Winter 2023 Stories

By James Nati

Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible & Old Testament Studies
Jesuit School of Theology

Each year, I teach a course titled Wisdom in Ancient Israel, one of the foundational courses for our Master of Divinity students at JST. The course covers five of the wisdom books in the Old Testament canon: Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and the Wisdom of Solomon (or Book of Wisdom). In working through these texts, students encounter a range of questions that figure prominently across the corpus: What exactly is wisdom? Who is capable of attaining it? How does one attain it? What rewards does it grant? What does it mean to live wisely? How do the various books of the Old Testament answer these questions differently, and why? We study these books in roughly chronological order according to the time period in which they were composed, paying attention to the social and economic forces that might have shaped the authors of each.

As we progress through the course and move from book to book, students are asked to zoom out and make connections across the books, interrogating why there seem to be different emphases— contradictions even—within just this small section of the canon. One of the issues that I like to highlight in this regard is that the books seem to have a variety of answers to the question, “Who can be wise?” The book of Proverbs, for instance, emphasizes at many points wisdom’s wide accessibility, even its presence in the most public of spaces: “Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks” (Prov 1:20–21). Even more pointed is the book’s assertion that wisdom was present with God at the creation of the world (“When he established the heavens, I was there” [8:27]), and, in one passage at least, wisdom seems to have partaken in the act of ordering the cosmos: “[W]hen he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker” (8:29–30). For Proverbs, the world itself is in this way chock full of wisdom; one needs only to go out and get it (“[T] hose who seek me diligently find me” [8:17]). The Wisdom of Solomon, written a few centuries later, expands upon this theme of wisdom’s presence at creation, stating even more explicitly that the created world is saturated with wisdom: “For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things” (Wis 7:24). For these authors, wisdom seems to be available to everyone, and the longer one lives and encounters wisdom in the world, the wiser one becomes.

Juxtaposed with these views, however, is a strong thread of skepticism about the accessibility of wisdom in other books. Job, for example, questions directly whether experience in the world really does correlate with the accumulation of wisdom: “Is wisdom with the aged, and understanding in length of days?” (Job 12:12). Job does not deny that wisdom exists, but the book emphasizes the human incapacity to grasp it over its ubiquity: “Where then does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? It is hidden from the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of the air” (Job 28:20–21). Neither is Ecclesiastes very optimistic about humanity’s ability to attain wisdom: “When I applied my mind to know wisdom ... 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.”

More than simply acknowledging that these different views are to be found in the Old Testament, I ask my students to understand these views as various expressions of lived experience. All theology is, after all, the product of particular circumstances, or, as we say at JST, all theology is done in context. The book of Proverbs, for example, seems to have been the product of elite groups of sages who held positions of power, or at the very least were quite proximate to power. These sages’ ability to navigate the politics of the royal court sometimes shows itself in ways that might strike us as unsavory. “A bribe is like a magic stone in the eyes of those who give it,” these authors tell us, “wherever they turn they prosper” (Prov 17:8). Much of the wisdom accumulated in the book, moreover, is clearly meant to be applied only by those with a particular level of access to this royal court: “When you sit down to eat with a ruler, observe carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you have a big appetite” (Prov 23:1–2). On the other hand, Job and Ecclesiastes, with their less-than-rosy views about whether wisdom is even attainable, were written sometime after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 587 BCE and the forced migration of some of the population to Babylon. This defining moment in the history of Israel caused a rupture in how the authors of these books thought about the relationship between actions and consequences, and thus we might understand their epistemological skepticism against the background of this collective trauma. These various views about the accessibility of understanding, about who—if anyone—is able to become wise, are thus situated in particular socio- historical circumstances.

While it can be quite difficult in some cases to pin down a specific historical situation for the composition of a biblical book, scholars are quite confident about when, where, and by whom the book of Sirach was written. The Greek version of the book begins with a prologue written by the author’s grandson, who states that he translated his grandfather’s book from Hebrew into Greek sometime around the year 132 BCE. This fact, combined with a reference to the High Priest Simon (50:1) and the author’s recording of his name and location (50:27), allows us to know with some certainty that the book was written in Hebrew in Jerusalem by a man named Jesus ben Sira around the year 180 BCE. This man was a scribe who seems to have run his own school in Jerusalem (51:23), two facts which, by definition, mark him as elite. His strong support of the temple priesthood—the primary economic institution of the time—likewise points to his relatively high socioeconomic status.

Biblical scholars have not been shy about highlighting what seems to be the quite elitist nature of this wisdom book. Leo Perdue notes that “Ben Sira was clearly an elitist due to his personal wealth, education, literary prowess, and profession of teaching male students of aristocratic Jewish families.”¹ Beyond being merely an intellectual posture, this elitism and proximity to the temple hierarchy offered material benefits, as “the temple became the economic center for Jerusalem and Judah and received sacrifices, gifts, and the temple tax. Indeed, it may have been at the center of a banking system for the colonial economy.”² Jesus ben Sira, the author of the book bearing his name, thus sat comfortably among the upper echelon of society in 2nd-century BCE Judah. This background profile on the book’s author is crucial for understanding some of the claims put forward in the book itself, since, as mentioned above, all theology arises from particular contexts. The context in this case is among the power-brokers of the temple aristocracy, the economic hub of the region at the time.

I always begin our unit on the book of Sirach with a short lecture that covers these details, one that gives my students some insight into who this author was. It is quite unique to have so much information about an individual author in the Old Testament, and it allows us to paint a detailed picture of the circumstances to which this author was speaking. And, as I do with the other books that we study, I ask my students to interrogate how Jesus ben Sira approaches the question, “Who is wisdom for?” One of the best passages with which to probe this question is Sir 38:24–39:11, one that tends to offer a challenge for many of my students.

The passage begins with a somewhat troubling claim: “A scribe’s wisdom is in the opportunity for leisure, and he who does less business, it is he who will become wise” (38:24). The author here seems to be saying that one’s acquisition of wisdom is dependent upon their financial stability. Leisure time, quite a rarity in the ancient world especially, is a necessary condition for one to become wise. While Proverbs, as I noted above, certainly reflected an elite stance, it emphasizes at various points that wisdom is available through different routes, through accumulated experience of different kinds. Sirach, in this passage that praises the scribal elite, cites leisure time as the precondition for the acquisition of wisdom, thus implying in this verse that those whose lives are burdened with manual labor are destined to foolishness. The implicit becomes more explicit as the passage continues:

How can one become wise who handles the plow, and who glories in the shaft of a goad, who drives oxen and is occupied with their work, and whose talk is about bulls? ... So it is with every artisan and master artisan who labors by night as well as by day ... So it is with the smith, sitting by the anvil, intent on his iron-work ... So it is with the potter sitting at his work and turning the wheel with his feet ... All these rely on their hands, and all are skillful in their own work. Without them no city can be inhabited, and wherever they live, they will not go hungry. Yet they are not sought out for the council of the people ... they cannot expound discipline or judgment, and they are not found among the rulers. But they maintain the fabric
of the world, and their concern is for the exercise of their trade. How different the one who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High! (Sir 38:25–34)

When teaching this passage, I provoke my students to think about a few issues. The most glaring one, of course, is the question of whether or not the author is correct: Can those who do manual labor become wise? My students overwhelmingly answer this question in the affirmative, thus pushing back against the author of the book. This past spring, a Jesuit student in class recounted his own marveling at the wisdom of his grandmother, a woman who worked for years as a homemaker and craftsperson, never having had the opportunity to pursue either higher education or, really, leisure time. This woman offered a living counterexample for this student to the seemingly harsh view put forward in the book of Sirach.

Beyond simply constituting a kind of snobbery on the part of an intellectual, this passage is reflective of a fundamental and problematic class division in the ancient society from which it comes. As Samuel Adams writes of the first centuries BCE in Israel/ Palestine, “In a stratified economy, with difficult farming conditions and a succession of foreign rulers, wealth and poverty concerns pervaded every aspect of life.”³ Financial precarity was the norm, with most people relying on agricultural yield for their livelihood. Against this backdrop, the book’s claim about farmers and craftspeople being destined to a life without wisdom packs an even more troubling punch. Adams notes this passage from Sirach in particular, writing that “the sage’s question points to inequality and classism among the more elite sectors ... the biblical texts and extracanonical evidence from this period often reveal a scribal or priestly bias, removed from the daily situations of families who lacked literacy skills and financial resources to codify their perspectives.”⁴ We thus encounter in this passage an elite and financially comfortable author musing about the inability of poor folks to acquire wisdom, what is for this author the sine qua non of a life well lived.

The author’s view here is morally off-putting, to say the least, and it thus offers an opportunity for my students to “read against the grain”: the adoption of a hermeneutical stance of resistance, in which we reject the claims of the author and side instead with those whom the author denigrates. I tend to present this view in a general way, relying on the assumption that students in the class will see the same problems that I see. As I progressed through this past year’s Bannan Forum seminar on the Catholic intellectual tradition, however, I was moved by our readings and discussions around the tradition’s emphasis on the dignity of work, and it struck me that this might provide a more robust way to teach this passage in the future.

The dignity of work is a large theme in the tradition, and it seems to have quite a bit of purchase in our current moment of increasing income inequality. The theme has been around as long as the Church has been concerned with labor in the modern world, going back to Rerum Novarum at the end of 19th century. I was most compelled, however, by the explication of the theme as it relates to the subjective and objective dimensions of work in John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens. The subjective dimension of work points simply to “the fact that the one who carries it out is a person, a conscious and free subject, that is to say a subject that decides about himself [sic]” (LE, 6). The objective dimension refers to work in the more colloquial sense of the various activities that people engage in toward the production of goods and services (LE, 5). One of the most important —if not the central—claim(s) of the encyclical is that the dignity of work is “to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one” (LE, 6; cf. LE, 7). Or, as Patricia Lamoureux puts it, “work is for the person, not the person for work.”⁵ It is through work itself, moreover, independent of what is being performed or produced, that one “achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being’” (LE, 9). The encyclical thus places a strong emphasis upon, in Lamoureux’s words, “the integral connection between the person’s self-realization and human labor.”⁶ Laborem Exercens does not use the word “wisdom,” but the language of “fulfilment” and “self realization”—not to mention the central theme of “co-creation” throughout the document—certainly brings us close. Work in this way exerts a formative pressure on the worker, one that “the pope associates with the development of virtue in the Thomistic sense.”⁷

As I reread Sirach 38 with these ideas in mind, it seems that the CIT opens up a few avenues for encountering this text more critically. First, it allows me to be more precise in my indictment of the author’s view of laborers. Rather than being simply off-putting or elitist, the author seems to be ignorant of the possibility that work can indeed foster self- realization. One “whose talk is about bulls” (Sir 38:25) may indeed be fulfilled spiritually through that very talk. As the encyclical suggests, work done well regardless of the object of the work itself can lead to the development of virtue, and, we might suggest, the acquisition of wisdom. Relatedly, it seems that the author is guilty of elevating the objective dimension of work alone. The passage as a whole, to be fair, does not castigate manual laborers. As we saw above, it even notes their utility. The problem, though, is that the importance of their work is given in solely objective terms: “Without them no city can be inhabited” (38:32); “they maintain the fabric of the world” (38:34). These people’s work is good, necessary even, for it allows the world—the rest of us—to function comfortably. The nature of this work, however, prohibits these subjects from acquiring wisdom, and thus the only positive aspects of this work for Sirach is what it produces.

The second avenue I see for encountering this text with the CIT is an entirely different reading altogether. Instead of reading against the grain and resisting this elitist author, we might take his words as a descriptive indictment against overwork rather than a prescriptive claim about the nature of different kinds of work. The problem with manual labor, in other words, is not that it does not cultivate wisdom in itself, but rather that this work is undervalued and exploited, and society does not allow these workers even a small amount of leisure time that would be necessary for wisdom acquisition. In favor of this reading is the emphasis in the passage upon the lack of rest that these workers are afforded: “every artisan and master artisan who labors by night as well as by day ... [the painter’s] sleeplessness is to complete the work” (38:27); “[the smith’s] sleeplessness is to decorate upon completion” (38:28); “[the potter] always lies down in anxiety about his work ... and his sleeplessness is about cleaning the kiln” (38:29–30). Sirach, on this reading, is not making a normative claim about the foolishness of laborers, but is instead lamenting the reality of a stratified economy in which agricultural workers and craftspeople need to work long days in order to make ends meet.

This reading is at home in the context of the Laborem Exercens, which, while emphasizing the importance of work as “co-creation,” notes that this implies rest as well. Humankind “ought to imitate God both in working and also in resting, since God himself wished to present his own creative activity under the form of work and rest” (LE, 25). As Lamoureux describes it, “leisure is a safeguard against becoming completely bound up in work and neglecting to give thanks and praise to God for the gift of life.”⁸ Rest, or “the opportunity for leisure” in Sirach’s words, is indeed necessary to become wise, and it is a societal shortcoming that it was not afforded to laborers in the author’s time.

Whether we take a hermeneutical stance in opposition to this elite author and uplift the subjective dimension of the work of farmers and craftspeople or, on the other hand, read this passage as an indictment of the conditions of labor in his own time, the CIT has offered me an avenue for exploring more deeply this troubling biblical text, and I look forward to incorporating the dignity of work into the course this year.