Ancient Wisdom: An Introduction to Sayings Collections

This volume provides a critical survey of compendia of proverbial wisdom from the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, including those of the earliest Jewish and Christian traditions. Walter Wilson situates these collections in their particular temporal contexts, summarizing their often complex and

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sometimes indeterminate textual histories. He seeks to identify the distinctive “moral agenda” of each collection, its particular perspectives on life and ethical priorities in its own time and place. He also compares the kinds of educative work these texts undertake by cross-referencing formal and thematic parallels in his footnotes, offering a taxonomy of the different genres or species of such sapiential discourse and supplying a bibliography of up-to-date translations and recent scholarship on the individual compilations. Some minor collections of ancient sayings are listed in an appendix, along with a general bibliography and indices of the authors, subjects, scriptural texts and other sources included in the volume. This is a very useful, comprehensive and thoughtfully designed handbook.

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