Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

part 1. Genre theory and the wisdom tradition. The modern scholarly wisdom tradition and the threat of pan-sapientialism: a case report / Will Kynes -- "Grasping after the wind": the elusive attempt to define and delimit wisdom / Mark R. Sneed -- Three theses on wisdom / Michael V. Fox -- Wisdom in the canon: discerning the early intuition / Douglas Miller -- Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater: on the distinctness of the sapiential understanding of the world / Annette Schellenberg -- Deciding the boundaries of wisdom: applying the concept of family resemblance / Katharine J. Dell -- Wisdom, form, and genre / Stuart Weeks -- part 2. Case studies. Where can wisdom be found?: new perspectives on the wisdom psalms / Markus Saur -- Gattung and Sitz im Leben: methodological vagueness in defining wisdom psalms / Tova Forti -- How wisdom texts became part of the canon of the Hebrew Bible / Raik Heckl -- Riddles and parables, traditions and texts: Ezekielian perspectives on Israelite wisdom traditions / Mark W. Hamilton -- part 3. Ancient Near Eastern comparison. The contribution of Egyptian wisdom to the study of the biblical wisdom literature / Nili Shupak.

"This collection of essays explores questions that challenge the traditional notion of a wisdom tradition among the Israelite literati, such as: Is the wisdom literature a genre or mode of literature or do we need new terminology? Who were the tradents? Is there such a thing as a "wisdom scribe" and what would that look like? Did the scribes who composed wisdom literature also have a hand in producing the other "traditions," such as the priestly, prophetic, and apocalyptic, as well as other non-sapiential works? Were Israelite sages open to non-sapiential forms of knowledge in their conceptualization of wisdom?"--