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(More customer reviews)This long-awaited book by one of the preeminent scholars of biblical Wisdom, Leo Perdue, was originally scheduled for publication in November 2007. For reasons unknown to me, it was continuously delayed, being released in June 2008. Perhaps there was some problem, but the result is a book that could have been greatly improved with a major edit. As it is, there are countless repetitions of fact and argument, some on the same page, others a few pages or more apart. It distracted from what was otherwise a very helpful resource.
On the merits, Dr. Perdue has shown many valuable connections between specific biblical and apocryphal Jewish texts and the various empires which held sway over Israel over a six hundred year period, from the Babylonians to the Romans. He shows clearly how each book came out of an elite sage in a privileged position within a colonial context and how each sage grappled in his own way with the ways of life embodied by the occupying power. For instance, he shows how the book of Job was not intended to address the abstract question of "way bad things happen to good people" (although it certainly can be read that way) but rather, to address the experience of the "innocent" rural landowners (like the fictional Job) who were exiled along with the Jerusalem elite to Babylon. Similarly, we can hear the voice of Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) as a skeptical voice of protest against the accommodations of Ptolemaic (Greek) rule over Judah.
Also helpfully, Perdue shows how the wisdom streams flow into the separate branch of what became the protest movement of apocalyptic and the eventual establishment movement of rabbinic Judaism.
Perdue is obviously very well read and his bibliography is an up-to-the-minute compendium of thought on a wide range of topics. It would have been a GREAT book if it had been more carefully and thoroughly edited into a concise sourcebook, but it is still certainly worth the time and money.
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