Wurzeln der Weisheit: Die ältesten Spruche Israels und Anderer Volker (review)

Hebrew Studies 34 (1993) 226 Reviews WURZELN DER WEISHEIT: DIE ALTESTEN SPRUCHE ISRAELS UND ANDERER VOLKER. By Claus Westermann. Pp. 186. Gtittingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990. Paper, DM 29,80. Emeritus Professor Westermann continues his enormously productive career with this short monograph on oral wisdom within and without the biblical book of Proverbs. The book raises important methodological issues in the study of Proverbs, especially in regard to the sociology of ancient Israel and the opposition of orality and literacy. Westermann proceeds inductively to explore individual sayings before placing them in larger thematic groups. His point is that wise sayings and admonitions, as universal human phenomena, are essentially oral genres which function in various social situations. The vitality of proverbs lies in their multivalent applicability. Thus insights gained from anthropological studies of proverb performance in pre-literate traditional societies give us valuable comparative material for understanding this biblical book. Westermann also seeks support for his enterprise in the work of Carole R. Fontaine (Traditional Sayings in the Old Testament; Sheffield: Almond Press, 1982). There are brief appendices of sayings from traditional societies collected by anthropologists as well as from ancient Near Eastern texts. In contrast to the discursive literary character of the Instruction genre (Lehrgedicht) of chaps. 1-9, the pithy sayings of chaps. 10-31 (sic, p. 10) were orally transmitted, until their collection by the men of Hezekiah (Prov 25: I). But their proper character was obscured when they were recast as two-line literary proverbs. Westermann's aim is to recapture the original oral, social functions of the sayings now collected in Proverbs. Thus Westermann's enterprise is essentially one of Formgeschichte. For him the oral sayings are more interesting than the actual literary product before the reader. His analysis leads him to denote two types of wisdom in the Solomonic Collections. First is the practical, active wisdom of oral culture, both saying and admonition. Second is a later, more abstract, "objective" Weisheit an sich. This later wisdom appears in the admonitions to learn, in the praise of Wisdom, and in the antithetical sayings concerning righteous and wicked (Proverbs 10-15). These abstract concepts bespeak a "late," that is, postexilic, instructional setting, and reveal no real societal function (p. 71). Wisdom has become didactic. Thus a fundamental break in the concept of wisdom is evident between chaps. 1-9 and 10-31 (sic, evidently the antitheses of chaps. 10-15 are to be grouped with 1-9, pp. 121- Hebrew Studies 34 (1993) 227 Reviews 122, cf. pp. 91-101). Unlike oral sayings, the later stage lacks humor (p. 134). The transition from the first to the second, "late" stage of wisdom is effected by multifarious expansions of the original, oral "simple saying." Such an opposition of "eady" and "late" is puzzling, however. The various genres found in the book of Proverbs have histories that stretch for millennia both before and after the book of Proverbs. Oral sayings continue today, not only in "traditional" societies, but also in modern, Western communities. Paremiologists such as W. Mieder have shown that even cultural elites such as doctors, lawyers, and academics employ oral sayings to facilitate community and work. With the exception of the righteous/wicked antitheses which already bespeak a didactic setting, Westermann generally considers the two-line sayings to be artificial literary expansions of one-line utterances, a move which impaired their original potency (e.g., pp. 31, 35, 51-52, 64, 77). These bicola, occasionally tricola, distort the original genius, character, and function of the oral utterances, which Westermann reconstructs. Westermann's circular quest for oral sayings and admonitions leads him to analyze many sayings into two unrelated parts and to choose one as the original nugget of oral gold. Moreover, the ancient redactors' work of collecting sayings in literary form does not help us interpret them, since the genre is fundamentally oral and each saying must speak for itself, apart from its literary context. Thus, the redactional grouping of Yahweh and royal sayings at the beginning of the second half of the first Solomonic Collection (16:1-15) tells us nothing about their meaning (p. 135). Consequently, Westermann also ignores significant redactional groupings such as the proverb...