Wisdom Discourse and Torah in Second Temple Judaism: Challenging the Integration Paradigm

In this volume, Professor Kwon moves beyond the impasse faced by much recent scholarship that has assumed wisdom literature developed either as secular to religious or as reactive to Torah-law traditions. Instead, he employs a discourse-critical method to intertextual readings of Proverbs, Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Deuteronomy. He demonstrates that wisdom literature maintained an independent identity and theological orientation distinct from legal traditions of the Torah. Rather than wisdom being subsumed into legal material, Jewish intellectual production remained pluralistic in form, genre and theological orientation throughout the Persian and Hellenistic periods.