Ernest C. Lucas - Exploring the Old Testament: A Guide to the Psalms and Wisdom Literature

This book aims to help students study the Psalms and Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament. Like other volumes in the Exploring the Old Testament and Exploring the New Testament series, it is intended to give students a primary resource to enable them to study the texts independently. It provides an introduction to each book, which includes a survey of the main trends in recent study of the book. There is a basic textual study. For Job, Ecclesiastes (or Qoheleth) and the Song of Songs, this amounts to a basic commentary on the book. In the case of Proverbs 10 31, the nature of the material makes such a commentary problematic, since it would require discussion of many individual, unrelated proverbs. Instead of the basic commentary the discussion of the compilation of the book provides a general overview of each section, with Proverbs 1 9 discussed in more detail. In the case of the book of Psalms, a representative selection of psalms is discussed in some detail. The discussion of each book includes a survey of the main theological issues it raises and of various theological approaches to interpreting it. Quotations from the Bible in English are taken from the New Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise indicated.

The book is interactive. Interspersed through it are a number of panels. Some (Think about) encourage the student to think further about what has been learnt. Others (Digging deeper:) encourage further study of some issue dealt with in the main text. There are also some panels that simply provide background material to supplement the main text.

The book is intended to introduce students to a range of critical and interpretative literature on the Psalms and Wisdom Literature. Each chapter has an annotated list of further reading, covering commentaries and other works. Most of these are referred to in the chapter in question. Items marked with * are considered suitable as first ports of call. Others are more complex, or related to specific issues.

It might be asked whether the Psalms and Wisdom Literature have been put together for anything more than pragmatic reasons. One justification for putting them in one volume is the preponderance of Hebrew poetry in these books. Psalms and the Song of Songs consist purely of poetry. Job has a prose prologue and epilogue, but most of the book is in poetry. The Hebrew proverb is poetic in its form. Ecclesiastes contains some proverbs. Some scholars conclude that it also contains a few poems, but there is debate about just how much of the book is poetic in form. The Wisdom Literature proper of the Old Testament is usually limited to Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. However, as we shall see, it can be argued that there are grounds for regarding the Song of Songs as at least a close relative to the Wisdom Literature. Also, the book of Psalms contains some wisdom psalms, though scholars debate just how many of them there are and some question the existence of this category.