata) another.34 In criticizing this behavior, Paul also distances himself from the “eloquent wisdom” (sophia logou; 1:17) and “lofty words” (2:1) that the competitive Corinthians have come to value. Just as Paul rejects the vaunting and boasting of the Corinthians, he also rejects as inconsistent with the Gospel their high esteem for impressive speech. The one who is “puffed up” (pephysiomenos) may be good at talking, Paul concedes, but whether his form of life has any real power is another matter entirely (4:19–​20). Thus, the Corinthians’ enthusiasm for rhetoric is also targeted in Paul’s attack on wisdom. In what way, however, do factionalism and fondness for eloquence suggest that the Corinthians are deficient with respect, specifically, to wisdom? That is, why does their present situation suggest to Paul that the issue has to do with an overarching wisdom rather than a more limited failure to live up to Christian ideals? Instead of engaging directly the content of the ekklēsia’s wayward wisdom—​their theology, cosmology, philosophy, or the like—​Paul presents his audience with a stark binary: either one follows the “wisdom of the world” or the “wisdom of God.” Given the long-​standing identification of wisdom with ruling knowledge, it is not surprising that biblical texts, including this section of 1 Corinthians and the many scriptural passages that it cites, turn to the topic of wisdom when discussing kings, rulers, and leaders of various sorts. To the extent that the problem in Corinth concerns attitudes toward leaders, it is also, therefore, a problem that concerns wisdom. In an important section (1:18–​2:16), Paul elaborates on the two opposing wisdoms. It is crucial to recognize that, in doing so, Paul draws heavily on the prophets.35 The oracles of Isaiah against Ephraim and Judah (Isa 28–​ 33) form the background of Paul’s argument that human rulers do not only oppose God’s wisdom; they are also unable to recognize it as such (1:18–​25). The rulers, priests, and prophets of Judah contemptuously spurned the true prophets of God and turned to Egypt for help against the Assyrian threat.

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Isaiah declared that this bid for help would prove futile, Jerusalem would come under siege, and salvation would come in an unexpected way from God himself. Paul draws a parallel between the foolish self-​confidence of the Judahite leaders and the characteristic arrogance of human leaders more generally. In the next section of 1 Cor 1, Paul argues that God has chosen the foolish, weak, and lowly to shame the wise and powerful of the world (1:26–​31). In doing so, Paul draws on Jer 9:22–​23 (ET 9:23–​24). The Jeremian verses, which follow a lament over the coming destruction of sinful Judah, refer both to wisdom and to boasting: “do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord.” The people forsook the Law ( Jer 9:13) and incurred divine judgment ( Jer 9:15–​16). Human leadership proved worthless in establishing covenant loyalty and avoiding the promised destruction of Jerusalem. Thus, what remains to leaders—​the “wise,” “mighty,” and “wealthy”—​is to lay aside their claims to rule and acknowledge the sovereignty of God, who will act with “love, justice, and righteousness” and subdue Israel’s enemies ( Jer 9:23–​ 25; ET 24–​26). The lowly Corinthians should not aspire to wisdom, power, or wealth but instead see their lowliness as part of the divine plan to shame and confound those who are high and mighty. Attention to the prophetic background of Paul’s arguments clarifies the scriptural pattern that structure his claims concerning wisdom: the rule of human leaders fails precisely when leaders place greater trust in their wisdom than in the prophetic word. In the case of ancient Judah, human leaders rejected Isaiah and Jeremiah and relied upon their own devices. Isaiah describes the desired alliance with Egypt as a “covenant with death” (Isa 28:15). Jeremiah complains that the scribes claimed to have wisdom and follow the Law but, by their actions, turned the law into a lie ( Jer 8:8). The conceit of the learned and the mighty, then, is ultimately a “wisdom” that will be put to shame ( Jer 8:9). In looking to the wisdom of human leaders, the Corinthians risk repeating the scriptural pattern. Paul therefore quotes Isaiah (29:14) in order to remind his audience that God characteristically “destroy[s]‌the wisdom of the wise” and “thwart[s] the discernment of the discerning” (1:19). Richard Hays argues that the preceding verse, Isa 29:13, also influenced Paul’s use of this prophetic passage. In that verse, God complains that the “people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me.” According to Hays, the Corinthians, “with their prized speech-​ gifts, make a show of possessing wisdom and honouring God with their lips, but their fractious behaviour shows that in fact their hearts are far from

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God.”36 The “wise,” then, are all the more blameworthy for making a verbal show of piety while at the same time behaving impiously. In saying that God “destroys the wisdom of the wise,” both Isaiah and Paul suggest that divine judgment does not simply arrive as a stark calamity, as a naked catastrophe that blindly destroys everything. Instead, when judgment is meted out, it is experienced, specifically, as a subversion of the existing order over which the high and mighty have installed themselves. It is a shocking reversal that functions in a specific way to nullify the entire system—​the way of thinking, acting, and relating—​by which the “wise” illegitimately rule the many. Thus, God promises not to destroy willy-​nilly but rather to confound the powerful, to “do amazing things with this people, [things] shocking and amazing” (Isa 29:14). The manner in which judgment takes place, then, is as important as the fact of judgment itself. Paul reminds the Corinthians that “not many” among them are “wise,” “powerful,” or of “noble birth” (1:26). By God’s design, the ekklēsia exists at the low and foolish end of the worldly wisdom polarity. This is to their advantage, since it is the wise, mighty, and wealthy who, according to Jeremiah and Paul, will be made to see that they having nothing to boast about. What the powerful regard as assets will, in the end, be recognized as useless. So if there must be boasting, let those who boast boast in the power of God to judge justly (1:31; Jer 9:23). There is, however, more to this “great reversal” than the toppling of the wise and the powerful. The reversal confounds human wisdom, but it also vindicates divine wisdom. When Paul describes this divine wisdom, he does so in a way that is akin to the Gospel writers’ presentation of wisdom as something finally embodied or incarnated in Jesus. Yet Paul steers sharply away from the idea that Jesus is a sage or purveyor of wisdom. For Paul, Christ is wisdom. But to grasp this, one must understand that it is Christ crucified who is “the wisdom of God” (1:24). Whereas Isaiah foretold the placement of a “precious cornerstone” in Zion (28:16), a ruler who would replace the corrupt leaders of Judah, Paul understands the stone, more specifically, to be a “stumbling stone” (skandalon; Rom 9:33; see Isa 8:14) who offends human sensibilities: “we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling stone to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1:23–​24). The cross offends “Jews” and “Greeks” for separate reasons, but in Christ, it also becomes the point of unity for these same groups. Either way, the shameful, public death of the Messiah has become, in Paul’s preaching, the single point of reference for all claims to wisdom. If the “cornerstone” of God’s kingdom is a man crucified as a criminal, then it should not come as a surprise that the

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ekklēsia gathered in his name should also be, in keeping with the divine plan, lowly, despised, and, to all appearances, foolish (1:26–​28). Nor should it be surprising that the church is rooted in the weak, fearful, and shaky preaching of Paul rather than in an impressive display of rhetorical mastery (2:3). The essential point about the cross, however, is not its formal character as a counterintuitive display of divine power (important though this is). It is rather its spiritual and moral significance. Paul provides the crucial explanation in 2:6–​10: Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden [laloumen theou sophian en mysteriō tēn apokekrymmenēn], which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him”—​these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths [ta bathē] of God. Paul reaffirms the connection between wisdom and ruling knowledge when he identifies human wisdom with “the rulers of this age.” Despite the fact that the acquisition of wisdom by rulers was a large and important topic among ancient philosophers, one that spawned a significant body of literature, Paul brings it up here merely to dismiss it:  human wisdom (which is only ever a “wisdom of this age”) is invalid, and rulers are “doomed to perish.” Autonomous rulers, past and present, have no hope of finding out the true wisdom by which the nations are ultimately governed, for this wisdom is rooted in God’s eternal counsel; humans can speak of it only as a veiled reality (en mysteriō); and it is unveiled entirely at God’s discretion. It cannot be reached by human imagination or distilled, somehow, from human experience. In affirming this, Paul adheres closely to the teaching of the prophets, especially Isaiah (Isa 64:3; see Isa 65:17). As Drake Williams has shown, however, this section of the letter also contains echoes of Daniel’s doxology, which he offered in thanksgiving to God after “the mystery [to mysterion]” of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream was revealed to him (Dan 2:19).37 Daniel ascribes power and wisdom to God with specific reference to God’s revelatory prerogatives and his authority over rulers:

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He changes times and seasons, deposes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding. He reveals deep [ta bathea] and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with him (2:21–​22). Put simply, the political order reflects the divine will. It is subject to God’s mastery of historical periods and his control over the rulers who appear within them. Rulers rise and fall according to a divine plan. When obscure, the plan is a “mystery”; when revealed, it is accepted as “wisdom” from God. It touches deep or profound realities that can only be revealed by God himself, or, as Paul says, by the divine Spirit, who knows “the depths [ta bathē] of God” (2:10; see Wis 7). The novum in Paul’s preaching is the cross. Isaiah and Daniel furnish essential background for Paul’s discussion of wisdom, but it is the cross that finally actualizes and establishes the prophetic understanding of human wisdom and rulership. For it was at the cross that the “rulers of this age,” in ignorance of divine wisdom, “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8). Prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah discerned a fundamental opposition between the God of Israel and human rulers (Israelite, Judahite, Babylonian, Assyrian, etc.); they spoke, as I have shown, of opposing wisdoms. To accept the lordship of Jesus, though, is not only to recognize that divine wisdom opposes and subverts the ruling knowledge of human leaders. It is also to recognize that, in sending his Son into the world, God provoked a political and religious crisis that would resolve, once and for all, the questions posed by wisdom: who is fit to rule? What is real and ultimate in our understanding of God, humanity, and the world? Given this understanding, in what way must humans live? In 1 Cor 2:8, Paul does not describe the death of Jesus from the point of view of God’s agency as he does elsewhere, for example, when he speaks of a “sacrifice of atonement” put forward by God (Rom 3:25) or of God’s demonstration of love for sinners (Rom 5:8). Instead, with the cross in view, Paul describes the death of Jesus from the point of view of human agency, stating that “the rulers of this age” (“hoi archontes tou aiōnos toutou”) crucified the “Lord of glory” (“ton kyrion tēs doxēs”). The unusual title for Jesus, otherwise unattested in Paul’s writings, brings out the meaning of the cross as a decisive event in human history. In other New Testament passages where human responsibility for Jesus’s death is emphasized, motivations are characterized as murderous greed on the part of Jewish leaders (Matt 21:38) or unwitting (but still culpable) fulfillment of the divine plan (Acts 2:22–​23). Paul’s characterization is

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closer to Luke’s than to Matthew’s, but his identification of Jesus as the “Lord of glory” also has strong moral overtones.38 A closer parallel to “Lord of glory” in 1 Cor 2:8 is the only other occurrence of this phrase in the New Testament: “with your acts of favoritism, do you really believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord of glory?” ( James 2:1; “tou kyriou hēmōn iesou christou tēs doxēs”). In James 2:1–​13, the author argues that favoritism of wealthy community members over poor ones is inconsistent with true belief in Jesus Christ, the “Lord of glory.” “Glory” refers here, as in Proverbs and Sirach, to the honor due the humble and lowly.39 For the author of James, Jesus Christ is honored as the “Lord of glory” precisely when the community reverses the worldly pattern of showing partiality to the rich and powerful and instead gives preference to the poor and the weak. When Paul states that the rulers of the age crucified the Lord of glory, he means that they have put to death the unbribable judge, the champion of the righteous, the one who rules according to a true and just wisdom. Faced with a divinely appointed man who perfectly embodied God’s righteousness, the world, led and represented by its rulers, provided full and final evidence of its hostility to God by rejecting, persecuting, and executing him. Paul suggests that it is impossible, after such an event, to maintain faith in the “world,” to believe that the wisdom of its rulers is anything but foolish, wicked, and deicidal. He softens this judgment somewhat when he states that the rulers of the age would not have crucified the Lord of glory if they had understood God’s “secret and hidden wisdom” (2:7–​8). In an important sense, then, they acted in ignorance (see Acts 17:30). Yet, as I have shown, this ignorance is, from a purely human perspective, insuperable. Apart from the revelatory work of the Spirit (2:10), there is no access to the deep things of God, no hope of understanding God’s mysterious plan to restore human life by personally absorbing its capacity for evil, only to receive rebellious humanity once again in love. The point is that, seen from the perspective of the cross, the prospects for autonomous human wisdom—​even among the best and brightest—​are worse than poor: they are nonexistent. The crucifixion of the “Lord of glory” was a public, world-​historical event in which the wisdom of the world ran its course and, in so doing, met its end.

The Divine Project If human wisdom has come to its end, then by what wisdom is the life of the ekklēsia now ordered and regulated? The obvious answer is, of course, divine wisdom, but how does divine wisdom order life in its multiple dimensions?

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As I have shown, Paul posits a radical disjunction between human wisdom, which is false and unjust, and divine wisdom, which is now manifest as true wisdom specifically in the cross. So superior is God’s wisdom to human wisdom that the two cannot even be compared. Even God’s “foolishness” is wiser than the best human wisdom (1:25). Given the degree of incommensurability between human and divine wisdom, it is difficult to see how the latter might be understood well enough by people to be implemented in human life. And when Paul describes divine wisdom as something hidden in mystery (2:7), which culminates in the shocking death of Jesus, he makes “wisdom” something alien indeed. In this way, Paul estranges true wisdom and places it beyond conventional human categories. He strips wisdom of its familiar connotations, putting paid to the notion that humans can successfully understand and order life according to a body of knowledge by which archontes of any sort claim to rule justly. What remains to humans is to recognize and live within a very different kind of order, one in which the only one with a legitimate claim to lordship is paradoxically proclaimed kyrios in his identification with death, shame, and folly. For reasons that are now clear, Paul declines to speak of this order, this way of life, as a “wisdom” in the familiar sense. To do so would no doubt have exacerbated the problematic division of the ekklēsia into groups loyal to leaders who were regarded, in some sense, as sophoi. It would also have undermined Paul’s insistence that the crucifixion of Jesus had inaugurated a new age and a new way of being. Instead of trying to reform a concept of wisdom, then, Paul uses scripture to circumvent the traditional wisdom discourse. He confronts the Corinthians instead with the pattern of failed human leadership attested in the prophetic writings, and he appeals simply and directly for unity (1:10), sobriety (3:18), and an end to partisan bickering (3:21) as they “wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:7). For all this, though, the realms of concern that belong, traditionally, to wisdom still have to be understood and coordinated. In order for Paul’s preaching to produce viable, well-​ordered communities, it must contain a coherent program for human flourishing. Despite Paul’s hyperbolic declaration that he decided to know “nothing” among the Corinthians except “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2), he does in fact have a great deal of guidance to impart to the Corinthians on a wide range of topics. The most urgent and important of these is leadership. Paul does not offer a political philosophy as such, but, having set aside standard conceptions of rulership, he takes pains to describe the form of human leadership appropriate to the ekklēsia. Paul offers himself and his ministry as the primary example of a Christian leader. Given all that Paul has written about the fallibility of human leaders and

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the dangers of boasting in any single one of them, this is a risky move that threatens to undermine what he has passionately argued in 1 Cor 1–​2. He only heightens this risk when he dares to refer to himself as—​of all things—​a “wise man,” one who is sophos! He writes in 1 Cor 3:10: “according to the grace of God given to me, like a wise master builder [sophos architektōn] I laid a foundation.” Despite the fact that Paul has criticized severely what might be called “wisdom thinking,” he likens his role in the life of the church, quite surprisingly, to that of “a wise master builder” who “laid the foundation” for the Corinthian community (3:10). What is going on here? It is unlikely that the statement is ironical, as Paul attributes his position to “the grace of God” and proceeds, on the basis of this metaphor, to explain the true nature of the ekklēsia as an edifice built by God. It is more likely that Paul appeals here to a constructive understanding of wisdom that is, like his earlier deconstruction of human ruling knowledge, rooted in scripture. Having rejected one type of wisdom, Paul turns once again to Israel’s past to present the Corinthians with an understanding of skillful leadership that is consonant with divine wisdom. The leaders of the ekklēsia must not be thought of as archontes but as subordinates. Paul declares that he and Apollos are mere “servants” (diakonoi; 3:5). He instructs the community to think of the apostles “in this way:  as menial servants [hypēretas] of Christ and stewards [oikonomous] of the mysteries of God” (4:1). This conception of leadership makes sense once the nature of the ekklēsia as a divine project is properly understood. As Socrates suggested to Euthyphro, it is better to think of piety as “service” (hypēretikē) rendered to the gods than as “care” (therapeia) of the gods, because the former assumes that humans aid the gods in carrying out a particular work (ergon), which in turn makes human piety purposeful and intelligible (Euthphr. 13d). In familiar examples of hypēretikē, like rowing on a ship or carrying armor for an officer, the hypēretēs works under the direction of a superior to accomplish a recognizable task (navigating or fighting). Neither Euthyphro nor Socrates was able identify the divine ergon in their aporetic dialogue, but Paul suggests that the divine ergon is the creation of the ekklēsia itself.40 The apostles are simply workers enlisted by God to assist in the development of a new, creative enterprise. In explaining what this is, Paul resorts, initially, to an agricultural metaphor. If the ergon is a “field” (geōrgion), perhaps a vineyard expected to yield produce (see Isa 5:1–​7), then Paul and his fellow apostles are synergoi, “fellow workers,” who are tasked with planting and watering (3:9). Because it is God who ultimately causes the growth (3:7), it is he and not the workers who holds a claim on what is produced. In making a second, more extensive comparison, Paul draws on the traditions associated

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with the building of the wilderness Tabernacle and the Jerusalem Temple. The Corinthian ekklēsia is God’s Temple (3:17). As founder of the church, Paul has no doubt played an essential role. Yet he is not a sophos who founded a polity and acted as lawgiver; he is not a Moses or Lycurgus. Instead, he is sophos architektōn, a “wise master builder,” who is more like a skilled artisan than a philosopher-​king.41 The church’s true foundation is Christ: “for no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ” (3:11). Paul speaks of “foundation” in two senses. A builder may lay the physical foundation, but the one who owns the materials, employs the workers, provides the land, conceives the plan, and authorizes the project has the stronger claim to the title of “founder” than the builder. The builder is “founder” only in a derivative sense. In the case of the ekklēsia, the founder is God, the foundation is Christ, and Paul is the skillful worker called in to implement the design. It cannot be mere coincidence that figures who function in precisely this role are described in scripture as “wise” (sophos). In Exodus, God instructs Moses to build the sanctuary in strict accordance with the “pattern” that he shows to Moses (Exod 25:9). Yet it is the “wise in heart” (“pas sophos tē kardia”; Exod 35:10) who are told to make the poles, coverings, furnishings, and vestments for the Tabernacle. Bezalel and Oholiab are named specifically as individuals whom God has filled with a “divine spirit of wisdom and understanding” (“pneuma theion sophias kai syneseōs”; 35:31; see 35:35) to undertake the necessary work. Another indication that Paul sees himself as having Bezalel-​like wisdom is the fact that he describes the materials at his disposal as “gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, and straw” (1 Cor 3:12). This list, with the exception of the last two items, mirrors the list of materials with which Bezalel works expertly. The divine Spirit enables Bezalel “to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood” (Exod 35:32–​33). Similarly, when King Hiram of Tyre sends a workman to help Solomon with the construction of the Temple, he sends Huram-​abi, a skilled artisan in metals and fabrics who is described as a “wise man” (“andra sophon”; 2 Chr 2:13).42 Though the great talents of artists like Bezalel and Huram-​abi are admirable, no one would mistake their skill or wisdom with authority or rulership. Much depends on their work, but the work itself does not depend ultimately on them. Similarly, whatever is skillful or admirable in the work of the apostles must be understood in the context of their identity as subordinates, as men under strict command. Paul’s “wisdom,” then, does not entail an authority to rule. It is closer to being a particular skill endowed by the Spirit and suited to the task of building, which is accompanied by a keen

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and fearful sense that the builders themselves are subject to a higher authority. The ergon belongs not to them but to God. Paul therefore counsels fellow leaders to “choose with care” how they build on the foundation (3:10). There are two points of reference for understanding and evaluating the work of church leaders. The first is the foundation itself, which determines the shape, design, and function of the building. As Paul explains, the “building” is, like the wilderness Tabernacle and Solomonic Temple of old, a divine structure by means of which God dwells among his people (3:16). Builders use appropriate materials and employ their skills to strengthen and beautify the ekklēsia. Through their work, the church becomes an axial structure that unites heaven and earth, the human world and the divine realm. As such, it is also a wisdom structure. Just as the climactic achievement of Israel’s wisest man was to build the Temple, the apostles’ “architectural wisdom” is required to preserve the coherence and holiness of the community as a dwelling for God’s Spirit (3:17). The second point of reference is the eschatological day of judgment. On that day, “fire will test what sort of work each has done” (3:13). Fire is commonly used as a metaphor for judgment in the prophetic writings. In Mal 3:2–​3, however, the Levites at the Temple experience the fire of judgment as a cleansing fire, one that destroys impurities while refining valuable gold and silver.43 This results in a renewed and restored Temple service, in which offerings are “pleasing to the Lord,” as they were “in the days of old and as in former years” (Mal 3:4). Similarly, Paul speaks of fire that either destroys or purifies what church leaders have added to the foundation. The builders themselves are not destroyed in the judgment (3:15), but the application of testing fire to the “work” (ergon) reveals the quality of their contributions. If one’s contributions endure the fire, then one is rewarded; if not, one suffers loss (3:14–​15). In speaking of fiery, eschatological judgment, Paul makes a rather simple point to his Corinthian audience: leaders cannot be judged by humans in the here and now. As in various kingdom parables in the Gospels (for example, the wise and foolish bridesmaids; Matt 25:1–​13), time is an essential condition in the vindication of wisdom. It is only in the end, the eschaton, that the true nature of one’s work and course of life become apparent (see Wisd 5). As that which unfolds in time, judgment is also a divine prerogative. The time of judgment, the moment of crisis, arrives only when God chooses to shine forth (Ps 94:1). Until that time, no human attempt to assay the true worth of human leaders will reach deep enough or burn hot enough to lay bare what is most essential about them. The certainty of future divine judgment renders all human judgments premature, presumptuous, and superficial. Thus, Paul

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concludes this section by enjoining his audience not to harbor any illusions about the wisdom upon which such judgments are founded: “do not deceive yourselves” (3:18). The wisdom that rivals within the Corinthian church claim to possess is limited, misleading, and bound to the present age: “if you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise” (3:18). Quoting the Writings rather than the Prophets this time, Paul restates an earlier theme. In the end, God will expose the wisdom of human leaders as folly: he will “catch the wise in their craftiness” (3:19; see Job 5:13), and he will make it clear that the “reasonings of the wise are futile” (3:20; see Ps 94:11). The verses from Job 5 and Ps 94 return Paul’s discussion to the contrast that he established in 1 Cor 1 on the basis of texts from Isaiah and Jeremiah: human wisdom (ruling knowledge) sets itself up against the divine will, and God acts in judgment to nullify human wisdom. Having created in 1 Cor 3 a space for a limited, subordinated wisdom akin to the inspiration of Bezalel, Paul articulates an understanding of wisdom that is appropriate to the institution of the divine ergon and the creation of the ekklēsia. Yet it is, at the same time, a form of wisdom that reflects the new age inaugurated by the cross. The rulers of this age discredited themselves by crucifying the Lord of glory. Boasting in human leaders is therefore eliminated (3:21); to boast in them would be to imagine wrongly that human authority is reliable or ultimate. The truly wise leader, however, cooperates with the divine project, understanding that all things belong ultimately to God (3:22–​23). For Paul, wisdom belongs to God. It names the “mystery” by which God redeems humanity through the cross (1:23–​24; 2:7) and the skill that God imparts to servants like Paul and Apollos to edify the ekklēsia (3:5, 10). By the former, God nullifies the ruling knowledge of archontes; by the latter, God makes true human wisdom a matter of skillfully and faithfully performing one’s assigned task. If divinely appointed leaders are really servants under authority—​hypēretai, diakonoi, oikonomoi—​then wisdom within human life is not to be understood hierarchically. It cannot be, as Plato and Aristotle portrayed it, the ordering of the many by the wise, enlightened few. It may be instructive here to mark a contrast between Paul’s understanding of authority and the modern, Weberian notion of “charisma” that has its roots in Paul’s writings. Max Weber used “charisma” to refer to an extraordinary power or quality (whether real or apparent) that distinguishes leaders from ordinary people and enables them to dominate their followers.44 Because others regard him or her as special, the charismatic leader is able to break through traditional arrangements and create new communities. Weber’s teacher, the Lutheran church historian Rudolf Sohm, had argued that authority in the early church

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depended not upon laws or duties but upon the recognition of divine power and the “gifts” (charismata; see 1 Cor 12:4) imparted by the Spirit to individuals to serve in particular capacities. He thus saw the ekklēsia as a “charismatic” organization.45 Extending Sohm’s analysis well beyond church history, Weber generalized a “charismatic” principle of authority and used it to identify one of three forms of domination (Herrschaft) found in various societies. (The other two forms of domination are based on traditional authority and bureaucratic control.) Despite Weber’s appropriation of Pauline terminology, his version of charisma differs considerably from Paul’s understanding of leadership in the ekklēsia. For Weber, the charismatic leader compels loyalty by dint of personality and a “mystique of legitimacy” that arises from his power to break with existing norms.46 Paul, however, warns against cults of personality (1:12), pretensions to novelty (4:6), and showy, self-​aggrandizing displays of wisdom (2:1–​4). Instead, “the utterance of wisdom,” the ability to speak appropriately of the divine mysteries (4:1), is but one example of a charisma (12:8) in an array of gifts (charismata) that the Spirit distributes among the faithful for the benefit of the ekklēsia (12:1–​7). Like parts of the human body, each member of the community is a useful and necessary part of a greater whole (12:12–​26). Charisma belongs not to one but to all. Having reframed the relation of leadership to wisdom, Paul instructs his audience to imitate him: “I appeal to you, then, be imitators of me” (4:16). As I have shown, Paul’s “wisdom” is a function of his role as worker and builder. Wisdom belongs to him as servant rather than as ruler. Yet, as he points out, he is the one who first proclaimed the gospel among them. The faith of the community issued from Paul’s preaching: “in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel” (4:15). Though a servant, Paul possesses a certain kind of authority. By resorting to familial language and avoiding the language of rulership, Paul casts this authority in a particular light. As a father, he is “above” the members of the ekklēsia in terms of his authority to discipline them (4:21), but he is fundamentally like his “beloved children” (4:14) in that he shares with them a name, an identity, a common spiritual patrimony, and an inheritance in the coming kingdom. What applies to Paul and other apostles applies equally to all who are in the “family.” If the Corinthians are to live wisely, then, they must follow Paul’s example and be like their spiritual father. But like Paul in what way? The most salient thing about Paul’s example is that he does not grasp at power. He denies that humans have access to a form of knowledge, a “wisdom,” that qualifies some to rule over others. As I have shown, Paul regards the cross as the ultimate indication of this fact. In a human contest for power, some may win. Yet, because injustice is inevitable,

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no matter who wins, all will lose in the end. The cross marks the end to the existing order of things, because it demonstrates that what Plato described as a kind of salvation through wisdom (Rep. 492e) begins with the renunciation of human wisdom itself. The crucifixion of Jesus as Lord of glory (2:8) and his subsequent resurrection from the dead (Rom 1:4) represent the triumph of divine wisdom over human attempts to understand and order life. To preach Christ and him crucified is to boast of divine wisdom. For this reason, it is futile to trust in the wisdom of human leaders, to boast about them (3:21), and to bloviate about their virtues (4:6). As a leader, Paul accepts his position as a man under divine authority. He disregards human opinion and refrains even from judging himself, because it is only the Lord who judges him (4:4). He exhorts the Corinthians, similarly, to refrain from pronouncing judgment on anyone and to live, instead, in expectation of the time when “the Lord comes” and “each will receive commendation from God” (4:5). To be under divine authority is also to understand limits. Speaking of Apollos and himself, Paul encourages his audience to consider what was apparently a well-​known saying: “I have applied all this to Apollos and myself for your benefit, brethren, so that you may learn though us the meaning of the saying, ‘Nothing beyond what is written’ ” (“to mē hyper ha gegraptai”; 4:6). Scholars explain the source and precise meaning of the saying in the latter part of this verse in diverse ways.47 Given Paul’s reliance upon scripture in 1 Cor 1–​3 and his use of gegraptai (“it is written”) to introduce biblical quotations throughout the section (1:19; 2:9; 3:19), however, it seems reasonable to infer that the saying is a warning against going beyond what is written in scripture. Paul intends for the Corinthians to learn from his example what it means to live within a scriptural pattern that emerges from the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. As Paul has drawn on all three divisions of scripture in 1 Cor 1–​4, he demonstrates that, in the case of wisdom, the scriptural pattern is clear. With the exception of “wise men” in the Egyptian court (Gen 41:8; Exod 7:11), the first people in the Torah to be described as wise are the skilled workers who participated in the building of the Tabernacle. Though Solomon was a ruler rather than a worker, his wisdom was manifest, above all, in the construction of the Temple. In contrast to wisdom that aims at the union of God and humanity, earthly rulers obey a wisdom that, according to the Isaiah and Jeremiah, sets itself up against God. Therefore, God destroys the wisdom of the wise and brings low the high and mighty. The Writings also affirm that God catches the wise in their craftiness ( Job 5:13) and exposes the vanity of their thoughts (Ps 94:11). The wisdom situation, as it were, is essentially binary. Divine wisdom facilitates the divine ergon, the

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creation of the ekklēsia on the foundation of “Christ crucified,” while human wisdom aims at some alternative regime. To seek another form of wisdom by which human life may be ordered is to look in vain for a different pattern and to go “beyond what is written.” Life within the scriptural pattern has a distinctive, cruciform shape. The cross indicates that God has nullified the “wisdom of this age” and “of the rulers of this age” (2:6). Yet it also means that God has done so, not by vanquishing the rulers but rather by becoming their victim. The crucifixion of the Messiah at the hands of human powers thus becomes the basis for a new collective in which all forsake the futile, worldly contest for wisdom and power. What holds the collective together is not the superiority of its leaders but the loyalty of each person within the ekklēsia to the “Lord of glory,” who alone is qualified to order human life justly, and who makes people God-​like by enabling them to receive “the Spirit that is from God” (2:12). In this order, Paul can claim to be a “wise master builder” worthy of emulation because his own labors mirror the shame, folly, and lowliness of the cross. Human leaders come last rather than first: “for I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle [theatron] to the world, to angels and to mortals. We are fools for the sake of Christ” (4:9–​10). Paul and fellow apostles are ridiculous “fools,” akin to the lowly mime actors who appeared in the comic “after-​pieces” of public spectacles, enduring “grotesque suffering” as a “source of amusement” for the crowds.48 Paul could scarcely have found a more vivid and fitting comparison for the shame and suffering that the apostles endured in their work as “founders”: like the despised mime actors, the apostles are weak, dishonored, hungry, thirsty, poorly clothed, beaten, homeless, and defenseless (4:10–​ 13). What remains to the Corinthians, then, is to imitate Paul and, indeed, to imitate Christ in accepting the scorn of a world that is still beholden to human wisdom as a competitive path to wealth, honor, and rulership (4:8). The faithful live at the close of the present age (10:11) and, at the same time, within a new order inaugurated by Jesus’s death on the cross. Within this new order, instead of ruling knowledge, there is cooperation with the divine ergon. Instead of competition, there is to be unity and humility. Instead of judgment, Paul calls for patience and forbearance. And in place of a metaphysical order in which the gods are identified with the heights of human strength and wisdom, Paul places himself and the ekklēsia at the bottom, where weakness and folly conceal the strange power and goodness of the crucified God.

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Conclusion Paul wrote the first letter to the Corinthians (or at least the first section of it) in response to a troubling report of factions within the church, which he received from “Chloe’s people” (1:11). His aim, no doubt, was to address this very specific problem and to do so in a manner suited to a particular group of people whom he knew very well. This is clear from the personal and pointed quality of the letter. Paul refers throughout to bits of shared history, and he refers to members of the community by name. In a manner that reflects deep familiarity, he combines sharp irony (and even sarcasm) with warm, affectionate words. It is important to acknowledge, then, that Paul’s discussion of wisdom in this letter was part of an occasional, ad hoc composition that (unlike a putative earlier letter to the Corinthians) happens to have survived. When it comes to interpreting 1 Cor 1–​4 in broader terms, as a discussion of wisdom in some general or universal sense, then, a certain degree of caution is appropriate. Nevertheless, I believe that Paul’s decision, first of all, to ground his criticism of factions in a more fundamental consideration of leadership and wisdom and then, second, to speak of wisdom in binary terms warrants a more capacious, theologically expansive reading. At crucial points, Paul’s discussion seems to float free of the original concerns over schism and to touch rather lofty matters. To make sense of a particular problem, he adverts to what he regards as a universal pattern. It is this aspect of 1 Cor 1–​4, this recourse to central realities like the cross and the eschaton, that makes it a vital text for understanding the fate of wisdom in Christian thought more generally. It is not merely the Corinthians’ fractiousness that matters to Paul but also the extent to which their behavior and attitudes betray a larger and more fundamental misunderstanding of the Christian faith. For reasons that are now clear, Paul saw all of this as a matter of competing wisdoms and thus problematized sophia for subsequent generations. In doing so, he showed that the oddity and angularity of Christianity in the Greco-​Roman world were not the superficial traits of a fledgling movement but rather the reflexes of what seemed to be an inexplicable rejection of that world’s noblest aspirations. Though the Gospel writers do not speak explicitly of a binary opposition between divine and human wisdoms in the way Paul does, they share with Paul a sense that human wisdom has come to an end with the advent of Jesus and the formation of the new Christian collective. Inasmuch as the evangelists portray Jesus as the incarnation of the divine logos ( John 1:14) and as wisdom personified (e.g., Matt 23:34 but see Luke 11:49; Matt 11:28), they exclude

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the possibility that others—​scribes, Pharisees, or sages of any sort—​possess knowledge or authority superior to that of Jesus. In 1 Cor 1–​4, Paul argued on the basis of a scriptural pattern in which human rulers axiomatically act unjustly and oppose God. This pattern, which featured prominently in Paul’s discussion of leadership, is also apparent in the Gospels. Proclaimed kyrios by the angelic hosts at his birth, Jesus presides over the establishment of a divine basileia that gathers in the poor and oppressed of Israel (“sinners and tax collectors”) and offers hope to the nations who, excluded and exploited by the Roman imperial order, are left hungering and thirsting after righteousness. Yet, as the Gospels report, the Jewish leaders delivered Jesus to the Roman authorities, who mocked his claims to lordship and crucified him as a criminal. Both Caiaphas and Pilate reasoned that the price to be paid for the stability of the existing order was the death of Jesus. Yet, in reasoning correctly, they unwittingly precipitated the final collapse of that order, which was signaled ominously by the empty tomb. They did not recognize the true identity of the one they put to death, nor did they understand the divine “mystery” by which his death would ultimately nullify the whole set of beliefs, assumptions, and reasonings by which human rulers perpetuate their own power. Or, in Pauline terms: in crucifying the Lord of glory, the rulers ignorantly displayed the folly of the “wisdom of this age.” Both Paul and the Gospel writers, then, believed that the new Christian collective, whether described as basileia or ekklēsia, must be ordered by a new wisdom. Leaders must regard themselves, above all, as servants. Jesus noted that the “rulers of the nations lord it over” their subjects and dominate them, but he instructed the disciples to become the servants and slaves of those under their authority (Matt 20:25–​27). This is precisely how Paul, the “fool of Christ,” presents himself, citing as evidence the sufferings and indignities that characterize his ministry. Many other things might be said about the new wisdom of the collective. One might comment, for example, on its ethical shape, especially the importance of humility, kindness, and passive resistance to evil. Jesus instructs the disciples to turn the other cheek and to love their enemies. In like manner, Paul blesses when reviled, endures when persecuted, and conciliates when slandered (1 Cor 4:12–​13). As I have shown, integrity is also an essential virtue. In the Gospels, Jesus directs piety away from the pursuit of human praise and toward an awareness of divine judgment, likening it to the sober, single-​ minded progress of a cross-​bearing prisoner on the way to certain death. Paul, similarly, operates under a death sentence (4:9); he cares nothing for human opinions and carries out his work in spite of shame and derision, knowing that it is only God who judges him. Yet what is most striking about this new

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wisdom is the degree to which it is staked on what might be called “personal” knowledge. The new wisdom seems to aim at familiar wisdom goods: proximity to the divine, knowledge of deeper realities, flourishing communal life, and personal virtue. Yet it does so without committing itself to any particular principles, programs, or proverbs. What matters to the Gospel writers is not a set, impersonal path to wisdom but rather the narrative exposition of Jesus’s life and the faith in Jesus that such an account can engender ( John 19:35). Their goal is to make Jesus known, and the single criterion for wisdom is obedience of Jesus’s words (Matt 7:24–​27). In our text, Paul has a great deal to say about the folly of human rulers and their wisdom. Yet, when it comes to offering a constructive account of wisdom, Paul makes a formal distinction (wisdom belongs to God, not to humans) but is otherwise content, it seems, to forgo the details. Whether the specific issue is knowledge, instruction, or ethical behavior, the one who aspires to wisdom need only heed the Spirit of God. God reveals what needs to be known through the Spirit (2:10–​12); the Spirit provides words to articulate divine things (2:13); the Spirit bestows gifts (2:14); and it is by the Spirit that “we have the mind of Christ” (2:16). When Paul criticizes the Corinthians for ethical failures (jealousy and strife), he explains their failure in terms of personal identity and relation rather than as violations of principle: their personal knowledge of Christ is undeveloped and immature, and they are at odds with the Spirit (3:1). It is not the Spirit who supports ethical life, then, but rather ethical life that facilitates cooperation with the Spirit. In the fourth Gospel, Jesus explains that the Spirit will come only after Jesus has returned to the Father. He has more to tell his disciples, but they will learn what they need to know in due course, when the Spirit guides them “into all the truth” ( John 16:12–​ 13). The physical absence of Jesus does nothing to alter the fact that wisdom depends on the disciples’ personal relation to him. What the Spirit hears from Jesus, the Spirit speaks directly to the disciples ( John 16:13). The centrality of the Spirit within Christian accounts of life in the world means that the new wisdom—​if that is indeed what it is—​is dynamic, open-​ended, and coordinated to an inscrutable divine will. The Spirit moves “where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” The wind bloweth where it listeth. To this Jesus adds: “so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” ( John 3:8). It is this dynamism, this concentration on the vital relation between divine personality and human personhood, that distinguishes the New Testament’s presentation of wisdom. When it comes to living with piety and integrity, the issue is not whether the individual’s “devout reason” is, in some general sense, “sovereign over the

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passions” (4 Macc 1:1); what counts instead is the quality of one’s relation to the Christian collective and the Spirit who presides over it. As the present age gives way to the new order of things, it is not wisdom that remains but a small and patient way of being in the world, what Paul calls, simply, “love.” Love lives toward a time when one “will know fully” even as one “is fully known” (1 Cor 13:12). To know is to be wise, but to know and be known, to love and to be loved, is, somehow, to lay hold of wisdom itself.

Summary For Paul and the Gospel writers, “wisdom” is problematic. On the one hand they propound something that is clearly wisdom-​like. The Christian way is a formally coherent way of life that belongs to a specific group of people, one marked by loyalty to Jesus as kyrios. On the other hand the New Testament writers identify the death and resurrection of Jesus with the inauguration of a new form of life in which certain elements of wisdom are explicitly rejected, namely the recognition of human authority based on ruling knowledge and the notion that wisdom derived from such knowledge is adequate to guide and order human life. In keeping with prophetic criticisms of kings and other leaders, the New Testament writers are skeptical of the “wise” and the “powerful” who rule over the many. Their claim that wisdom is fully identifiable with Jesus entails a rejection of human claims to wisdom. It is consistent with a program for human flourishing based instead on solidarity, shared suffering, and sacrificial love. These, in turn, form the basis for a way of life marked less by knowledge than by piety and integrity.

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Conclusion Though I cannot know, I can yet think freedom. —​kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xxviii

Not all things become clearer in hindsight. Some things, in fact, become stranger and more remote. Today, classical and biblical tradition continues to recede from cultural view. Recalling once again Stephen Prickett’s observation that to study a tradition is to place oneself in relation to it (see the introduction), I feel obliged to disclose the position of this book as an inquiry into the roots of classical and biblical tradition from the perspective of someone whose lived experience of that tradition has included both participation in it as student and teacher and, at the same time, a strong, persistent sense that it no longer commands broad cultural assent. The tradition, as I see it, is culturally contested and, with respect to contemporary life, intellectually marginal. Biblical literacy, familiarity with Greek and Roman literature, and knowledge of ancient history have all continued to decline, both among those who are not formally educated and among those who are. In the United States, older programs for “general education,” which once introduced students to the “great questions” or “great books” of the larger classical and biblical tradition, survive in a few institutions of higher learning, and, even then, only as the bailiwick of certain “niche” schools or as the program of a small, recusant minority within the larger academy. In the decades following World War II, leaders in Western countries placed increasingly greater emphasis on scientific education and research. C. P. Snow captured the mood well in his 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures,” in which he criticized the snobbery and insularity of “literary intellectuals” and argued that educators should bridge the gap between the humanities and natural sciences and seek, above all, to orient education toward the improvement of material conditions for all people.1 Given a newer emphasis on the practical and the political, forms of education oriented

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toward a traditional form of inquiry and its antiquated ideals were bound to come under criticism. In an influential formulation of the shift from “traditional theory to critical theory,” Max Horkheimer unmasked the “traditional” descriptive, conceptual, and abstract model of understanding (traceable ultimately to the ancient Greeks but identified also with the Enlightenment) as bourgeois cultural activity arising from and suited to capitalist systems.2 Like Snow, he argued for a (“critical”) mode of theoretical engagement with cultural phenomena that was sensitive to historical context, existentially engaged, and fundamentally oriented toward social justice. Horkheimer thus reinforced Marx’s famous maxim concerning philosophy, that its purpose is not to interpret the world but to change it. Reflecting on the fate of classical education in the middle of the 1950s, Horkheimer pithily described it as something that, even then, had collapsed into contradiction and irrelevance: “what is advertised as useful education for what is useless itself becomes useless, even as self-​positing reason represents what is unreasonable. Where tradition rationalizes itself, it has already ceased [hat sie schon aufgehört].”3 To the extent that a classical and biblical tradition has indeed ceased (aufhören) and grown silent, however, it is possible to listen to it, to “attend to” it (aufhorchen), in a new and different way. Though it is valuable to understand the role of our tradition in historical, genealogical terms, as a discourse at the roots of Western thought, an encounter with the classical and biblical tradition also prompts us to consider whether anything has been lost in the assignment of central questions to independent domains under the authority of what Stephen Jay Gould famously described as “non-​overlapping magisteria.” It is not only science and religion that today have separate programs overseen by distinctive authorities; so too do cosmology and political philosophy, metaphysics and ethics, and other domains of human life once gathered under wisdom. The tradition was oriented toward a spiritual, intellectual, and ethical whole, one that, in contemporary perspective, no longer seems accessible as such. I  believe, however, that traditional pursuits of wisdom retain a spectral presence in modern culture. As I have argued, wisdom names the order by which things cohere, according to which both knowledge and action are measured. It stands for the possibility of attaining an understanding of reality that is at once true, coherent, and normative, of gaining access to a holistic vision of things that unites our knowledge of what is with nonarbitrary convictions about how humans ought to conduct their lives. To the extent that such holism remains intelligible and compelling (even when frustrating and elusive), wisdom may represent more than the “foundations” of modern culture. It may represent one of its chief aspirations as well.

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Wisdom is a program for human flourishing that is ordered to a holistic, authoritative account of reality in its metaphysical, cosmic, political, and personal dimensions. The “metaphysical” comes first in this definition because, in classical and biblical tradition, unseen realities that are difficult to grasp are also the highest and most consequential:  to put it more strongly, they are the best and most real. In terms of the analysis offered in this book, the metaphysical realm is the divine realm. What belongs to the purview and authority of divine beings represents the things that are, in every way, the best things for humans to know. As Aristotle put it, what is “most divine is the most honorable” (Meta. 983a5–​6). Because wisdom has recourse to the metaphysical realm in this sense, it has a vertical or axial dimension by which the “lower” is subordinated to what is “higher.” To be wise is to identify “upward” with what is higher or closer to what is ultimate; to be unwise is to identify “downward” with things that fall beneath the full dignity and stature of humans in the order of being. For the Homeric heroes, “all lies in the lap of the great gods” (Od. 16.129) such that the will of Zeus, for example, creates the conditions and sets the parameters for heroic life. Friendship with the gods is not a matter of knowing what the gods know, for this lies beyond the scope of what is proper to humans. Instead, it is a matter of holding one’s allotted share (aisa) with skill, piety, and heroic virtue, of reaching honorably one’s appointed end within a delimited world. In the Hebrew Bible, there is one God, one creator, who is the “sponsor,” so to speak, of an order in which humans are granted a definitive place. The fact that humans come to be within a world of God’s making means, most basically, that God and the world exist independently of humans. For this reason, wisdom is seen principally as a way of being reconciled or of reconciling oneself to an order that is ontologically prior to human beings, a spiritual and cosmic reality that cannot be remade according to human desire. Because God has created all things “in wisdom” (Ps 104:24), wisdom names the point of contact between human moral and intellectual perception and the world as God made it. To flourish in the world is to live in accord with the wisdom by which it was created. Whether this wisdom is reflected more truly in the “bright” world of Proverbs than in the “dark” experience of Job is an open and important question. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle found Homeric theology lacking, but they did not thereby dispense with the divine realm. They insisted instead that an understanding of the divine realm, one consistent with the life of virtue and a rational and principled search for truth, was essential to a wisely lived life and the full realization of human happiness. Jewish authors like Aristobulus harmonized understandings of wisdom and divinity found in the Hebrew Bible with those articulated by

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Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. To a great degree, it was the prominence given to theology in Hellenistic philosophy that facilitated this harmonization. New Testament authors challenged important aspects of this synthesis, but they did not contest the view that wisdom begins with a recognition of divine authority. They did nothing to overturn the earlier, biblical understanding that God is both creator and judge; nor did they sever the Platonic link between theology and ethics. In proclaiming the crucified Jesus as kyrios and Son of God, they identified wisdom, in a new and dramatic way, with divine self-​offering, but it was precisely a new understanding and experience of God that demanded a new way of life. Second, the cosmic. Wisdom is not a theory or a guide to life that corresponds merely to what a person or group of persons would like to think or do; it is not a proposal rooted in the will. Wisdom is rather a program that fits with some larger understanding of the world, an ethical orientation that arises from what one, through experience and intellectual effort, has come to know about reality. Christine Korsgaard explains how, for Plato and Aristotle, it is a thing’s form that is most real about it. A thing’s form is its “true nature and its perfect nature,” whereas matter is “just the potential for form.”4 Virtue, then, is a matter of growing into one’s form and excelling in one’s nature. Modern moral philosophy, however, is coordinated to an understanding of the world as matter rather than form. Thus:  “the real is no longer the good. For us, reality is something hard, something which resists reason and value, something which is recalcitrant to form.”5 As form must be imposed on the world of matter, so too, she argues, must value be imposed on human life; ethics must be explained in terms of obligation rather than nature. In drawing this contrast between ancient and contemporary attitudes, Korsgaard deftly illustrates the connection between ethics and beliefs about the world. For the classical and biblical authors surveyed in this book, the world is indeed real and good, a harmony of forms rather than what Bertrand Russell called an “accidental collocation of atoms.” Whether portrayed as a union of natural and social orders, as in the “Shield of Achilles” passage in the Iliad (18.478–​607), or as the hospitable cosmic order of Gen 1, the world has a form that cooperates with “reason and value.” The world is not only amenable to wisdom; it is what makes wisdom’s synthesis of intellectual insight and ethical aspiration possible. Plato held that one learns virtue by contemplating the regular motions of heavenly bodies, such that wisdom is, as Brague put it, “an imitation of the world.”6 Likewise, Aristotle perceived a certain homology between the cosmos and the human soul. In explaining how the Unmoved Mover conveys motion to the outer cosmic sphere, the

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Primum Mobile, Aristotle could not, of course, attribute motion to the Unmoved Mover. Instead, Aristotle explained, the Unmoved Mover moves the cosmos by being the object of its desire. He moves it as a beloved “moves” a lover (“kinei hōs erōmenon”; Meta. 1072b).7 Even when the moral constitution of the cosmos is not coordinated to reason, virtue, or love—​but rather to strangeness, particularity, and integrity, as in the book of Job—​the world cannot be left out of account. Though New Testament writers did not place special emphasis on the cosmos as a component of wisdom, they portrayed it as something that cooperates with and bears witness to the divine will (as in Wisdom of Solomon) in a manner that vindicates the righteous. Third, the political or social. As essential as the metaphysical and the cosmic are to classical and biblical accounts of wisdom, the political or social realm is in some ways the most salient. It is the capacity of wisdom to order cities and households that is, according to Plato’s Diotima, “by far the greatest and most beautiful part of wisdom” (Symposium 209a). This is so because it is in the ordering of common life that humans employ skill, virtue, and knowledge to re-​create on a human scale the larger order by which God rules the cosmos. It is in social and political life, then, that humans reproduce by choice a harmony that exists independently of human volition. In doing so, human rulers do not merely obey commands. In addition, they cooperate with wisdom. Given the primacy of the metaphysical realm, wise political rule is essentially derivative. That is, the wise ruler bears authority that is derived from or based on divine sanction. The ruler is thus accountable to fixed standards of reason and justice enforced by God, as Plato argued in Laws. To the extent that a ruler is good or wise, he or she conforms in some way to the divine will. Humans made “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen 1:26) rule over creation in ways that mirror, but remain subordinate to, divine sovereignty. The Homeric heroes belonged to a superior class; they were aristoi distinct from the common run of people (as Odysseus’s rebuke of the nonheroic Thersites in Il. 2.188–​202 indicates). Yet they were constrained by the will of the gods and by social order (themis), itself a gift of the gods intended to promote peace and orderliness.8 Kinship ties are an important element of social order in the epics: Achilles’s only comfort in Hades comes from learning of the martial valor of his son Neoptolemos. Odysseus’s triumph is not his alone: the Odyssey ends, happily, with the salvation and restoration of the hero’s family. In the Hebrew Bible, wisdom is also manifest in harmonious family life, even as it is, by extension, connected with ruling knowledge on a larger scale. Wisdom is thus vindicated when rulers rule justly, but suffering ( Job) and national calamity (Ecclesiastes) also show that wisdom and justice

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are not identical. There are other components of social order, namely respect for limits (Ecclesiastes) and reconciliation ( Job), that also do the work of wisdom. In the Hellenistic period, the national character of wisdom became yet more prominent. Whether one turns to Sirach, the Letter of Aristeas, or Wisdom of Solomon, one sees that the Joban question (“Where shall wisdom be found?” Job 28:12) admits an ethnic answer. Wisdom resides with the Jewish people. It is evident, specifically, in the admirable and virtuous way that divine wisdom orders the Jewish way of life. An understanding of wisdom as something that is manifest in a collective is also central to the writings of Paul and the evangelists. As Plato argued for the dissolution of the traditional family in his ideal city, New Testament authors placed loyalty to the kingdom of God above ties to kinship groups. In addition, critical of human rulers, they announced the divine basileia and the creation of the ekklēsia (including both “Jews” and “Greeks”) as venues for divine wisdom in which life oriented toward “Christ crucified” and ordered by the Spirit brings the futile and competitive quest for ruling knowledge to a close. Fourth, the personal. The personal or ethical dimension comes last because an individual has no share in wisdom apart from a recognition of the metaphysical, cosmic, and social orders in which his or her life is embedded. Seen against the background of a divinely ordered and socially delimited world, the individual (even a royal one) is small, definite, and lowly. As Qohelet says, “God is in heaven, and you upon the earth; therefore, let your words be few” (Eccl 5:1; ET 5:2). The subordinate position of human beings in a larger order explains why piety is central to classical and biblical accounts of wisdom. Achilles and Odysseus reached their appointed ends by cooperating with the gods, notably Athena, goddess of wisdom. Biblical sages identified wisdom with “fear of the Lord,” even as Plato and Aristotle made what Aristobulus called “devout convictions about God” essential to their discussions of sophia and phronēsis. Piety is a central topic in the book of Job and, in many ways, the key to understanding what is at stake for Socrates, both as a truth-​seeker and as a man forced to give an account of his life to his fellow citizens. To be wise, then, is both to recognize one’s place in the order of things and to integrate oneself into it knowingly and willingly. Yet pious wisdom has different colorings. On the one hand this understanding of wisdom can be aspirational. Seen this way, wisdom is a positive achievement consisting in the attainment of virtue or knowledge. In his discussion with Euthyphro, Socrates spoke of wisdom as transmittable knowl­ edge that makes moral action intelligible in terms of what has ultimate value. A  similar understanding also underlies the intergenerational passing on of

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mešalim in Proverbs. Wisdom corresponds to a complete or perfect condition that follows the turning of the soul to the Good (Plato) and long training in virtue (Aristotle). Wisdom is an ideal, and the sage is an exemplar. Wisdom is, on this view, something that attracts and inspires. Seen another way, though, wisdom is not so much an attractive thing toward which one aims as much as it is something that one, finally, “ends up with” by facing up to limits. In this book, I have sought to call attention to this side of wisdom by referring at various points to metaphysical vulnerability, which is not simply an experience of weakness but is the fearful realization that one is subject to hostile or indifferent forces beyond one’s control. It is seen, for example, in the fear, shame, and uncertainty of Adam hiding in the garden. It is the recognition that one is fundamentally at the mercy of fortune, balanced on one side of Zeus’s scale (Il. 8.69; 22.209) or placed on the receiving end of fates to be “poured” from one of his two great urns (Il. 24.537–​533). It is a sense that one is constrained by “times” that one cannot decipher (Eccl 3:1–​11) or situated in the “hand of God” without knowing whether “it is love or hate” that holds one there (Eccl 9:1). The most dramatic example of metaphysical vulnerability in the Hebrew Bible is Job, a righteous man who was nevertheless made to face the terror of a God-​forsaken life. As the cry of dereliction indicates (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34), Jesus similarly experienced on the cross the deep anguish of a man who is utterly alone in his own life. To the extent that life includes the experience of metaphysical vulnerability, wisdom must include a sober realization of limits. Yet understanding and respecting the limits that constrain one’s life—​limits imposed by mortality, misfortune, or an inscrutable divine will—​make it possible to discern the scope and nature of one’s life, to take responsibility for it, and to possess it with clarity and conviction. For this reason, integrity is a touchstone for wisdom in classical and biblical tradition. To review the fourfold account of wisdom is to discern the shape of wisdom in these ancient texts. While this account sheds light on shared elements, it also brings a certain disjuncture into view. The most common way of conceptualizing the disjuncture has been to pit the “classical” (identifiable with Greek culture) and the “biblical” (identifiable with Judaism and Christianity) against one another. This division has a long and familiar history that stretches back to the Hellenistic period. Even an eager harmonizer like Aristobulus was forced to acknowledge that the true path of philosophical piety was accessible in two separate contexts, one in Jewish tradition and the other in a secondary, derivative form identifiable with Plato, Pythagoras, and other philosophers.9 Aristobulus’s claim that the Greeks “stole” philosophy

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from the Jews is thus an early attempt to navigate a “classical-​biblical” divide. Paul reinforced this divide when he juxtaposed a scriptural pattern of divine opposition to human wisdom with the foolish cultivation of eloquence and wisdom sought by “Greeks” (1 Cor 1:17, 22). An oppositional understanding, framed conveniently and memorably as an Athens-​Jerusalem dialectic, informed later Jewish and Christian approaches to wisdom and endured, as noted in the introduction, well into the medieval and modern periods. Though this two-​sided history is crucial to understanding the “double helix” at the heart of Western culture, it is not the only disjuncture within “classical and biblical tradition.” I believe that a close look at wisdom also reveals other ways of thinking about its two-​sidedness. One unfortunate byproduct of dividing between “classical” and “biblical” has been the tendency to superimpose on this division a distinction between “reason” and “faith” or, worse, between “secular” and “religious.” Whatever differences there are among texts and figures treated in this book, none are accurately described in terms of a commitment either to reason or to faith, a program for life that is either religious or nonreligious. Socrates is perhaps the best example of someone who is ambiguous on these terms, but Plato, Aristotle, Qohelet, and the author of the book of Job would certainly qualify as well. Instead of seeing classical and biblical tradition solely in terms of these formal categories, I believe that it may be helpful to mark different sorts of dualism, ones that cut across the “classical” and “biblical” categories. To do so is to raise the possibility that there is more to the “braided” character of the tradition than differing points of cultural origin. It is to ask what the deeper rationale for the formal pairing of “classical and biblical” might have been, to wonder whether the formal pairing itself endured because it reflects a more fundamental dialectic between wisdom perspectives. What, exactly, this dialectic might be is difficult to say, but I offer here, as one possibility, a dialectic between what I will call “lucid wisdom” and “opaque wisdom.” Both perspectives are holistic, integrating all four dimensions of life into a coherent account of wisdom. Yet the two differ with respect to the “themes” or “colorings” of their respective accounts. On the one hand there is a “lucid” account. From this perspective, one sees the fourfold order of things clearly. The metaphysical, cosmic, political, and personal realms are not only harmonious but also homologous, such that personal virtue and social order accord with the workings of divine reason and justice. Though human knowledge can never be complete, lucid wisdom emphasizes the “fit” that exists between reality and the human capacity to apprehend it. One not only perceives cosmic order; one learns from it how to be good and wise. The world, in other words, is hospitable to

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human reason and favorable to moral effort. Knowledge and virtue are therefore important aspects of lucid wisdom, things that keep the “ideal” in constant view. Piety is “optimistic,” consisting in reverence for divine authority and in the intelligent assimilation of one’s life to the order over which it stands. Selfhood is grasped in a principled and aspirational way; it is illuminated by a general understanding of what humans are and, given steady progress toward excellence, what they may become. Among texts and figures discussed in this book, wisdom is presented (largely) as lucid in the Priestly creation account, Proverbs, the speeches of Job’s friends (including Elihu), Wisdom of Solomon, 4 Maccabees, and the writings of Aristobulus, Plato, and Aristotle. On the other hand there is “opaque” wisdom. Opaque wisdom does not deny the existence of order in the world; rather, it emphasizes the limits of our ability to perceive and describe it. The four realms of concern are related to one another, but disjunctively. Therefore, justice, for example, may be ascribed to God or to the gods in some general sense, but the existence of injustice in the social order darkens and destabilizes our view of any putative harmony. Rulers are self-​interested, and humans are prone to irrationality. For this reason, a wise grasp of social order, even if oriented toward some ideal arrangement, is nevertheless conditioned by suffering and the realities of moral failure. Opaque wisdom is attuned to experience; it is sensitive to the ambiguous and uneven ways that experience bears out (or fails to bear out) conventional thought. It therefore regards general knowledge as something that is exceedingly difficult to attain or even, in the final analysis, unavailable. In contrast to lucid wisdom, opaque wisdom does not draw on cosmic order as a source of moral knowledge—​although the whirlwind speeches in Job represent a strikingly ambitious attempt to do so from within an opaque perspective. Cosmic order, though real, is ethically silent. Whereas piety is optimistic in lucid wisdom, it is, from the opaque perspective, prudential. Opaque piety is strongly oriented toward explicit divine commands and the prospect of divine judgment, raising the possibility that piety is self-​serving (as the satan suggests in the book of Job) or part of an attempt to bribe the gods (as Plato says of popular Greek religion). Taking a more sympathetic view, however, one may identify opaque piety with integrity, a mode of divine service that is rooted in personal vocation or identity and is therefore strong enough to withstand persecution, adversity, and even existential doubt. Selfhood is not objectively achieved as much as it is subjectively recognized. One finds features of opaque wisdom in the creation account of J, the epics of Homer, Ecclesiastes, the speeches of Job and the whirlwind speeches, 1 Cor 1–​4, and in the figure of Socrates.

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The point here is not to press a particular distinction between lucid and opaque wisdoms, as though this were the real dialectic at work in these texts. It is merely to provide an example of the way in which classical and biblical tradition, viewed as a singularity rather than a simple pairing of cultural opposites, hosts a dialectic pursuit of wisdom. If the two-​sided tradition is more than a formal designation for a combination of Greek philosophy and Abrahamic religion—​if it generates a particular set of debates about wisdom—​then it merits consideration as a coherent tradition in its own right. A point made in the introduction bears repeating here, namely that the goal of this book is not to harmonize the classical with the biblical or to distill them into a single essential wisdom. The goal is rather to consider what is involved in understanding wisdom from the perspective of an expiring, two-​sided tradition that nevertheless retains a spectral presence in modern culture. One response to a project like this one is to acknowledge the historical role of the tradition but then to bury it, once and for all, in the irrevocable past. Wisdom has had a long life, but that life now draws to an end. A clear-​ minded person, a true friend of wisdom, ought to approach the tradition as one does a sick and dying animal and deliver, quickly and decisively, the coup de grâce. In 1955, French philosopher Raymond Polin called on fellow moderns to do precisely this. In an essay titled simply “Against Wisdom,” Polin first asks whether any people who are wise by traditional standards exist in the modern world—​indeed, whether they can exist “in the present state of affairs.”10 According to Polin, the ideal of wisdom bequeathed to us by the ancients includes three varieties of sage: the all-​knowing man, the completely happy man, and the man of perfect action. Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus have taught us what these ideals involve, but history and experience have taught us that it is no longer possible to be wise in these ways. With respect to knowledge, we see now that we are not, in fact, microcosms capable of grasping a larger cosmic totality because its reality is immanent within us. Instead, we are painfully aware of our own ignorance and our position “in an obscure and confused chaos,” from which we see not “an actually intelligible eternity” but only “an ever changing History.”11 The kind of happiness that Epicurus commended comes from being absorbed into “the harmonious universal organism,” such that one “has only to feel and to enjoy this passive communion.”12 Yet, because one who has done this has also renounced social life, this happiness is morally complacent. And not only this: sagely ataraxia is ill-​suited to restless moderns, who are, paradoxically, happiest when they are least happy, that is, when they are active in the pursuit of ends that continually recede from view. It is the “joys of movement,” not the joys of rest and

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attainment, that keep us going. Finally, there can be no man of perfect action. Though it was once thought that the creative activity of humans could mirror the work of a divine creator, we see now that human action is always contingent, uncertain, and provisional: “man essentially acts without sufficient basis, without secure certitude; his action is essentially limited and imperfect; his results, essentially temporary and incomplete; the order he builds does not embrace the whole world nor bring together the whole of mankind, nor even achieve a perfect intelligibility.”13 For these reasons, Polin maintains that wisdom is utterly incompatible with modern culture. The only wise thing left to do is to “renounce the ideal of wisdom, because we have given up already any belief in a given order in which our life should be integrated. . . . There is no model fit for a human life.”14 The point of life, as Kant taught, is to realize human freedom, and the point of freedom is to invent oneself. For this, one needs strength and creativity, but not wisdom. Though Polin wrote “against” wisdom in 1955, his observations remain relevant in the twenty-​first century. He describes well what ancient wisdom traditions look, feel, and sound like to moderns who do not share the basic worldview or orientation toward life on which these traditions were based. There is no gainsaying his impressions. Over the course of several centuries, ancient wisdom has indeed lost plausibility, and it has done so for reasons that Polin describes. Moreover, Polin is not alone in criticizing wisdom as a failed enterprise. He takes his place in a long line of thinkers—​Descartes, Spinoza, Vico, Hobbes, Kant, and others—​who saw fit to modernize wisdom by rethinking metaphysics, cosmology, political philosophy, and ethics. Yet, despite Polin’s strong opposition to wisdom, his actual renunciation of wisdom is less than total. He is unable, it seems, to banish it entirely. Some of the perspectives that he offers as alternatives to wisdom are attested within the classical and biblical tradition:  for example, realization of ignorance rather than possession of knowledge (Socrates, Qohelet); awareness of historical change as something that blocks vision of an intelligible eternity (Qohelet); the world as chaos and obscurity rather than harmony and clarity ( Job); ceaseless striving for social benefit rather than attainment of sagely tranquility (Socrates, Paul); provisional tasks suitable to one’s life rather than to the construction of worlds (Homer, Qohelet). Polin leaves these perspectives out of account no doubt because he draws his model of wisdom, narrowly, from Stoics and Epicureans, from Aristotle and certain Platonic dialogues. To refer to an earlier distinction, he argues against lucid wisdom. In doing so, though, he resonates with the themes of opaque wisdom. It is possible, then, to understand Polin’s essay not as an attack on wisdom tradition but rather

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as a participation in it—​provided that one understands the tradition, appropriately, as something two-​sided. Another indication that Polin has not left wisdom entirely behind is that, as he acknowledges, the very wisdom ideals he discredits recur in modern thought. In Hegel’s philosophy, Polin sees the return of the “all-​knowing man” who achieves omniscience at the end of history: “it is strange to state that, in modern times, a renewed effort towards absolute knowledge has brought the same conception of the sage into existence.”15 Polin also identifies Marx’s vision of revolution leading to a new humanity freed from material want and social alienation as a program aimed toward producing the ideal man of perfect action.16 Wisdom, apparently, does not die easily. Be that as it may, Polin does indeed leave the orbit of classical and biblical tradition as presented in this book. He reaches “escape velocity” when (like Nietzsche) he denies that there is a larger order into which human life can be integrated and claims that it behooves “every man to invent his own values, to organize his actions in a personal order, to build his original existence with his imperfect creations.”17 A relevant question here is how to describe the “space” for radical human autonomy that exists beyond the bounds of the tradition. Given the prominence of piety and divine authority in classical and biblical tradition, it is not surprising that many have identified the tradition with a “sacred” conception of culture that stands opposed to a modern “secular” one. What it means for a culture to be secular is a large and difficult question. Seen in terms of wisdom, though, one may describe the secular, minimally, as permitting a rejection of traditional belief in the reality of an underlying order. The rejection of this belief, however, is not a simple matter. Aristotle argued in Protrepticus that the claim that “one is obliged to do philosophy” is irrefutable. This is so because someone who denies that a general obligation to do philosophy exists would have to resort to rational argumentation to explain why this is so. In other words, in the very act of denying the obligation to do philosophy he would be forced to philosophize.18 The argument is, perhaps, more clever than profound; it seems more like a trap than a serious response to an important question. Yet it points to what is I  think a real difficulty in a secular rejection of order. To the extent that the secular is understood, historically and conceptually, as the counterpart to the sacred, it responds to the sacred in categories first posited by the tradition. Even when it does so in a negative mode, in order to deny the claims of the tradition, its denials must “map onto” and replace components of traditional wisdom in order to surpass them. The negation derives its force and intelligibility from that which it negates. For an “antiwisdom” to be compelling, it must become a

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new wisdom, a new program for coordinating life in its multiple dimensions. So, for example: because there is no larger order and no final vocabulary to describe it but only a series of undetermined historical happenings, one ought to give up pious illusions and live freely as the creator of one’s own life. An antiwisdom is still a wisdom. As Leszek Kołakowski argues, a total escape from secularity’s sacred counterpart comes—​if it comes at all—​at the cost of an intolerable disorientation: “to be totally free with respect to sense, free of all pressure from tradition, is to situate oneself in a void and thus, quite simply, to disintegrate. And sense can come only from the sacred; it cannot be produced by empirical research.”19 I believe that we have arrived at a particular moment in the story of classical and biblical tradition. As modern engagement with the tradition makes clear, we recognize the frustrations and the failures of its distinctive quest for wisdom. We understand the advantages of a culture oriented away from traditional wisdom and aimed, instead, toward the progressive realization of freedom, autonomy, and the efficient improvement of material conditions. Modern culture offers a new way of being at home in the world, not by assimilating ourselves to a given order but rather by consciously remaking the world in ways that seem good to us. More attractive still is the modern vision of human dignity, which is the dignity of holding beliefs that do not go beyond what we can demonstrate rationally, endorse pragmatically, and describe clearly. These beliefs light the way toward free and prosperous forms of life, such that we are not only satisfied with our own lives but at home peaceably with others. That this arrangement, which took definitive shape in the time of the Enlightenment, has not been as successful, stable, or self-​evident as we once thought is clear from the radical reevaluation to which it has been subjected in the postmodern era. Looking back on wisdom from this vantage point, we feel that the traditional quest for wisdom belongs to a very different form of life. It is not completely alien, but the sense of difference and disjuncture is strong. This quest yields up to our cultural imagination a different kind of person in a different sort of world. Or, to the extent that we can still see the world in the old way, it nevertheless remains what C. S. Lewis called a “discarded image” of the world.20 But is this all that we see? Do we not also sense that our reconstructed world, somewhat like the life-​size map of the empire in Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story, is an impressive artifact, but one that might still be deserted by future generations and “delivered up to the inclemencies of Sun and winters” before falling to pieces?21 In other words, the modern drive to know the world by remaking it may yet produce its own “discarded images.” It now seems fitting to ask whether the effort to produce a

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world cleansed of taboos, organized by bureaucratic rationality, and oriented toward peace, freedom, and distributive justice might, by the dictates of some deeper logic, also yield new forms of oppression, injustice, and superstition. To suggest, as Kołakowski does, that we are facing “the revenge of the sacred in secular culture” may go too far.22 Yet it seems clear that the sacred has not been vanquished but, as Steven Shapin explains, provisionally set aside: “late modern culture appears to be conducting a great experiment to see whether we can order our affairs without a sacred conception of knowledge.”23 The final results of this experiment are yet to be determined. But if Shapin is right, then we are ambivalent about traditional wisdom precisely because we have committed ourselves to producing a new version of it. And if this is true, then we are not finished with wisdom. We are simply in the middle of an argument with it.

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Introduction 1. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1994) , 87. 2. Ibid., 90. 3. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957); Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 4. Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 6. 5. Christine Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) , 1. 6. Ibid., 2. 7. Dariusz Karłowicz, Socrates and Other Saints: Early Christian Understandings of Reason and Philosophy, trans. Artur Sebastian Rosman (Eugene, OR:  Cascade, 2017) , 13. 8. Ibid., 13, 58. 9. Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 10. Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) . 11. Ibid., 70. 12. Ibid., 218. 13. Ibid., 220, 225–​227. 14. C. Kavin Rowe, One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) .

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15. Ibid., 175. 16. Ibid., 6. 17. Stephen Prickett, Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition:  Backing into the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 238. 18. Rowe, One True Life, 184. 19. Ibid. 20. The burden of this book is to illuminate the ethical and intellectual contours of this tradition with respect to foundational texts. Subsequent chapters will argue that the classical and biblical tradition has a distinctive shape and coherence. 21. On this, see James Turner, Philology:  The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 22. Rowe, One True Life, 205. 23. See for example the incisive essay of James I. Porter, “What Is ‘Classical’ about Classical Antiquity?,” in James I. Porter, ed., Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1–​65. On the development of “biblical” authority within early Judaism and Christianity, see Michael Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 24. That there were pagan philosophers conscious of Jewish and Christian claims—​ figures like Celsus, Porphyry, and the emperor Julian—​indicates that “Jerusalem” exerted a certain pressure on “Athens.” But this phenomenon is a secondary response to the apologetic efforts of Christians and Jews who criticized pagan philosophy. 25. Preface to De orthographia, cited in Prickett, Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition, 2. 26. Guy Stroumsa, “The Christian Hermeneutical Revolution and Its Double Helix,” in L. V. Rutgers, P. W. Van der Horst, H. W. Havelaar, and L. Teugels, eds., The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 9–​28; 28. 27. Rowe, One True Life, 244. 28. See Will Kynes, “The Modern Scholarly Wisdom Tradition and the Threat of Pan-​sapientialism: A Case Report,” in Mark R. Sneed, ed., Was There a Wisdom Tradition? New Prospects in Israelite Wisdom Studies (Atlanta:  SBL Press, 2015), 11–​38. 29. See Will Kynes, “The Nineteenth-​Century Beginnings of ‘Wisdom Literature,’ and Its Twenty-​First-​Century End?,” in John Jarick, ed., Perspectives on Israelite Wisdom: Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar (London: T & T Clark, 2015), 83–​108. C h a p t er   1 1. Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 22–​23.

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2. Margalit Finkelberg, “Canonising and Decanonising Homer:  Reception of the Homeric Poems in Antiquity and Modernity,” in Maren R. Niehoff, ed., Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 15–​28; see also A. A. Long, “Stoic Readings of Homer,” in Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney, eds., Homer’s Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 41–​66. 3. Margalit Finkelberg, “Homer as a Foundation Text,” in Margalit Finkelberg and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds., Homer, the Bible, and Beyond:  Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 90. 4. M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 143–​154. 5. J. H. Lesher, “Perceiving and Knowing in the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey,’” Phronesis 26.1 (1981) : 2–​24. Lesher also notes that two other “knowledge” words in the epics, noein and gignōskein, also bear connections to vision and experience (12). 6. Ibid., 21 n. 18. 7. In citing passages from Homer, I will use the translations of Richard Lattimore: The Iliad of Homer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), and The Odyssey of Homer (New York: Harper Collins, 1967). 8. Schol. (D) Il. 1.5, in Martin L. West, trans. and ed., Greek Epic Fragments from the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, LCL 497 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 81. 9. Simon Pulleyn, Iliad Book One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 122. 10. Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis:  Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) . For the description of Thetis in this paragraph, I am indebted to Slatkin. 11. Ibid., 73. 12. Ibid., 103. 13. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the wrath of Demeter threatens the cosmic order. Nothing will grow while she endures intense grief over the abduction of Persephone, carried out by Hades and sanctioned by Zeus. To satisfy Demeter and restore the agricultural cycle, Zeus has Persephone brought up from Hades. He promises Demeter that Persephone will spend two-​thirds of the year on Olympos and one-​third in Hades. In addition, he promises Demeter “honors [timai] . . . in the company of the immortal gods” (Hymn to Demeter, ll. 443–​444; 461–​462). See also Slatkin, Power of Thetis, 91–​96. 14. He resorts again to the threat of force in Il. 8.1–​27. Here Zeus calls an assembly of the gods and forbids them to interfere with his plan by intervening in the war. He threatens to chastise and exile all offenders and reminds them that he is stronger than all of them put together. “So he spoke and all of them stayed stricken to silence” (Il. 8.28). 15. B. C. Dietrich, Death, Fate and the Gods: The Development of a Religious Idea in Greek Popular Belief and in Homer (London: Athlone Press, 1965), 322–​326.

26

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16. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 1, Archaic Greece, The Mind of Athens, 2nd ed., trans. Gilbert Highet (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1945), 7. 17. Oswyn Murray, Early Greece, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 52. 18. There is an interesting parallel between Agamemnon and the biblical king Ahab (1 Kgs 22). Because of Ahab’s sin against Naboth (1 Kgs 21), Ahab is condemned to a violent death by the prophet Elijah. To draw Ahab into war, Yahweh sends a “lying spirit” (1 Kgs 22:22) to Ahab’s court prophets, who then promise Ahab victory. Ahab heeds them but takes the additional, deceptive step of adopting a protective disguise in battle, only to be killed by a random arrow. Agamemnon also appropriates a prophecy in a deceptive way when, for fear of losing soldiers, he misrepresents the dream to the army. See note 19. Both kings added their own deceptive schemes to the deceptions visited upon them. But in both cases, the will of the deity was fulfilled: Ahab died violently, and Agamemnon drew the Greeks into a losing battle. 19. Ronald Knox and Joseph Russo, “Agamemnon’s Test:  Iliad 2.73–​75,” Classical Antiquity 8.2 (1989): 351–​358. The authors compare the actions of Agamemnon to those of the biblical judge Gideon ( Jud 7)  and the laws of holy war in Deuteronomy (especially Deut 20:8), in which those afraid to fight are dismissed from the army. They argue that “Agamemnon’s decision to test the men first is not the impulse of erratic generalissimo, but compulsory themis” (353). Custom required him to give cowards the opportunity to leave. But since Agamemnon does not want to risk losing any soldiers, he turns the customary test into an outrageous suggestion that all give up and go home. “He does this with the calculation that, since it is inconceivable, of course, that the entire army should admit failure and accept disgrace, therefore every man in the army—​the dismissal of cowards having been offered and rebuffed en masse—​will be consequently bound to persevere” (355–​356). 20. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1968) , 5. 21. Ibid., 7. 22. William F. Wyatt, Jr., “Homeric ἌΤΗ,” American Journal of Philology 103.3 (1982): 247–​276; 253. 23. On Patroklos’s desire to excel and Achilles’s decision to send him into battle, see Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Homer on the Gods and Human Virtue:  Creating the Foundations of Classical Civilization (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2014), 163–​178. 24. Wyatt, “Homeric ἌΤΗ,” 264, 275–​276. 25. Note the remarkable passage in book 19 where Agamemnon discusses at length an episode in which Zeus himself fell prey to atē and was tricked by Hera into making Eurystheus lord over Herakles and the other Argives (Il. 19.95–​133).

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26. The nature of the “choice of Achilles” is somewhat unclear, as it is characterized in two different ways in the Iliad. One portrays a general choice between long life without glory and a brief life with renown. The other suggests that Achilles’s motive for rejoining the war is not to gain glory but to avenge Patroklos (Il. 18.114–​116). See Andrea Harbach, Die Wahl des Lebens in der antiken Literatur (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010), 13. 27. Harbach, Wahl, 26. 28. Jaeger, Paideia, 49. 29. Bernard Knox, introduction to Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996), 23. 30. Od. 19.406–​409. Robert Fagles translates line 406 as follows: “so let his name be Odysseus . . . the Son of Pain, a name he’ll earn in full” (Odyssey, 403). For discussion of the name, see Joseph Russo, Manuel Fernández-​Galiano, and Alfred Heubeck, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. 3, Books XVII–​XXIV (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 97. 31. On Odysseus’s offense against Zeus, see below. 32. According to Rainer Friedrich, “The Hybris of Odysseus,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 111 (1991) : 16–​28, Odysseus displays a traditional heroic attitude whereby “Heroic Man usually does as it pleases his megaletor thymos: he follows, as is his wont, the impulses arising from his proud heroic temper” (22). 33. Ibid., 26. 34. Marcel Detienne and Jean-​Pierre Vernant, Cunning and Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Hassocks, England: Harvester, 1978), 22–​ 23; 93 n. 2. 35. The best and famous commendation of mētis and its importance for heroic excellence is found in Nestor’s speech to Antilochus during the funeral games of Patroklos (Il. 23.306–​348). 36. Detienne and Vernant, Cunning and Intelligence, 5–​6. 37. Friedrich, “Hybris,” 22. 38. Ibid., 26. 39. The absence of Athena in the earlier episodes seems odd, given her extensive involvement in the second half of the Odyssey. The poet acknowledges this when he has Odysseus point out to Athena that she went missing after he left Troy (Od. 13.316–​323). Athena’s excuse—​that she did not want to cross Poseidon (Od. 13.341–​ 343)—​seems somewhat weak, as it does not explain why she did not help Odysseus before the encounter with Polyphemos. Though awkward from the point of view of the plot of the Odyssey, the involvement of Athena is consistent with the themes of the second half: deception, foresight, martial victory. 40. Ahrensdorf, Homer on the Gods and Human Virtue, 240–​246. Ahrensdorf criticizes Odysseus for laying aside his own stratagems and obeying Athena: “It is therefore simply astonishing that Odysseus does not deliberate at all concerning whether to kill the suitors, how to kill them, or how to pacify their relatives. Instead, when he

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arrives in Ithaca, he simply puts himself in the hands of Athena, who comes to him and claims that he could trust her since she has ‘always’ stood by him in the past and protected him (13.299–​301)” (244). 41. The notion that mētis and biē are contrasting forms of heroic excellence is alluded to in Od. 8.72–​82, where Demodokos sings of a great quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles. A  scholion notes that the subject of the argument was whether to conquer Troy by mētis or by biē. See Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 42–​58. 42. Friedrich, “Hybris,” 27. 43. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Laocoön:  An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry” (1766), in J. M. Bernstein, ed., Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 95. 44. See Il. 20.47–​53, where Athena fights for the Greeks and Ares fights for the Trojans in the climactic battle leading up to the confrontation between Achilles and Hektor. 45. Omens and prophecies, of course, are means by which humans gain superior forms of knowledge. They are, however, hard to come by and at times difficult to interpret, making them exceptions that prove the rule. 46. On the etymologies of common words for fate, see Dietrich, Death, Fate and the Gods, 11–​13. C h a p t er   2 1. Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1–​9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 58. 2. James L. Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction, rev. ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 50, original emphasis. 3. How best to understand materials traditionally assigned to the Yahwist or J source is a debated question. The issue is whether “J” passages constitute a coherent narrative source (as the traditional documentary hypothesis maintained) or belong to a broader category of “non-​P” materials (as proponents of various tradition-​historical approaches maintain). See Joel S. Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), esp.  53–​67, and Thomas B. Dozeman, Konrad Schmid, and Baruch J. Schwartz, eds., Pentateuch:  International Perspectives on Current Research (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). 4. See, for example, Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, trans. John H. Marks (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), 28, 95–​99. 5. Tanakh:  The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia:  Jewish Publication Society, 1985). Genesis 1:1 in the NRSV is a hybrid. The translation retains the traditional opening “In the beginning” but reverts to a relative understanding: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth . . .”

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6. Genesis Rabba 1:1, cited in James L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible:  A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1998), 45. 7. Saint Augustine, On Genesis: Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees and On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis:  An Unfinished Book, trans. Roland J. Teske (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 148. 8. The next two paragraphs are adapted from an earlier essay: Michael C. Legaspi, “Wisdom Is the Preservation of Life,” in Nicolae Roddy, ed., Festschrift in Honor of Professor Paul Nadim Tarazi, vol. 1, Studies in the Old Testament (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 1–​24. 9. Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 65. 10. Paul Nadim Tarazi, Genesis:  A Commentary (St. Paul:  OCABS Press, 2009), 41–​42. 11. Ibid., 52. 12. See for example Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–​11:  A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 212–​213. 13. On ṭob varaʿ as “good and bad” rather than “good and evil,” see, for example, E. A. Speiser, Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 26. 14. Claus Westermann provides a helpful review of scholarly discussions of “the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 1–​11, 242–​248). 15. So, for example, von Rad, Genesis, 76; Westermann, Genesis 1–​11, 247. 16. Nahum Sarna, Genesis (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 19. See also Malcolm Clark, “A Legal Background to the Yahwist’s Use of ‘Good and Evil,’” Journal of Biblical Literature 88 (1969): 266–​278, esp. 277–​278. 17. The word has a negative connotation in Job 5:12, 15:5 but is seen in a positive light in Proverbs (12:16; 12:23; 13:16; 14:8; 14:15; 14:18; 22:3; 27:12). 18. von Rad, Genesis, 98. 19. Ibid., 76. 20. See comments on the category of “Wisdom literature” in the introduction. 21. James Kugel, “Wisdom and the Anthological Temper,” Prooftexts 17 (1997): 17–​18. 22. For the significance of this idea to early biblical interpretation, see Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 44–​47. 23. The scholarly literature on the personification of wisdom as a feminine being of great power, authority, and antiquity is voluminous. See, for example, Roland E. Murphy, The Tree of Life:  An Exploration of Biblical Wisdom Literature, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 133–​149, 227–​229, 278–​281; Fox, Proverbs, 279–​289, 352–​359; and Alan Lenzi, “Proverbs 8:22–​31:  Three Perspectives on Its Composition,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2006): 687–​714. 24. Prov 1:22–​33; 9:4–​6. See Sir 24; Bar 3:9–​4:4, and Wis 7–​9. 25. With Fox (Proverbs, 287), I take ʾamon as derived from the verb “to nurture.” 26. Kugel, “Wisdom and the Anthological Temper,” 20–​21.

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27. Following here the translation of Fox (Proverbs, 263). 28. On the senses of rešit and teḥillah in Prov 1–​9, see the helpful discussion of Zoltán Schwáb, “Is Fear of the Lord the Source of Wisdom or Vice Versa?,” Vetus Testamentum 63 (2013): 652–​662. 29. See Dermot Cox, “Fear or Conscience? Yir’at YHWH in Proverbs 1–​9,” Studia Hierosolymitana 3 (1982): 83–​90. 30. Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom, 118. 31. Peter Enns, Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2011), suggests that the point of alluding to Solomon (by way of verbal parallels between the name Qohelet and the verb qhl in 1 Kgs 8:1, 22) without actually naming him may be “to get the perceptive reader to ‘think Solomon when you read this’ ” (19). 32. Jennie Grillo (Barbour), The Story of Israel in the Book of Qohelet:  Ecclesiastes as Cultural Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 26. On the difficulties of identifying Qohelet with Solomon, see Tremper Longman III, The Book of Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 4–​8. 33. For a review of scholarly opinions concerning the supposedly nonhistorical character of Ecclesiastes, see Grillo (Barbour), Story of Israel, 1–​2. James Kugel, “Qohelet and Money,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 51 (1989): 47, comments that the book’s “utter lack of what one might call Judean nationalism or consciousness” is “striking.” Like Grillo, Enns also sees the experience of exile as formative for the book (Ecclesiastes 13, 122, 166). 34. Grillo (Barbour), Story of Israel, 3. 35. Ibid., 137. 36. Enns, Ecclesiastes, 122 (original italics). 37. C. L. Seow, Ecclesiastes:  A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 103–​104. 38. Russell L. Meek, “The Meaning of ‫ הבל‬in Qohelet: An Intertextual Suggestion,” in Mark J. Boda, Tremper Longman III, and Cristian G. Rata, eds., The Words of the Wise Are Like Goads: Engaging Qohelet in the 21st Century (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 241–​256. Meek argues that hebel deliberately evokes the figure of Abel (Gen 4) and should thus be understood as frustratingly “Abel-​like” or full of “Abel-​ness”: specifically, injustice and ephemerality (254). 39. See Seow, Ecclesiastes, 101–​102, for a review of suggested translations for hebel. Seow himself proposes that something that is hebel is “beyond human ability to grasp” (102). 40. Translation adapted from NRSV. I have chosen to leave “Qohelet” untranslated. 41. Enns, Ecclesiastes, 9. 42. Norbert Lohfink, Qoheleth:  A Continental Commentary; trans. Sean McEvenue (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), sees 1:18 (“For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.”) as a conventional mašal equivalent to the modern aphorism “No pain, no gain” (48). The idea is that competence in wisdom only comes through great effort and painful discipline. I believe that

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Qohelet quotes this bit of conventional wisdom here in connection with his own experience as a youthful student of wisdom. The relatively unusual vav-​consecutive in 1:17 (“vaʾettenah libbi ladaʿat ḥokmah”) has, in this case, a pluperfect sense: “I said to myself, ‘I have acquired great wisdom . . .’ For I had applied my mind to know wisdom . . .” 43. Grillo (Barbour), Story of Israel, 31. 44. Ibid., 69. 45. See Carolyn J. Sharp, “Ironic Representation, Authorial Voice, and Meaning in Qohelet,” Biblical Interpretation 12 (2004) : 37–​68. Thus Sharp: “and herein may be discerned another thoroughgoing irony in the book of Qohelet:  his particularity expressly cannot underwrite his categorical, universalistic claims in the way that he purports to find it to do. . . . The authority based on ‘Qohelet’s’ experience fails because it is based on caricature” (54). 46. Ibid., 62, 60. 47. Ibid., 63. 48. On Qohelet as an “autonomous” figure, see Craig G. Bartholomew, “The Theology of Ecclesiastes,” in Boda, Longman, and Rata, Words of the Wise Are Like Goads, 367–​386; 371. 49. Elias Bickerman, Four Strange Books of the Bible: Jonah, Daniel, Koheleth, Esther (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 156. 50. Katharine Dell, “Exploring Intertextual Links between Ecclesiastes and Genesis 1–​11,” in Katharine Dell and Will Kynes, eds., Reading Ecclesiastes Intertextually (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), argues that there are no clear intertextual links between Genesis and Ecclesiastes, with the possible exception of Gen 3:19 and Eccl 3:20. She argues further that Qohelet “never mentions the concept of a fall; rather, he presupposes a post-​fall world without using that language” (9). Without arguing for an explicit intertextual relationship between Genesis and Ecclesiastes, I use the description of Qohelet as a “fallen Adam” loosely, as a way of characterizing Qohelet’s own sense of the broken, toilsome, and frustrating character of human experience. 51. See Ruth Sandberg, “Qohelet and the Rabbis,” in Boda, Longman, and Rata, Words of the Wise Are Like Goads, 37–​54; 39–​40. 52. Sharp, “Ironic Representation,” 60. 53. Michael V. Fox, “The Inner Structure of Qohelet’s Thought,” in A. Schoors, ed., Qohelet in the Context of Wisdom (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1998), 225–​ 238; 228–​229. 54. I follow here the translation of James Kugel (“Qohelet and Money,” 43–​44). 55. Stuart Weeks, Ecclesiastes and Skepticism (London: T & T Clark, 2012), 129. 56. Kugel, “Wisdom and the Anthological Temper,” 25. 57. Fox, “Inner Structure,” 232. The “accommodations” and “little meanings” described by Fox resemble the Freudian concept of “auxiliary constructions.” 58. Meek, “Meaning of ‫הבל‬,” 250–​252; Thomas Krüger, “Die Rezeption der Tora im Buch Kohelet,” in Ludger Schwienhorst-​ Schönberger, ed., Das Buch

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Kohelet:  Studien zur Struktur, Geschichte, Rezeption und Theologie (Berlin:  de Gruyter, 1997), 303–​325; 315. 59. Enns, Ecclesiastes, 108; Seow, Ecclesiastes, 369. 0. Grillo (Barbour), Story of Israel, 154–​167. 6 61. Ibid., 166. C h a p t er   3 1. This objection is named after “the satan” from Job 1–​2. 2. For a review of Job in ancient and medieval tradition, see Samuel E. Balentine, Have You Considered My Servant Job? Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015) , esp. 15–​49. 3. Ibid., 48. See also Ann Astell, Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 6–​20. 4. I  follow C. L. Seow, Job 1–​21:  Interpretation and Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2013), 275, and David J.  A. Clines, Job 1–​20 (Waco, TX:  Word, 1989), 4, in taking yare as a perfect rather than a present participle. 5. Sam Meier, “Job I–​II: A Reflection of Genesis I–​III,” Vetus Testamentum 39 (1989): 183–​193; 193. 6. Ibid., 185–​187. 7. Ibid., 188. 8. Ibid., 189–​190. 9. Ibid., 192. 10. When questioned, Eve explains: “the serpent deceived me” (hišiʾani) (Gen 3:13). One can only speculate that if the serpent was indeed sent to test Adam and Eve, then he was punished for resorting to trickery in conducting the test—​not for the test itself. 11. Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford:  Clarendon, 1985), argues that “the disintegration of Job’s inner world is dramatized in 3:1–​13 via a reversal of an image of the created world as found in Gen 1” (321). But if Maier (187–​188) is correct, then “de-​creation” is a feature not only of Job’s lament ( Job 3) but of the prologue as well. 12. It is not permanently reversed, however. When Job is restored in the epilogue, the “posterity” (ʾaḥarit) promised to the man of peace (Ps 37:37) comes into view: “the Lord blessed the latter days [ʾaḥarit] of Job more than his beginning” ( Job 42:12). 13. Meier, “Job I–​II,” 189. 14. On the bitterness and possible blasphemy of Job, see the incisive study of John T. Wilcox, The Bitterness of Job: A Philosophical Reading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 51–​97. 15. Kugel, “Wisdom and the Anthological Temper,” Prooftexts 17 (1997):  24. For a fuller discussion of the exegetical significance of the mourning ritual in the book of

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Job, see David Lambert, “The Book of Job in Ritual Perspective,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134 (2015): 557–​575. 16. Kugel, “Wisdom and the Anthological Temper,” 24. See also Wilcox, Bitterness of Job, 9–​26. 17. On God’s just rule: 8:3, 20. On the perishing of the wicked: 4:12–​14; 8:11–​19; 11:20; 15:20–​35; 18:5–​21; 20: 4–​29. On the prosperity of the righteous: 4:7. On the restoration of repentant sinners: 5:17–​27; 8:5–​7, 20–​22; 11:13–​19; 22:21–​30. There is also in the friends’ speeches another explanation of suffering. While it is certain that the wicked perish, humans may also find themselves suffering for reasons they cannot understand. In view of the great ontological distance between God and humans (4:17–​21; 11:7–​8; 15:14–​16; 22:12–​14; 25:2–​6), people like Job ought to accept sufferings as a form of divine chastisement (5:17). The implication is that even if one is not aware of specific sins for which punishment is warranted, there is a just (if obscure) reason for discipline. The wisest policy, therefore, is to confess sin, repent, and cooperate with divine instruction (5:17–​27). This argument, like others, fails to move Job. 18. Brian R. Doak, Consider Leviathan:  Narratives of Nature and the Self in Job (Minneapolis:  Fortress, 2014). On the dialogue among Job and the friends, see 103–​181. 19. On the analogy between the family of lions in 4:10–​11 and Job’s family, see Doak, Consider Leviathan, 117–​119. 20. Wilcox, Bitterness of Job, 128. 21. Carol Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 128. See also Philippe Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil, trans. M. Kigel (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998). 22. Translation mine. Clines notes that verse 21, with its “unusual staccato rhythm” of short phrases, is “cryptic.” Clines takes the phrase ʾaḥat hi (“it is one”) to refer to Job himself: “what is ‘one’ in v 21 is the man Job—​in his contrasting states; on the one hand, he is ‘blameless’; on the other, he despises his life” (236). If this is correct, as I believe it is, then the feminine forms, ʾaḥat and hi, refer back to Job’s “self ” (nepeš). 23. Note the following usages of tam/​tamim. Cattle or sheep presented for the peace offering must be tamim: neither blind, lame, maimed, nor afflicted with sores (Lev 22:21–​22). The entirety of a single day is described as yom tamim ( Josh 10:13). A vine that is intact is described as tamim (Ezek 15:5). People who act according to their natures, without plan or deliberation, are said to act letummo (singular; 1 Kgs 22:34) or letummam (plural; 2 Sam 15:11). 24. I borrow the phrase “nearness to God” (“qirbat ʾelohim”) from Ps 73:28. Commonly cited as an example of a “wisdom psalm,” Ps 73 contains the reflections of a temple-​ goer troubled by the fact that the wicked prosper. When he enters the temple, he perceives that the wicked will ultimately perish (Ps 73:17–​20). But the psalmist’s deeper consolation is the fact that God is his “strength” and his “portion” (Ps 73:26). He concludes by saying that “nearness to God” is his true good.

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25. Ps 27:2–​4; Ps 73; Jonah 2:3–​7; Isa 38:22. 26. Following here the qere and the traditional rendering of this verse. The ketib has the negative particle lo rather than the prepositional phrase lo (le plus pronominal suffix) as in the qere. The NRSV renders the ketib “See, he will kill me; I have no hope.” 27. Wilcox argues that all four share essential wisdom beliefs: “the friends share Job’s conception of justice and his conviction of God’s omnipotence. They avoid Job’s bitterness and blasphemy by dishonesty, by failing to see the world for what it is; their ‘orthodox theology’ distorts, or expresses a distortion of, their sense of reality. Perhaps behind that dishonesty lie other failures and other differences from Job. But much of their theology, and many of their psychic yearnings, are his” (Bitterness of Job, 83). 28. Seow (Job 1–​21, 34) notes that Elihu uses two different words for knowledge: dea’ for divinely revealed knowledge (32:6, 10, 17; 36:3; 37:16) and daʿat for “other kinds of knowledge” (33:3; 34:35; 35:16; 36:12). 29. Seow, Job 1–​21, 34–​37. Eliphaz’s claim to have seen a vision (4:12–​21) is a claim to divine revelation, perhaps, but it is not a claim to speak divinely inspired words in the way Elihu does (33:1–​4). 30. Many commentators disparage or minimize the role of Elihu in the book. Marvin Pope, Job, Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1965), for example, expresses the view that the Elihu materials are repetitive: “for the most part Elihu’s arguments merely echo what the friends have already said repeatedly, yet he has the effrontery to offer them as if they were novel and decisive” (xxvii). Doak is also dismissive, writing that Elihu “ends up spewing forth uninspired material” and comes off as “awful, uninformed . . . bombastic, repetitive” (177). Newsom attempts a sympathetic reading of Elihu but ultimately sees his formal “act of interruption,” not his material arguments, as his “signal contribution” (233). 31. Note that Elihu is not mentioned in the prologue or the epilogue, or anywhere else for that matter. 32. Job’s pains are traceable to the work of the satan in ­chapter 2. It is possible to see Elihu and the friends as mediators charged with returning Job from “the Pit” (33:24). And Job himself reports that he has received dreams sent from God: “then you scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions” (7:14). 33. A. B. Davidson, The Book of Job, with Notes, Introduction and Appendix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), 72. 34. Doak, Consider Leviathan, 229. 35. See Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 14–​17 (Leviathan in Job and in Ps 104); 53–​55 (the allusion to Leviathan in Gen 1:21). 36. Doak describes the ostriches and jackals described by Job in 31:38–​40 as the “steppeland photographic negatives of the domestic cattle of the prosperous years” (Consider Leviathan, xxiii). I believe the analogy applies as well to cosmic order as portrayed in the whirlwind speeches.

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37. Doak, Consider Leviathan, 218. 38. This translation reflects the suggestion of Dale Patrick, “The Translation of Job xlii 6,” Vetus Testamentum 26 (1976):  369–​371, to render niḥamti ʿal as “repent of ” on the basis of passages where the niphal of this verb in combination with the preposition ʿal means “to change one’s mind about something one had planned to do: Exod. xxxii 12, 14, Jer. xviii 8, 10, Amos vii 3, 6, Joel 22 13, Jonah iii 10, iv 2” (370). Thus, “when Job says that he foreswears dust and ashes, he means that he will remove himself from the physical setting associated with mourning and lamentation and cease what he has been doing from ii 8” (370). 39. See for example Jer 31:31–​34; Hab 2:14; Hos 6:1–​3. C h a p t er   4 1. On this point, see Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 3–​7; 63–​79. 2. This translation is taken from Plato’s Theaetetus, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2004), as are subsequent quotations from this dialogue. 3. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1963), 209, 285–​286. 4. On the Homomensursatz, see, for example, Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1982), 541–​545. 5. Laszlo Versényi, Socratic Humanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 14. 6. Socrates certainly has more in common with the sophists than with the natural philosophers. He explicitly disavowed the kind of elevated knowledge of the cosmos (“things in the heavens and things below the earth”) that was commonly associated with the new class of scientific, antitraditional intellectuals. But the nature of the cosmos was not simply a philosophical adiaphoron as far as Plato was concerned; neither was it unimportant to Socrates, as I will argue below. 7. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1991), 158. 8. See John M. Cooper, introduction to Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997) , xiii–​xiv. 9. Translation of Nicholas P. White in ibid. 10. Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 31. 11. Similarities between Ion and attacks on poetry in “middle” or “later” Platonic dialogues, such as Laws, Phaedrus, or Republic, have suggested to some that the dialogue, taken as a whole, may represent the views of Plato rather than Socrates. While the possibility cannot be ruled out, the attempt here to see whether a conventional activity (in this case, poetry) is based on knowledge resembles Socratic inquiries into possible knowledge underlying rhetoric (Gorgias) and piety (Euthyphro). The critique of poetry found in Apology (22b–​c) is the same one found in Ion.

27

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12. See Albert Rijksbaron, introduction to Plato, Ion, or:  On the Iliad, ed. Albert Rijksbaron (Leiden:  Brill, 2007), 9–​10. Rijksbaron points out that Plato refers to poetry as epipnoia, “inspiration” (Phdr. 265b3) or mimēsis, “imitation” (Rep. 606d3 and 607 b–​c ; Lg. 719c5). He is surely correct in pointing out that the single reference in the dialogue to a technē of poetry (Ion 532c7–​8, where the adjective poetikē clearly suggests technē poetikē) is not in earnest but rather introduced argumenti causa. 13. Translation of Trevor J.  Saunders in Cooper, ed., Plato:  Complete Works. Robert Parker, Miasma:  Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), notes that Plato’s prescriptions are “undoubtedly derived from Attic practice” (113). 14. Translation of G. M. A. Grube in Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works. Subsequent quotations from Euthyphro are also taken from this translation. 15. Euthyphro’s disregard for the distinction between a killing within the household and one outside of it makes him highly unusual. “The son who actually prosecutes his father for causing an unprotected dependent’s death, claiming to fear pollution, is branded thereby as a fanatic” (Parker, Miasma, 119). 16. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1985), 269–​271. 17. On this see Saskia Peels, Hosios:  A Semantic Study of Greek Piety (Leiden:  Brill, 2016), 207–​251. Analyzing all supposed examples of the “semantic paradox,” Peels argues convincingly that in each case hosios does not function as the opposite of hieros and that to understand hosios as “profane” in these passages is mistaken. 18. Burkert, Greek Religion, 270. 19. Ibid., 148. 20. Another word often translated as piety is eusebeia. It is far less common in Euthyphro than hosios. Eusebeia and cognates occur seven times; hosios and its cognates occur fifty times. Laszlo Versényi, Holiness and Justice (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982), cautions against making fine distinctions between eusebeia and hosiotes (2). Another commentator, Mark L. McPherran, The Religion of Socrates (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), regards the two terms as essentially interchangeable (29). 21. Versényi, Holiness and Justice, 76–​77. 22. See Terry Penner, “The Unity of Virtue,” in Hugh H. Benson, ed., Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 162–​184. Penner argues that “virtue is one,” such that the names of specific virtues are in fact different names for the same thing. 23. Mark L.  McPherran, Religion of Socrates, 48–​59. McPherran argues, convincingly in my view, that this formulation of the relation between justice and piety represents a (generalized) version Socrates’s actual view. The formula is not refuted in the elenchus but serves instead as the basis for further discussion: Socrates keeps it “constantly before Euthyphro for the remainder of the dialogue” (48).

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24. Versényi, Holiness and Justice, 104. 25. McPherran, Religion of Socrates, 35 n. 23. 26. This reference to Euthyphro’s verbal reticence need not be taken as ironic praise. Socrates regarded laconic brevity as a mark of ancient wisdom. In the Protagoras, he holds up the Spartans as wisdom exemplars. Though they seem unimpressive in conversation, Spartans can accomplish a great deal with few words. After drawing them out, one finds that they are able to outdo loquacious interlocutors: “pick any ordinary Spartan and talk with him for a while. At first you will find he can barely hold up his end of the conversation but at some point he will pick his spot with deadly skill and shoot back a terse remark you’ll never forget, something that will make the person he’s talking with (in this case you) look like a child” (Prot. 342 d–​e ; translation from Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell in Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works). 27. As Mark McPherran (“Socratic Piety in the Euthyphro,” in Benson, Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates, 220–​241) argues:  “the field of human wisdom comprises the knowledge of human affairs, including the knowledge (fallible) of virtue; it does not extend . . . to the complete and fallible understanding of the definition of piety, since that would require a complete and infallible knowledge of the gods’ ergon” (230). 28. For example, Versényi, Holiness and Justice, 124–​125. 29. Translation from G. M. A. Grube in Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works. All subsequent quotations from this dialogue are also taken from this translation. 30. Translation from M. J. Levett and Myles Burnyeat in Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works. All subsequent quotations from this dialogue are also taken from this translation. 31. Joe Sachs, introduction to Plato’s Theaetetus, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2004), 8. See also Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 165–​166. 32. Versényi, Socratic Humanism, 85–​86. 33. Joe Sachs, introduction to Plato Gorgias and Aristotle Rhetoric, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA:  Focus, 2009), describes the distinction this way:  “Gorgias announces that what he has a knowledge of and a power over are speeches, logoi [449E], and shortly thereafter [453C] Socrates begins to pound away at the singular of that word, as he says over and over again that what he wants to do and they need to do is to follow the logos where it leads” (6). 34. Socrates’s identification of rhetoric as a technē in the opening lines of Gorgias is conventional and preliminary. He eventually argues that rhetoric is superficial and imitative (Gorg. 465b–​466a) and not something that depends on knowledge as a technē does. 35. Translation from Joe Sachs, Plato Gorgias and Aristotle Rhetoric. All subsequent quotations from this dialogue are also taken from this translation, unless otherwise indicated.

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36. Translation from W. R. M. Lamb in Plato: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, LCL 166; (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925). 37. Thomas Aquinas, The Cardinal Virtues:  Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, trans. Richard J. Regan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 124–​125. 38. Roslyn Weiss, Virtue in the Cave: Moral Inquiry in Plato’s Meno (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) . 39. Ibid., 183–​184. 40. Ibid., 170. 41. Ibid., 166. 42. Lorraine Smith Pangle, Virtue Is Knowledge:  The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) , 246. 43. Ibid., 134, 201, 208, for example. 44. Ibid., 208. 45. Ibid., 134. Pangle supplies as references Apol. 28b3–​29a4, 21e3–​22a1, 23c6–​7, and 30c4–​31c3. 46. Ibid. 47. Note Socrates’s elaborate account of divine judgment in the afterlife in Gorg. 523a–​ 527a. Though aware that Callicles will likely dismiss it as a “myth” of the sort that old women tell (Gorg. 527a), he offers it as a story consistent with (though not a proof of ) an absolute imperative to live virtuously in this life. 48. McPherran, Religion of Socrates, 54. 49. Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 176. 50. Ibid., 162. 51. McPherran, Religion of Socrates, 78. 52. Ibid., 81. 53. See for example Theae. 176e, where Socrates speaks of “two patterns” in the world: the divine, which is just and blessed, and the godless, which is unjust and wretched. 54. Versényi, Socratic Humanism, 165. 55. Burkert, Greek Religion, 275. C h a p t er   5 1. Herodotus refers in passing to the Jews, calling them “Syrians of Palestine” and reporting that they adopted the practice of circumcision from the Egyptians (Hist. 2.104:3). 2. Plato’s writings also contain passages in which interlocutors use sophia in a looser, nontechnical sense to refer to general intellectual aptitude, for example, to skill or cleverness (Rep. 365d, 398a, 406b) or some subject in which one gains erudition or expertise (Lg. 644a, 677c). A closer approximation of Plato’s normative account is the false or deficient sophia of the sophists. The sophists claim to possess a transmittable body of knowledge. Because it appears formally to be a sophia,

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Plato’s Socrates refers to it as their “wisdom” (e.g., Rep. 600d). Yet he denies the validity of this wisdom because it is attuned not to being but to the mastery of appearances (Rep. 516c) and to ever-​changing popular opinions (Rep. 493a–​b). 3. Though Socrates is the primary speaker in Republic, I take the Socrates character in this dialogue (as well as Symposium) to be a spokesman for Plato’s views. 4. Translation from Plato, Republic, trans. G. M.  A. Grube and C. D.  C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992). Subsequent quotations from Republic are also taken from this translation. 5. Translation from A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1997). Note that Plato does not distinguish sharply between sophia and phronēsis; the two are, for him, largely interchangeable. See, for example, Rep. 433b, where the familiar list of four virtues has phronēsis instead of sophia (see Rep. 427e). 6. Translation by Trevor J. Saunders in Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works. Subsequent quotations from Laws are also taken from Saunders’s translation. 7. Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 34. 8. See also Timaeus 47b–​c, 90c–​d, where Plato draws on a microcosmic conception of humans, making the ordering, governing power of reason analogous to that of the heavenly bodies. Just as the heavenly bodies move in regular and harmonious ways, so the soul should learn from this how to overcome the irregular, wandering motions of the body and follow the ordered path of virtue and reason. 9. Translation from Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Santa Fe:  Green Lion Press, 2002). Subsequent quotations from Metaphysics are also taken from Sachs’s translation. 10. Throughout book 1 of Metaphysics, Aristotle uses sophia to refer to wisdom. As I  will show, he distinguishes between theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom (phronēsis) in book 6 of Nicomachean Ethics. Though the subject of Metaphysics book 1 is theoretical wisdom, there is one instance in which phronēsis is used in place of sophia (982b26). 11. Joseph Owen, “Aristotle’s Notion of Wisdom,” Apeiron:  A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 20 (1987): 1–​16; 3. 12. Sarah Broadie, “Aristotelian Piety,” Phronesis 48 (2003): 54–​70; 56. 13. Richard Bodéüs, The Theology of the Living Immortals, trans. Jan Edward Garrett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 141–​158. The notion that piety is simply the specific form of justice that pertains to the gods was common (e.g., Euthyphro 12e; see further Broadie, “Aristotelian Piety,” 58 n. 14). 14. Broadie suggests that Aristotle “veils” his definition of piety because a straightforward pronouncement on piety would have been politically risky, and it would have exposed true piety itself to “scandal and ridicule from outsiders” (“Aristotelian Piety,” 69).

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15. Translation from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999). Subsequent quotations from NE are also from this edition. 16. Broadie, “Aristotelian Piety,” 67. 17. Owen, “Aristotle’s Notion of Wisdom,” 9. 18. Translation from Aristotle, Politics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport: Focus, 2012). 19. The report of Clearchus is preserved in Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.176–​183. Translation here from Menahem Stern, ed. and trans., Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, vol. 1, From Herodotus to Plutarch ( Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974), 50. 20. J.-​D. Kaestli, “Moïse et les institutions juives chez Hécatée d’Abdère,” in T. Römer, ed., La Construction de la Figure de Moïse (Paris: Gabalda, 2007): 131–​143; 132. 21. Gregory E. Sterling, Historiography and Self-​Definition:  Josephos, Luke-​Acts, and Apologetic Historiography (Leiden:  Brill, 1992), 76–​77. The account is found in book 40, section 3 of the Historike Bibliotheke of Diodorus; it survives, however, in the Bibliotheca of patriarch Photius (codex 244; ninth century ce). 22. Text and translation of Diodorus, Library 40.3, from Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, 26–​29; hereafter cited according to its place in Diodorus (e.g., Diod. Sic. 40.3.3). 23. Kaestli, “Moïse chez Hécatée,” 138. 24. For a review of scholarly positions, see Sterling, Historiography and Self-​Definition, 80–​87; Sterling himself argues that they are plausibly regarded as authentic (87–​91). R. Doran, “Pseudo-​Hecataeus,” in James H. Charlesworth, ed., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (New  York:  Doubleday, 1985), vol. 2, 905–​918, argues that the fragments in Contra Apionem 1.183–​205 and 2.43 are authentic. More recently, however, Erich Gruen, “Josephus’ Contra Apionem,” in Carol Bakhos, ed., Ancient Judaism in Its Hellenistic Context (Leiden:  Brill, 2005; 31–​51), has declared the inauthenticity of the Josephus excerpts a settled matter (42 n.  28). See B. Bar-​Kochva, Pseudo-​Hecataeus on the Jews: Legitimizing the Jewish Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 54–​121, 143–​181. 25. Text and translation of Josephus, Contra Apionem are from Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, 35–​40. Subsequent citations, however, refer to numbering in Contra Apionem (CA). 26. On the veracity of details in the Mosollamus story, see Aryeh Kasher, “Hecataeus of Abdera on Mosollamus the Jewish Mounted Archer (Contra Apionem I, 200–​204),” in Hubert Cancik, Hermann Lichtenberger, and Peter Schäfer, eds., Geschichte-​Tradition-​Reflexion: Festschrift für Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), vol. 1, 147–​158. 27. A fragment of the treatise on piety is preserved in Porphyry’s De Abstinentia 2.26. See Jacob Bernays, Theophrastos’ Schrift über Frömmigkeit (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1866; reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1979). On the historical and literary connections between Hecataeus and Theophrastus, see Werner Jaeger, “Greeks and Jews: The

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First Greek Records of Jewish Religion and Civilization,” Journal of Religion 18 (1938): 127–​143, and Oswyn Murray and Menahem Stern, “Hecataeus of Abdera and Theophrastus on Jews and Egyptians,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 59 (1973): 159–​168. 28. Text and translation from Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, 10. 29. Bernays, Schrift, 111–​112. 30. Text and translation from Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, 10. 31. On these two understandings of genos, see Michael Satlow, “Theophrastus’s Jewish Philosophers,” Journal of Jewish Studies 59 (2008): 1–​20; 13–​14. 32. Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, 45–​46. 33. Ibid., 47–​52. 34. Bernays, Schrift, 111. 35. “And indeed, says Theophrastus, the Syrians, of whom the Jews constitute a part, also now sacrifice live victims according to their old mode of sacrifice; if one ordered us to sacrifice in the same way we would have recoiled from the entire business” (Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, 10). 36. Bernays suggests that the Jews had a very practical reason for looking for stars: when the stars appeared in the sky, that day’s fasting obligation was ended. Greeks like Theophrastus, though, were predisposed to believe that their observation of the stars had a philosophical purpose (Bernays, Schrift, 115). 37. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom:  The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 86. 38. Satlow, “Jewish Philosophers,” 9–​10, 15–​19. 39. Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, 92. C h a p t er   6 1. Carl R. Holladay, Aristobulus, vol. 3 of Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors, Texts and Translations 39, Pseudepigrapha Series 13 (Atlanta:  Scholars Press, 1995), 74–​75. 2. Elias Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 222. 3. John J. Collins, “Artapanus,” in James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 891–​892; see also John Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 33–​35. 4. Holladay, Aristobulus, 153, 155. 5. Bickerman, Jews in the Greek Age, 230. 6. Holladay, Aristobulus, 185. 7. Ibid., 179, 181. 8. Ibid., 137. 9. Ibid., 163.

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10. Philo, On the Migration of Abraham, describes the divine voice in this way (48–​49). 11. Holladay, Aristobulus, 163. 12. Ibid., 165. 13. See Carl R. Holladay, Orphica, vol. 4 of Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors, Texts and Translations 40, Pseudepigrapha Series 14 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1996), 43–​ 91, 162–​165, 201. 14. See William Sale, “The Popularity of Aratus,” Classical Journal 61 (1966): 160–​164. 15. Holladay, Aristobulus, 171, 173. 16. Ibid., 173. 17. Ibid., 175. 18. Giovanni Rizzi, “Hermeneutic Phenomena in the Translation of Peshitta Wisdom,” in Angelo Passaro and Guiseppe Bellia, eds., The Book of Wisdom in Modern Research: Studies on Tradition, Redaction, and Theology (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 219–​253; 232–​234. 19. See John J. Collins, Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 181–​182; see David Winston, “A Century of Research on the Book of Wisdom,” in Passaro and Bellia, Book of Wisdom in Modern Research, 1–​18; 4. 20. See Michael Kolarcik, S.J., “Sapiential Values and Apocalyptic Imagery in the Wisdom of Solomon,” in Géza G. Xeravits and József Zsengellér, eds., Studies in the Book of Wisdom (Leiden:  Brill, 2010), 23–​36; see Winston, “Century of Research,” 13–​14. 21. For a concise summary, see Collins, Jewish Wisdom, 196–​204. See also David Winston, The Ancestral Philosophy:  Hellenistic Philosophy in Second Temple Judaism, ed. Gregory E. Sterling (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2001), 83–​98; Stella Lange, “The Wisdom of Solomon and Plato,” Journal of Biblical Literature 55 (1936): 293–​302; Luca Mazzinghi, “Law of Nature and Light of the Law in the Book of Wisdom (Wis 18:4c),” in Géza G. Xeravits and József Zsengellér, eds., Studies in the Book of Wisdom (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 37–​59. 22. Giuseppe Bellia and Angelo Passaro, “Infinite Passion for Justice,” in Passaro and Bellia, Book of Wisdom in Modern Research, 307–​328; 316–​317. 23. On the characterization of section 3 as an account of Israel’s paideia, see Moyna McGlynn, Divine Judgment and Divine Benevolence in the Book of Wisdom (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 55, 129–​130, 223. 24. Winston, Ancestral Philosophy, 89–​90. 25. Collins, Jewish Wisdom, 220–​221. 26. Ibid., 219–​220. 27. Moyna McGlynn, “Solomon, Wisdom and the Philosopher-​Kings,” in Xeravits and Zsengellér, Studies in the Book of Wisdom, 61–​81; 61–​62. 28. On the immortality of the righteous, McGlynn (“Solomon, Wisdom, and the Philosopher-​Kings”) cites the explanation of C. D.  C. Reeve, Philosopher-​ Kings:  The Argument of Plato’s Republic (Princeton:  Princeton University Press,

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1997), 110–​115, who pointed out that the relevant distinction is not between what is mutable-​mortal and what is immutable-​immortal: “Reeve has pointed out that this teaching is more complex than the simple equation of changeability and mortality. The substance/​essence (ousia) that fills perishable things is likewise perishable—​as food for the body—​whereas the substance that fills the empty states of the soul is truth, knowledge, wisdom, virtue. The making of a psyche/​soul is filled with substance which is itself immortal and ‘always being,’ like the forms. The closer our instantiation of a form, the closer we are to its eternal properties” (76). 29. McGlynn (Divine Judgment and Divine Benevolence) notes astutely that Wisdom of Solomon transformed the conventional link between wisdom and kingship: “thus, the link between kingship and wisdom is no longer based upon the idea of a gift given at the moment of enthronement, but is seen as the rational choice of the just king. The request that accompanies this moment is no longer a formalized, royal ritual such as enthronement, but one that has eternal implications” (108). 30. On the similarity of these verses to a Platonic formulation (Tim. 34b–​c), see Lange, “Wisdom of Solomon and Plato,” 299–​300. 31. McGlynn, “Solomon, Wisdom and the Philosopher Kings,” 72. 32. In the sixth antithesis (18:5–​25), there is an allusion to the “child” who “had been abandoned and rescued” (18:5). Moses is mentioned as the lone survivor of Pharaoh’s murderous decree, for which the Israelites are later avenged. 33. See, for example, Joachim Schaper, “ΝΟΜΟΣ and ΝΟΜΟΙ in the Wisdom of Solomon,” in Bernd U. Schipper and D. Andrew Teeter, eds., Wisdom and Torah (Leiden: Brill, 2013): 293–​306; Mazzinghi, “Law of Nature,” 39. Mazzinghi spots references to the Torah in 2:12; 16:6; 18:4; 18:9. To this list, Schaper adds 6:4. Mazzinghi also finds allusions to the Torah in 9:17 and 16:11. 34. “Divine law” should be distinguished from “natural law” or a “law of nature.” Mazzinghi (“Law of Nature”) argues persuasively that Wisdom of Solomon reflects an awareness of the Stoic concept of natural law; yet, as he demonstrates, the author avoids specific Stoic terminology in order to distinguish his sense of nomos from that of the Stoics. 35. Christine Hayes, What Is Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) , 94–​139. 36. Ibid., 2. 37. Ibid., 3–​4. 38. Translation of R. G. Bury, Plato:  Laws, Books I–​VI, LCL 187 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926). 39. So Theae. 176e: “my friend, there are two patterns set up in reality. One is divine and supremely happy; the other has nothing of God in it, and is the pattern of the deepest unhappiness.” 40. Note that in 2:12 “law” is parallel to “our training.” The righteous man is said to reproach the rulers for their “sins against the law” and to accuse them of “sins against our training [paideia].” At stake here is not the rulers’ conformity to the Torah but

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their failure to show a decency consistent with their status as refined and educated rulers. 41. McGlynn, Divine Judgment and Divine Benevolence, 110. 42. Ibid., 123. 43. David Winston, The Wisdom of Solomon: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1979), 317. 44. Collins, Jewish Wisdom, 214. 45. Winston, “Century of Research,” 9; Kolarcik, “Sapiential Values,” 36. 46. McGlynn, Divine Judgment and Divine Benevolence, 123. 47. Collins, Jewish Wisdom, 218–​219. 48. See McGlynn, “Solomon, Wisdom and the Philosopher-​King,” 77–​81. 49. Alexander Di Lella (Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira: A New Translation with Notes [New York: Doubleday, 1971]) accepts a date for the translation some time after 117 bce (8–​9). C h a p t er   7 1. David Ford, “Jesus Christ, the Wisdom of God (1),” in David F. Ford and Graham Stanton, eds., Reading Texts, Seeking Wisdom (London:  SCM Press, 2003), 4–​21; 13. 2. Moses Hadas, The Third and Fourth Books of Maccabees (New York: Harper, 1953), 109–​113. 3. See David A. deSilva, 4 Maccabees (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 137–​141. 4. David A. deSilva, 4 Maccabees: Introduction and Commentary on the Greek Text in Codex Sinaiticus (Leiden: Brill, 2006) , 147–​149. 5. Ibid., 148. 6. Ibid., 251. 7. Hadas, Third and Fourth Maccabees, 118. 8. Hadas argues that 4 Maccabees resembles the arguments in Plato’s Gorgias by which Socrates attempts to convince Callicles that the life of justice and reason lived by the true philosopher is more real and more satisfying than the life of injustice advocated by opponents of philosophy (ibid., 116–​118). 9. James D. G. Dunn, “Jesus: Teacher of Wisdom or Wisdom Incarnate?,” in Stephen C. Barton, ed., Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church, and the Contemporary World (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999) : 75–​92. 10. Ibid., 91. 11. Celia M. Deutsch, Lady Wisdom, Jesus, and the Sages: Metaphor and Social Context in Matthew’s Gospel (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press, 1996), 145. 12. Ben Witherington III, Jesus the Sage:  The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994) , 116–​117; see also 383–​384.

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13. Ibid., 201–​208, 386. For analysis and critical evaluation of scholarly paradigms regarding the identification of Jesus with Sophia, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus:  Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet:  Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (New York: Continuum, 1994), 131–​162. 14. Stephen C. Barton, “Gospel Wisdom,” in Barton, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found, 93–​110, 94. 15. Ibid., 98, 108. 16. Ibid., 99, 101. 17. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 152–​153. 18. Barton, “Gospel Wisdom,” 102–​104. 19. Dunn, “Teacher of Wisdom or Wisdom Incarnate,” 86. 20. C. S. Lewis, Mere Chrisianity (New York: Harper One, 2001), 65. 21. Barton, “Gospel Wisdom,” 94. 22. Bruce D. Chilton, “The Kingdom of God,” in Jacob Neusner, Bruce D. Chilton, and Alan J. Avery-​Peck, eds., Judaic and Christian Visions of the Social Order: Describing, Analyzing, and Comparing Systems of the Formative Age (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2011): 229–​244; 229. 23. Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001), 62. 24. John J. Collins, Seers, Sybils, and Sages in Hellenistic-​Roman Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 102, 114. 25. On the “spiritual” or “ethical” understanding of the “kingdom of God” in early Judaism, see Collins, Seers, Sybils, and Sages, 106. 26. Ibid., 114. 27. On the importance of the category of ethnos and the persistence of “ethnic reasoning” among early Christians, see Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race:  Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Buell argues that early Christians “used ethnic reasoning to legitimize various forms of Christianness as the universal, most authentic manifestation of humanity,” offering “Christians both a way to define themselves relative to ‘outsiders’ and to compete with other ‘insiders’ to assert the superiority of their varying visions of Christianness” (2). 28. For a brief discussion of 1 Cor 1 in the thought of Clement and Tertullian, as well as Barth and Tillich, see Francis Watson, “Christ, Community, and the Critique of Ideology: A Theological Reading of 1 Corinthians 1.18–​31,” Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift 46 (1992) : 132–​149; 133–​137. 29. Ibid., 138. 30. For a helpful review of recent scholarship on 1 Cor 1–​4, see Oh-​Young Kwon, “A Critical Review of Recent Scholarship on the Pauline Opposition and the Nature of Its Wisdom (σοφία) in 1 Corinthians 1–​4,” Currents in Biblical Research 8 (2010):  386–​427. See also Timothy A. Brookins, Corinthian Wisdom, Stoic

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Philosophy, and the Ancient Economy (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–​61. Kwon argues in support of the more common view that Paul’s target is rhetoric and Greco-​Roman social values, while Brookins, bucking this trend, argues that Paul’s opposition is philosophical—​more specifically, that Paul seeks to combat a Christian adaptation of Stoic thought. 31. The letter to Philemon is written to an individual, but even this letter is concerned with the church. Not only does the introductory salutation also address the ekklēsia that is in Philemon’s “house” (Philemon 2); the letter also aims at the restoration of Onesimus to the Christian community in Colossae and was likely intended to be read to the ekklēsia as a whole. 32. H. H. Drake Williams III, The Wisdom of the Wise: The Presence and Function of Scripture within 1 Cor. 1:18–​3:23 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 237–​255. 33. The fourth “ego” statement in this verse, “I belong to Christ,” most likely did not reflect an actual faction but was included by Paul to reduce the other three to absurdity. See Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, S.J., First Corinthians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2008), 145; Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, trans. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 33. 34. See Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, 86 n. 17, on the use of hyper and kata in this verse. 35. In his careful and insightful study, Williams has shown not only that Paul quoted directly from the prophets (Isa 29:14 in 1 Cor 1:19; Jer 9:23 in 1 Cor 1:31) but also that Paul’s writing includes “echoes” of Isa 33:18 in 1 Cor 1:20 and of Isa 28:16 in 1 Cor 1:21–​24 (49–​55). Similarly, there is a direct quotation of Jer 9:23 in 1 Cor 1:31 and an allusion to Jer 9:22 in 1 Cor 1:26–​29 (Wisdom of the Wise, 108–​110). Daniel 2:19–​23 is also echoed in 1 Cor 2:6–​11 (166–​168). Williams concludes that in Paul’s multifaceted engagement with earlier biblical texts, “Paul uses Scripture with a high respect for its context” (336). I follow Williams in his identification of the echoes and allusions listed above and concur, too, with his evaluation of Paul’s attention to the larger scriptural contexts of the verses that appear in and inform Paul’s writing. 36. Richard B. Hays, “Wisdom According to Paul,” in Barton, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found, 111–​123; 115. 37. Williams, Wisdom of the Wise, 166–​168. 38. It is unlikely that the phrase in 1 Cor 2:8 has apocalyptic significance, as it does in 1 Enoch. See Jack Freeborn, “Lord of Glory: A Study of James 2 and 1 Corinthians 2,” Expository Times 111 (1999–​2000) : 185–​189; 187. 39. Ibid., 186, 188. 40. Note the prominence of the word ergon in this section: “the work [to ergon] of each builder will become visible” (3:13); “if the work [to ergon] is burned up . . .” (3:15). 41. Fitzmeyer claims that Paul borrowed the phrase sophos architektōn from LXX Isa 3:3, the only other occurrence of this phrase in the Greek Bible (First Corinthians,

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196). This seems unlikely, however, because Isaiah lists the sophos architektōn among the professions whom God will remove from Judah. Identifying with this group of doomed leaders would run counter to Paul’s extended argument about apostolic leadership. It makes more sense, instead, to take explicit references to narratives featuring the Temple and the Tabernacle as the proper context for Paul’s self-​ identification as a “wise master builder.” 42. Huram-​abi is referred to as Hiram in the parallel account in 1 Kings. Interestingly, Hiram is described there as a metalworker who is knowledgeable and technically proficient (“peplērōmenos tēs technēs kai syneseōs kai epignōseōs”; 1 Kgs 7:2) but is not described specifically as “wise.” This may reflect an effort to confine wisdom associated with the building of the Temple to Solomon himself, whose wisdom is a major theme of this section (1 Kgs 3–​7). 43. On the echo of Mal 2:2–​3 in 1 Cor 3:10–​17, see Williams, Wisdom of the Wise, 291–​300. 44. See for example Max Weber, “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 245–​252. 45. Christopher Adair-​Toteff, Fundamental Concepts in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 135–​138. 46. Philip Rieff, Charisma:  The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken from Us (New York: Vintage, 2007), 120. 47. See Fitzmeyer, First Corinthians, 215–​216, for a review of the ways this saying has been understood by scholarly interpreters. 48. Laurence L. Welborn, “Μωρὸς γένεσθω:  Paul’s Appropriation of the Role of the Fool in 1 Corinthians 1–​4,” Biblical Interpretation 10 (2002): 420–​435; 429, 434. C o n c lus i o n 1. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory:  Selected Essays, ed. M. O’ Connell (New York: Continuum Press, 1999), 188–​243. 3. “Die als nützlich verteidigte Bildung furs Nutzlose wird selbst nutzlos, wie andererseits die sich selbst setzende Vernunft die Unvernunft darstellt. Wo Tradition sich rationalisiert, hat sie schon aufgehört.” Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, ed. Alfred Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main:  Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), 275. 4. Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996) , 2. 5. Ibid., 4. 6. Brague, Wisdom of the World, 34. 7. See C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 113.

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8. M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 79. 9. Carl R. Holladay, Aristobulus, vol. 3 of Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors, Texts and Translations 39, Pseudepigrapha Series 13 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 153, 155. 10. Raymond Polin, “Against Wisdom,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 16 (1955) : 1–​17; 3. 11. Ibid., 6, 7. 12. Ibid., 10. 13. Ibid., 14. 14. Ibid., 16. 15. Ibid., 5. 16. Ibid., 13. 17. Ibid., 16. 18. See Aristotle, Protrepticus or Exhortation to Philosophy, trans. and ed. D. S. Hutchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson (www.protrepticus.info), 4–​5. 19. Leszek Kołakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 73. 20. Lewis, Discarded Image. 21. Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 325. 22. Kołakowski, Modernity, 63–​74. 23. Steven Shapin, Never Pure:  Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 258.

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295

Index of Ancient Sources

Hebrew Bible Genesis 1, 50–​51, 101, 106 1:1–​2:4a,  48 1:2, 87 1:21, 102 1:26–​30,  51–​53 1:27, 183 1:28–​30,  90 2:23, 88 2–​3,  52 2:4b–​25,  49 2:7, 52 2:8, 15, 52, 53 2:16–​17,  53 2:20, 57, 106 2:23, 57 3, 146 3:1, 55 3:1–​24,  49 3:5, 22, 54 3:6, 55, 57, 90, 91, 106 3:7, 54, 89 3:10, 63, 89, 106 3:14–​22,  56 3:22, 90 3:22–​24,  52 22:1, 2, 54 41:8, 239

Exodus 1–​17,  180 6:6, 197 7:11, 239 20:18, 174, 175 23:19, 49 25:9, 235 34:26, 49 35:10, 235 35:31–​35,  235 Leviticus 2:12, 49 17:11, 207 Numbers 11:25, 170 Deuteronomy 1:39, 54 4:12, 174 4:26, 222 4:33, 174 4:36, 222 5:23–​26,  174 9:1–​7,  215 11:10–​17,  222 32:6, 217

296

296 Joshua 24:27, 222 1 Samuel 12:17–​18,  222 2 Samuel 19:35, 54

Index of Ancient Sources 27:1, 49 28:1, 49 51:2, 78 50:33, 71 Ezekiel 17:22–​23,  216 34:17–​31,  218

1 Kings 3:9, 197 4:22–​28,  197 4:32, 66 4:33, 185 12:4, 197 17:1, 222

Micah 6:1–​2,  222

Isaiah 2:4, 218 5:1–​7, 226, 234 8:14, 229 28–​33,  227 28:15, 228 28:16, 229 29:13, 228 29:14, 228, 229 58:6, 219 61:1–​2,  219 63:16, 217 64:3, 230 64:8, 217 65:17, 230

Psalms 10:2, 4, 62 21:12, 62 25:21, 89 37:7, 62 37:37, 89 73:28, 72 82:8, 218 94:1, 236 94:2, 218 94:11, 237, 239 104, 58, 101, 102, 106 104:24, 58, 247 104:26, 102 104:27, 90 139:20, 62

Jeremiah 8:8–​9,  228 9:13, 228 9:15–​16,  228 9:22–​25,  228 9:23, 229 10:12,  58–​59 17:17–​18,  78 25:31, 218 26:1, 49

Malachi 2:10, 217 3:2–​4,  236 3:14–​15,  236

Job 1–​2, 86–​91,  92 1:1, 85, 88 1:1–​5,  86 1:3, 88 1:5, 87, 88 1:8, 85, 86, 88, 97, 103, 104 1:9, 86 1:12, 87

297



Index of Ancient Sources 1:13–​22,  89 1:21, 89, 91 1:22, 87 2:3, 88, 96, 97, 103, 104 2:6, 87 2:7–​10,  89 2:11–​13,  92 2:9, 90, 96 2:10, 87, 89, 90–​91 2:13, 92 3, 99 3:25, 106 4:3–​6,  96 4:17, 94 5:12, 62 5:13, 237, 239 5:17, 94 5:22–​27,  101 5:27, 93 6:4, 94 8:8–​10,  93 8:11–​20,  101 9:5–​9, 95, 101 914–​24,  96 9:21–​22, 82, 96, 104, 269n22 9:33–​35,  95 10:16, 95 11:7–​11,  95 11:13–​20,  95 12:4, 95 12:7–​8,  101 13:1–​3,  95 13:3, 95 13:13–​19,  95 13:15, 97 13:24, 95 15:5, 62 17:6–​16,  107 19:25–​27, 95, 97, 104 21, 85, 95 22:4–​5,  94 23:5–​7,  95 23:15–​16,  106

26:11–​14, 96, 101 27:5, 97 28,  82–​83 28:12, 250 28:28,  97–​98 31:6, 97 31:40, 99 32–​37,  98 32:1, 99 32:8–​10,  98 32:11–​15,  99 32:18–​22,  98 33:4, 98 33:8–​11,  99 33:13, 100 33:14–​20,  100 34:17–​20,  100 34:31–​32,  100 35:7–​8,  100 36–​37,  101 36:3–​4,  98 36:5–​12,  100 36:24–​33,  100 37:12–​13,  100 38–​41, 101, 106 38:1–​3, 101, 106 38:23, 101 38:26, 101 38:30, 101 38:38, 102 39:30, 102 40:4, 107 40:7–​9,  101 40:19, 102 41:1–​10,  102 41:25, 103 41:34, 103 42:1–​6,  107 42:3, 104 42:5–​6, 97, 101, 104, 106, 271n38 42:7–​8,  104 42:7–​17, 86, 91 42:8–​9,  105

297

298

298 Job (cont.) 42:10, 105, 106 42:11, 105 42:12–​13,  105 42:15, 104 Proverbs 1–​9,  80 1:1–​6,  47 1:7, 63, 106 1:10, 66 1:10–​19,  107 1:20–​21,  64 2:7, 89 2:10–​19,  82 3:7, 89 3:13–​17,  63 3:18, 57, 88 3:19–​20,  64 4:5–​9,  63 4:7, 49–​50, 106 7, 107 7:4, 64 8–​9,  102 8:1–​3, 64, 107 8:12, 62 8:13, 63, 89 8:22, 64, 102 8:22–​23,  173 8:22–​31, 59–​60, 101, 106, 212 8:30, 64 8:33, 35–​36, 60 9:1–​6, 62, 106 9:10, 63 10:1, 66 14:16, 89 16:4, 90 16:6, 63, 89 24:3–​4,  62 25:2, 90 Ecclesiastes 1, 69

Index of Ancient Sources 1:1, 65 1:2, 67 1:3, 67 1:4–​11,  78 1:12, 66 1:12–​14, 68, 70 1:16, 65, 76 1:17–​18, 75, 76 2:1, 67 2:4–​11,  78 2:10, 70, 78 2:11, 67 2:12–​17,  78 2:13, 75 2:14, 75, 77 2:15–​16, 70, 75 2:19, 70 2:21, 70 2:24–​26,  77 2:26, 75 3:1–​8, 70, 251 3:9–​11, 70, 71 3:10–​22,  77 3:11, 73 3:14, 71, 74 3:22, 78 4:1–​3,  66 4:4, 71 4:9, 12, 71 4:17–​5:6,  71–​72 5:1, 250 5:6, 74 5:17–​18,  78 5:18–​20,  77 6:2, 70 7:2, 82 7:4, 75 7:10, 75 7:11, 75 7:12, 75 7:16, 76 7:19, 75 7:23, 76

29



Index of Ancient Sources 8:1–​5,  75 8:10–​15,  77 8:12–​13,  74 8:16–​17, 76–77, 82 8:23–​24,  46 9:1, 251 9:2, 74 9:7–​10,  77 9:9, 78 9:15, 75 9:18, 75 10:9,  75–​76 10:10, 76 11:2, 77 11:6, 77 11:7–​10,  77 11:8, 78 11:10, 67 12:1, 79 12:1–​8,  78 12:8, 67 12:9–​11,  66 12:13, 73, 79 12:14, 74, 81, 218

Lamentations 1:2, 71 Daniel 2:19, 230 2:21–​22,  231 4:10–​12,  216 2 Chronicles 2:13, 235 Deuterocanonical /​Apocryphal Books Wisdom of Solomon 1:1, 182 1:6, 195 1:16–​2:24,  182 2:2, 182 2:7–​8,  182

2:10, 182 2:11, 183, 190 2:12, 188, 190 2:13, 183, 188 2:14–​15,  183 2:23, 183 3:13–​19,  184 3:4, 183 3:5, 183 3:8, 184, 196 4:1, 183 4:3, 184 4:10–​15,  184 5:15–​23,  184 5:20, 193 6, 184–​185 6:4, 188, 190 6:12, 198 6:18, 188, 190 6:21, 196 6:24, 196 7, 231 7:1–​6,  185 7:7, 185, 212 7:11, 185 7:17–​20,  185 7:23, 195 7:27, 185 8:7, 185 8:14–​15,  197 8:17, 185 8:18, 185 8:19–​20,  186 8:21, 169, 186 9:4, 192 9:4–​11,  190 9:5, 188, 190 9:7, 196 9:8, 187 9:9, 181 9:10, 187, 192 9:11, 192 9:12, 197

299

30

300 Wisdom of Solomon (cont.) 9:14, 181 10:15, 192, 196 10:16, 188 11:1, 188 11:1–​14,  194 11:15–​12:27,  195 11:16, 193 11:24, 180 11:24–​26,  195 12:10, 195 12:12–​14,  195 12:13, 195 12:16, 195 12:19, 192, 195 14:16, 188, 190 15:14, 192 15:18, 192, 193 16:1, 193 16:1–​4,  194 16:5–​14,  194 16:5–​29,  194 16:6, 188, 190 16:17, 193, 200, 223 16:25, 193 17:1, 193 171–​18:4,  194 17:2, 192, 196 18:4, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 18:5, 193 18:5–​25,  194 18:9, 188, 190–​191 18:14–​16, 190, 193 18:15, 190 19:1–​9,  194 19:6, 193, 223 19:13–​16,  195 19:16, 197 Sirach Prologue, 198 1:14, 198 1:16, 198

Index of Ancient Sources 14:22, 198 19:20, 199 24:10–​11,  199 24:12, 214 24:12–​17,  199 24:23, 199 38:24, 198 39:1–​3,  198 39:4, 198 39:5, 198 44:1, 199 45:5, 199 2 Maccabees 1:10, 171 5–​7,  205 4 Maccabees 1:1, 208, 209, 243–​244 1:17, 208 1:18, 208 1:33–​34,  208 2:5–​6,  208 2:8–​13,  208 2:21–​23,  208 5:16–​18,  208 6:27–​29, 206–​207 9:6, 206 9:9, 206 10:10–​11,  206 11:24, 206 12:12, 206 13:9–​17,  206 15:25, 206 15:29, 206 17:6, 206 17:21, 207 17:22, 207 18:11–​19,  206 New Testament Matthew 1:1, 215

301



Index of Ancient Sources 1:23, 213 2:9–​10,  222 4:17, 215 5, 213 5–​7,  220 5:3, 220 5:17, 203, 213 5:21–​30,  220 5:45, 218 6:1–​6,  220 6:32, 220 6:33, 220 7:21, 215 7:24, 214 7:24–​26, 214, 243 8:18–​22,  215 8:27, 223 9:36, 219 10:1–​4,  215 10:19–​20,  221 10:37, 222 10:38, 221 11:28, 241 12:31–​32,  216 12:42, 212 13, 215 13:1–​23,  216 13:11, 211 14:25, 223 15:32, 219 16:16, 215 16:19, 215 18:21–​35,  220 20:25–​27,  242 20:26, 220 20:28, 207 21:20–​22,  223 21:38, 231 22:1–​14,  218 22:14, 215 22:21, 217 23:34, 241 25:1–​13, 216, 236

25:14–​30,  216 25:32–​45,  219 25:53, 215 26:28, 207 26:39, 220 27:45, 223 27:46, 251 27:51, 223 Mark 1:14, 215 4:1–​20,  216 4:11, 211, 215 4:30–​32,  216 4:41, 223 5:18–​19,  215 6:34, 219 6:48, 223 8:2, 219 10:21–​22,  215 10:43, 220 10:45, 207 11:20–​26,  223 12:17, 217 13:11, 221 13:34, 216 14:36, 220 15:33–​39,  223 Luke 1:74, 207 2:11, 215 2:35, 206 2:40, 210 2:52, 210 3:8, 206 4:16–​30, 218, 219 4:26–​27,  218 5:1–​11,  223 6:17–​49,  220 6:20, 220 7:11–​17,  223 7:36–​50,  218

301

302

302 Luke (cont.) 8:4–​15,  216 8:25, 223 8:43–​48,  223 8:49–​56,  223 11:31, 212 11:49, 241 12:11–​12,  221 12:32, 218 13:18–​19,  216 14:15–​24,  218 14:26, 222 14:27, 221 15, 218 19:1–​10,  218 19:11–​27,  216 19:13, 216 20:25, 217 22:29, 218 22:42, 220 23:44–​45,  223 24, 203 24:44, 206 25:26, 220 John 1:1–​3, 50, 223 1:14, 241 2:1–​11,  223 3:3–​7,  215 3:8, 243 3:16, 218 5:22, 219 6:19, 223 8:18, 218 8:39, 206 9:1–​7,  223 10:30, 218 11, 223 12:27, 220 13:12–​17,  220 14:7, 219 14:28, 219

Index of Ancient Sources 16:12–​13,  243 18:36, 215 19:25–​27,  206 19:35, 243 21:4–​8,  223 Acts 2:22–​23,  231 5:41, 206 9:2, 203 17:6–​7,  202 17:30, 232 Romans 1:4, 239 3:25, 207, 231 5:8, 231 9:33, 229 11:26–​28,  225 15:7–​12,  225 16:1, 226 1 Corinthians 1:7, 233 1:10, 224, 226, 233 1:11, 224, 241 1:12, 226, 238 1:17, 227, 252 1:18–​25,  227 1:23–​24,  229 1:26–​28,  230 1:26–​31,  228 1:19, 223, 228, 239 1:23–​24,  237 1:24, 229 1:20, 224 1:25, 233 1:26, 229 1:31, 229 2:1, 227 2:1–​4,  238 2:2, 225, 233 2:3, 230

30



Index of Ancient Sources 2:6, 240 2:6–​10, 230, 232 2:7, 226, 233, 237 2:8, 231–​232, 239 2:9, 239 2:10, 231, 232, 243 2:12, 240 2:14, 243 2:16, 226, 243 3:1, 243 3:3, 226 3:5, 234, 237 3:7, 234 3:9, 226, 234 3:10, 234, 236, 237 3:11, 235 3:12, 235 3:13, 236 3:16, 236 3:17, 226, 235, 236 3:18, 226, 233, 237 3:19, 237, 239 3:20, 237 3:21, 224, 227, 233, 237, 239 3:22–​23,  237 4:1, 234, 238 4:4, 239 4:5, 239 4:6, 227, 238, 239 4:8–​13, 240, 242 4:14, 238 4:15, 238 4:16, 238 4:19–​20,  227 4:21, 238 6:9–​10,  225 10:11, 226, 240 12:1–​7,  238 12:4, 238 12:8, 238 12:12–​26,  238 13:12, 244 15:24–​28,  225

16:19, 226 Galatians 1:2, 226 5:20–​21,  225 Colossians 2:15, 206 Philemon 2, 226 James 2:1–​13,  232 5:11, 86 Homer Iliad 1.1–​7,  21–​22 1.3, 5, 22 1.5, 22 1.62, 64, 26 1.70, 26 1.122–​129,  28 1.162, 28 1.184–​187,  27 1.277–​281,  26 1.311, 26 1.396–​404,  23 1.420, 23 1.514–​516,  23 1.518–​519,  23 1.565–​567,  24 1.192, 28 1.213–​214,  28 1.218, 28 1.239–​244,  28 1.284, 29 1.421, 28 2.6, 29 2.19, 29 2.75, 29 2.150–​151,  29

303

304

304 Iliad (cont.) 2.185–​187,  26 2.188–​202,  249 2.323–​329,  22 2.350–​353,  22 4.18–​19,  24 4.62–​64,  24 4.163–​168,  22 5.222, 21 5.857, 19 5.902–​906,  19 6.208, 27 8.69, 43, 251 9.113, 31 9.115–​119,  30 9.312, 32 9.410–​416,  33 9.512, 31 9.613–​614,  32 9.646–​647,  32 9.697–​608,  31 11.783, 27 16.39, 31 16.96, 31 16.684–​693,  31 16.688, 20 16.805, 31 17.176, 20 18.433, 23 18.478–​607,  41–​43 18.821, 19 19.28–​36,  28 19.85–​94,  30 22.209, 43, 251 24.527–​533, 43, 148, 251 Odyssey 1.1–​10,  33–​34 1.8, 35 1.22, 35 1.34, 34 1.35, 34

Index of Ancient Sources 1.60–​62,  34 1.65–​67,  34 1.74–​75,  35 3.268–​270,  43 4.379, 20 4.382, 123 4.468, 20 5.18, 38 5.24, 38 5.203–​213,  33 8.498–​520,  36 9.41–​61,  35 9.96–​104,  35 9.172–​176,  35–​36 9.318–​320,  44 9.364, 37 9.408, 36 9.410, 36 9.479, 38 9.504, 37 9.525, 37 10.332–​542,  36 11.601, 139 12.127–​134,  41 12.313–​326,  41 12.415–​419,  41 12.446–​447,  41 12.488–​491,  41 12.538–​540,  41 12.563–​564,  40–​41 13.137, 39 13.287–​295,  39 13.296–​310,  38–​40 13.386, 39 16.129, 44, 247 21.291–​304,  31 22.411–​417,  40 23.125–​126,  36 Plato Apology 19b, 125

305



Index of Ancient Sources 19b–​c,  114 20d–​e,  125 21a–​22e,  125 21d, 126 23a–​b,  141 28d–​e,  127 28e, 143 29d, 141 30e, 141 31c, 113

Crito 46b, 143 46b–​47a,  142 53c, 143 Euthydemus 280a–​281d,  136 Euthyphro 3c–​d,  122 4b, 122 4b–​c, 116–​117 4e, 122 5d–​e,  118 5e–​6a,  118 6a, 119 6a–​b,  122 6d, 118 8c–​d,  116 9b, 122 11b, 119 11e, 119 12e, 119 12e–​13a,  140 13c, 120 13d, 234 14b, 120, 124 14c, 121 14d, 122–​123 14e, 123 15b, 121

15c–​d,  123 15d, 122, 123 15e–​16a,  121 Gorgias 438b–​c,  130 447c, 129 456d–​457c,  129 460a–​461a,  129 462c, 129 469c, 221 484a–​b,  130 485d–​e,  130 486b–​c,  131 486d, 130 487c–​d,  131 487e–​488a,  131 491b, 132, 135 491e–​492a,  132 492e, 132 493c, 133 499b, 132 500c, 114, 131 500c–​d,  132 501b, 132 502c, 132 503a–​b,  132 503e–​504a,  133 504d, 132, 133 505c, 133 506d, 133 507a, 133 507a–​b, 134, 140 507c, 134 508a, 109, 137 520a, 136 522d, 142 527e, 134 Ion 530b, 114 532d, 114

305

306

306 Ion (cont.) 534b, 115 536a–​b,  115 541b–​d,  115 542b, 114 Laws 689d, 167 713a–​714e,  189 714a, 189 714c, 189 715d, 189 715e–​716a,  190 865d, 116 885b, 149 886b, 149 886c–​d,  149 886d–​e,  149 889b, 149 889c, 149 889e, 149 890b, 149 891c, 149 891e, 150 892a, 150 896a, 150 897c, 150 899b, 150 902a, 150 902e, 150 903c, 150 906b, 150 909d–​910c,  186 Meno 99c–​d,  137

Index of Ancient Sources 318a, 113 319a, 113 349b, 136, 140 349d, 134–​135 351a, 135 352b–​c,  135 356c–​357b,  135 356e, 136 359b, 136 360d, 136 Republic 376a–​377a, d, 148 377a–​c,  148 378c, 148 383c, 149 416c–​417b, 161–​162 427e, 147 428b, 147, 204 428e–​429a,  147 433b, 185 434d–​441c,  152 443d, 152 443e, 152 485b, 152 487a, 152, 186 487d, 151 497b, 152 492a, 152 492e, 153, 239 500b–​c,  151 521c, 153 Sophist 231b, 113, 121

Phaedo 118a, 143

Symposium 209a, 147, 249 209e, 144, 160

Protagoras 315c, 139

Theaetetus 148e, 126

307



Index of Ancient Sources 150c, 126 150c–​d,  127 152a, 136 155d, 109 172d, 109 175e, 110 176b, 183 176e, 279n39 209e, 128 210c–​d,  128

Aristotle Metaphysics 980a, 153–​154 982a, 154 982b9–​10,  154 982b12–​14,  155 982b21–​22,  155 982b24–​26,  155 982b27, 155 982b25–28, 155 982b30–​31,  156 982b33–​983a3, 156, 184 983a, 212 983a5–​6, 156, 247 983a11–​13,  156 983a10–​11,  156 1072b, 249 Nicomachean Ethics 1140b5–​7,  157 1140b18–​19,  158 1140b31–​32,  158 1141b6–​7,  158 1141b23–​24,  159 1144a3–​5,  158 1144b19–​20,  158

307

1145a20, 186 1177a20–​27,  156 1177b28, 157, 186 1178b22–​24,  156 1179a23–​25, 156, 186 1179b21–​27,  159 Politics 1253a27–​29,  156 1277b27–​28,  159 Other Contra Apionem ( Josephus) 1.183, 162 1.187, 189, 163 1.183–​205,  162 1.190–​191,  163 1.198–​199,  163 1.201–​205,  163 2.16–​42,  217 2.43, 162 Historike Bibliotheke (Diodorus Siculus) 17.54.5, 144 40.3, 187 40.3.3, 161 40.3.4, 161, 162 40.3.6, 161, 162 40.3.7, 162 40.4–​5,  161 Praeparatio Evangelica (Eusebius) 13.12.1, 172 13.12.4, 175 13.12.6, 176 13.12.8, 178 13.12.10–​11,  173

308

309

Index

Abraham, 46, 54, 176, 206, 209, 218 Achilles, 19, 21–​23, 25, 41, 43–​45, 74, 249 and Agamemnon, 26–​33 Adam, 52–​57, 63–​64, 73, 88–​91, 105, 106, 218 Agamemnon, 21–​22, 34, 43 and Achilles, 26–​33 Alexander, 144–​145, 160, 169 Alexandria, 169, 172, 179, 198, 199 andreia, 134–​136, 161, 185, 194, 208 Antiochus IV, 205–​206, 209 Apollo, 21, 26–​27, 127, 128 Aratus, 176–​177, 199 Ares, 19, 42 aretē, 27–​28, 36 Aristeas, Letter of, 10, 169–​170 Aristobulus, 10, 12, 170–​178, 181, 191, 247 and Plato, 172–​173, 175 Aristophanes, 114 Aristotle, 77, 153–​160, 167, 184, 186, 247, 248, 256 See also wisdom Arnold, Matthew, 3 atē,  29–​32 Athena, 28, 42, 193, 202, 250 and Odysseus, 29, 34, 38–​40, 263n39 Athens, 113, 141, 143, 153

“Athens and Jerusalem,” 10, 14, 252 Augustine, 4, 50, 202 Barton, Stephen, 210–​211, 213 Bernays, Jacob, 164, 165 Berossus, 172 Bible, 18, 168 Bickerman, Elias, 73, 172, 173 biē, 36, 40, 44 Boethius, 10 Borges, Jorge Luis, 257 Brague, Remi, 6–​7, 114, 151 Briseis, 21, 27, 30, 31 Broadie, Sarah, 156–​157 Burkert, Walter, 117, 143 Callicles, 130–​134, 136–​137, 149 Calypso, 33, 45 Cassiodorus, 10 charisma, 237–​238 Chilton, Bruce, 214 Chryseis, 21, 26 Chryses, 21, 26, 43 Cicero, 1, 2 Circe,  40–​41 Clearchus, 159–​160, 165 Clement, 171, 178, 224 Cochrane, Charles Norris, 3

310

310 Collins, John, 172, 180–​181, 196 conscience, 63 cosmic order, 45, 175, 193, 222–​223, 248–​249,  253 in Hebrew Bible, 48, 51, 56, 58–​59, 84–​85, 94, 101–​103, 105 in Plato, 137, 150–​151, 167 cosmos, 178, 181, 193, 196, 222–​223 See also wisdom Crenshaw, James, 48, 65 Crito, 142–​143 cross, 221–​222, 229–​232, 239–​240, 242 Cynics, 196, 215 David, 65, 80, 197, 209, 215 Demeter, 24, 261n13 Demetrius, 171–​172 deSilva, David, 207 Detienne, Marcel, 37 Deutsch, Celia, 210 Doak, Brian, 93–​94, 102, 103 Dodds, E. R., 30 Dunn, James, 210, 211–​212 Ecclesiastes, book of, 12, 46, 64–​81 and exile, 66–​67, 78–​80 See also wisdom Egypt, 144, 160, 163, 169, 179, 180, 192, 198, 227 ekklēsia, 225–​229, 232–​242, 250 Eleazar, 205–​209 elenchus, 109, 113, 115, 118, 121, 137, 141 Enlightenment, 7, 15, 257 Enns, Peter, 66–​67 Epicureanism, 202, 254, 255 epistēmē, 20, 135, 147, 158 ergon, 120, 123, 140–​142, 204, 234–​236, 239–​240 eschaton, 106, 184, 236, 241 Eusebius, 171, 174 Euthyphro, 115–​125, 178, 204, 234 Eve, 52–​57, 73, 91, 106

Index exodus, 171, 191, 192, 195–​197, 198, 200 Ezekiel the Tragedian, 171 fear of God, 63–​64, 71–​74, 79, 198–​199 in Job, 86–​87, 88–​89 Finley, M. I., 19 Ford, David, 203 Fox, Michael, 47, 77 Genesis, book of, 12, 22, 73, 78 chapters 1–​3, 48–​57, 80, 87–​91 Gilgamesh, 22, 40, 54 Gorgias, 129–​130 Grillo (Barbour), Jennie, 66, 70, 78 Hayes, Christine, 4–​5, 188–​189 Hays, Richard, 228–​229 Hazony, Yoram, 5–​6 hebel, 67–​69, 72, 77, 79 Hebrew Bible, 12, 46–​47, 168 See also wisdom Hecataeus, 12, 145, 160–​163, 166, 168, 170, 187 Hegel, G. W. F., 256 Hektor, 19, 21, 31, 43 Helen, 22, 24, 43 Hellenistic Judaism, 10, 12, 144–​146, 201 See also wisdom Hephaistos,  41–​44 Hera, 21, 24, 28 Heraclitus, 33, 110 Herodotus, 18 Hesiod, 18, 110, 111, 148 hieros, 117–​118 hokmah, 58, 203 Holladay, Carl, 171 Holy Spirit, 211, 235, 240, 243–​244 Homer, 11–​12, 110, 114, 146 heroic ideals, 27–​28, 44–​45, 112 portrayal of the gods, 17–​21, 247 See also wisdom Horkheimer, Max, 246

31

Index hosios, 117–​118, 124–​125, 142, 148, 178, 186 hubris, 35–​38, 43, 121 hypēretikē, 120, 140, 234 Iliad, 12, 19–​33 “Shield of Achilles,” 41–​44, 248 image of God, 51 injustice, 71, 190, 238 integrity, 112, 139, 142–​143, 152, 205, 208, 220, 244, 251 See also tummah Ithaka, 33, 37, 38 J source, 48–​49, 53–​54, 87–​88, 253, 264n3 Jaeger, Werner, 33 Jerusalem, 66, 79, 161, 205, 228 Jesus, 13, 203–​204, 206–​207, 209–​226, 229–​235, 238–​244 Job, book of, 12, 34, 82–​108, 220, 247, 249 Elihu, 98–​101, 104, 270n30 friends, 92–​98, 99, 269n17 Leviathan, 102–​103 See also wisdom Josephus, 162–​163, 217 justice, 116–​117, 119, 129, 134, 152, 185 divine, 190, 194, 195 Kalchas, 21, 22, 26–​27 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 245, 255 Karłowicz, Dariusz, 5 kingdom of God, 214–​220, 225, 229, 242, 250 knowledge, 46–​48, 98, 113–​114, 178 and character, 26–​33, 135–​136 of good and evil, 54–​57, 73, 91, 107 human and divine, 20, 25, 76, 83, 125–​126, 156, 230 ruling, 53, 147, 154, 184, 227, 230, 231, 233, 238 and virtue, 111, 136, 138, 147

311

and wisdom, 43–​45, 61–​62, 80–​81, 92, 105–​108, 136–​137, 153–​156 Kołakowski, Leszek, 1, 257, 258 Korsgaard, Christine, 248 Kugel, James, 58, 60, 61, 77 Kynes, Will, 15 law divine, 4–​5, 162, 167, 186–​192 human, 188–​190, 191 Mosaic (see Torah) Lessing, Gotthold, 41 Lewis, C. S., 213, 257 logos, 50, 110, 129, 133, 139, 177, 196, 209, 241 Lycurgus, 160, 235 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 7–​9 Manetho, 160, 172 Marx, Karl, 246, 256 McGlynn, Moyna, 187, 195 McPherran, Mark, 140–​141, 272n23 Megasthenes, 165 Meier, Sam, 87–​89 Meletus, 121, 125, 128 Menelaos, 20, 24, 123 metaphysical vulnerability, 13, 45, 63–​64, 79–​81, 106–​107,  251 mētis, 36–​41, 44 miasma, 116–​117, 123 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 166, 167–​168 moros, 34, 44 Moses, 160–​162, 170, 172–​176, 187–​188, 199, 235 Mosollamus, 163 Nemo, Philippe, 94 Nestor, 21, 26, 29, 31, 44 New Testament, 12–​13, 202–​244 See also wisdom Newsom, Carol, 94 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 256

312

312

Index

Odyssey, 12, 17, 33–41 Odysseus, 19, 26, 29, 43–​45, 74, 249 and Athena, 29, 34, 38–​40, 263n39 in the cave of Polyphemos, 35–​38 character of, 33–​34 and gods, 34, 41 name, 34 return to Ithaka, 38–​40 and suffering, 34–​35 oikoumenē, 144, 146, 168, 170 Orpheus, 175–​178, 199 Owen, Joseph, 155 paideia, 180, 186, 195 Pangle, Lorraine Smith, 138 parables, 215–​216 paredros, 190, 192, 193, 200 Paris, 24, 43 Patroklos, 19, 28, 31–​33 Paul, 4, 5, 202–​205, 207, 223–​244 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 3–​4 Peri Hypsous, 17, 19 Phaiakians, 35, 38 philanthrōpia, 122, 184–​185, 195–​196, 218 Philo, 4, 10, 188, 222 philosophy, 110, 130–​131, 142, 246, 248, 256 and ancient Judaism, 164–​166, 170–​174, 185, 199, 208–​209, 251–​252 and Hebrew Bible, 5–​6 and Paul, 224–​225 in Plato, 109, 141, 151–​153 Phoinix, 27, 31 phronēsis, 77, 149, 161, 185, 194, 208 in Aristotle, 157–​159, 167 piety, 45, 63, 73, 81, 194 in Aristobulus, 173–​178 in Aristotle, 156–​157 in Euthyphro, 111, 115–​125 Jewish, 164–​166 in Job, 83–​84, 86–​87, 107 in New Testament, 205, 221–​222, 244 in Plato, 149–​150 in Socrates, 111, 140–​143

Plato, 18, 146–​153, 167, 204, 222, 248 and Aristobulus, 172–​173, 175 on gods, 148–​150, 247 and Socrates, 109, 112–​113 and Wisdom of Solomon, 179, 181–​182, 185–​186, 190, 193, 200 See also wisdom Platonic thought, 146, 171, 174, 248 poets, 114–​115, 148, 156 Polin, Raymond, 254–​256 Polus, 129–​130 Polyphemos,  34–​40 Poseidon, 34–​35, 37, 40 Prickett, Stephen, 8, 245 Priestly source, 48–​54, 87, 253 Protagoras, 110, 113, 134–​136 Proverbs, book of, 12, 47–​48, 57–​64, 232, 247 See also wisdom Pythagoras, 155, 172, 175, 178, 251 Qohelet. See Ecclesiastes von Rad, Gerhard, 56 reason, 50, 63, 85, 177–​178, 196, 208, 246, 248–​249,  275n8 and Aristotle, 154, 157–​158 and Plato, 150–​151, 167, 189 and Socrates, 124, 138, 141, 143 rešit, 49–​50, 57–​60, 63, 102 rhetoric, 129–​131, 212, 225 Rowe, Kavin, 7–​11, 13 Sabbath, 173, 192 Sarna, Nahum, 54–​55 satan, 85–​87, 88, 97 Satlow, Michael, 166 Septuagint, 168, 169–​170 serpent, 55–​56, 62, 73, 88 Shapin, Steven, 258 Sharp, Carolyn, 72–​74 Sirach, book of, 188, 197–​200, 232 See also wisdom

31

Index Slatkin, Laura, 23 Snow, C. P., 245, 246 Socrates, 109–​143, 175, 178, 181, 204, 208, 221, 234 as midwife, 126–​128 and Plato, 109, 112–​113 See also wisdom Sohm, Rudolf, 237 Solomon, 65, 80, 200, 212 in Wisdom of Solomon, 180, 185–​187, 192, 196–​197 Solon, 160 sophia, 15, 147, 173–​174, 185–​186, 198, 201, 208 in Aristotle, 154–​157, 158, 167, 275n10 in New Testament, 202, 203, 224–​225,  241 in Socrates, 122, 125, 136 sophists, 110, 113, 125, 134 sophos, 149, 154, 157, 167, 233, 234, 235 sōphrosunē, 133–​136, 185, 194, 208 Stoicism, 8–​9, 146, 177, 202, 208 and Aristobulus, 171, 173, 174, 178 and Wisdom of Solomon, 179, 193, 196 Stroumsa, Guy, 10 technē, 115, 129, 132, 133, 135, 154 Temple, 71–​72, 161, 163, 187, 197, 200, 239 in New Testament, 204, 210, 226, 235–​236 Tertullian, 5, 10, 178, 224 themis, 23, 249, 262n19 Theophrastus, 12, 145, 163–​166, 168, 170 Thrasymachus, 130, 149, 189 timē,  27–​28 Thetis, 21–​24, 28, 32 Torah, 73–​74, 79–​80, 174, 178, 190–​192 in New Testament, 204, 210, 213–​214 and wisdom, 187–​188, 198–​200, 208–​209 See also wisdom tradition, 58, 84–​85, 199–​200 classical-​biblical, 2–​11, 251–​258

313

tree of knowledge of good and evil, 52–​57 tree of life, 52, 57 Troy, 21, 22, 24, 35 tummah, 12, 90, 96–​99, 102–​105, 107 unity of virtues, 119, 134–​136 Vernant, Jean-​Pierre, 37 Versenyi, Laszlo, 128 virtue, 112, 119, 147, 159, 186, 198, 208 and knowledge, 111, 136, 138, 147 in New Testament, 216, 220 in Wisdom of Solomon, 181, 194–​196 Vlastos, Gregory, 140–​141 Watson, Francis, 224 Weber, Max, 237–​238 Weeks, Stuart, 76 Weiss, Rosslyn, 137–​138 Wilcox, John, 94 Williams, Drake, 230 Winston, David, 180 wisdom in Aristotle, 12, 153–​159, 167, 181 attributed to Jews, 159–​168 belonging to a collective, 145, 179, 192, 196, 197–​200, 204 and cosmos, 49–​52, 59–​60, 101–​103, 192–​193, 222–​223 definition of, 11, 247–​251 divine, 82–​83, 141, 156–​157, 181, 225, 231, 233, 239–​240 in Ecclesiastes, 64–​65, 74–​78, 83 in 4 Maccabees, 207–​209 human, 125–​139, 223, 230, 231, 237, 239 in Gospels, 210–​223 in Hebrew Bible, 79–​81 in Hellenistic Judaism, 12, 145, 201 in Homer, 43–​45 in Job, 12, 83–​84, 106–​108 lucid, 252–​254, 255 in New Testament, 12–​13, 202–​204, 243–​244

314

314

Index

wisdom (cont.) in 1 Corinthians, 223–​244 opaque, 253–​254, 255 and order, 58, 81, 151, 173, 191 personified, 59–​61, 192–​194, 198–​199, 210–​214,  241 in Plato, 12, 146–​153, 167, 181 in Proverbs, 59–​64, 80 pursuit of, 1–​2, 112, 122–​124, 181, 213, 246 in Sirach, 197–​200 in Socrates, 12, 122–​143 and Torah, 187–​188, 198–​200 in Wisdom of Solomon, 180, 184–​186, 190, 192–​197, 200–​201

wisdom literature, 15, 47, 58 Wisdom of Solomon, book of, 12, 170, 178–​201, 218, 222–​223 and Plato, 179, 181–​182, 185–​186, 190, 193, 200 See also wisdom Witherington, Ben, 210, 211 wonder, 146, 155 Wyatt, William, 32 yitron, 67–​72, 79 Zeus, 29, 41, 119, 148, 177–​178, 199 as judge, 34–​35, 190 will of, 18–​25, 28, 32–​33, 247