369 - What Are They Saying About Wisdom Literature & A Whirlpool of Torment: Israelite Traditions of God as an Oppressive Presence

What Are They Saying
About Wisdom Literature
By Dianne Bergant, C.S.A.
Ramsey, N.J., Paulist Press, 1984. 112 pp., $3.95.

A Whirlpool of Torment:
Israelite Traditions of God
as an Oppressive Presence
By James L. Crenshaw
Philadelphia, Fortress. 144 pp., $7.95.

370 - What Are They Saying About Wisdom Literature & A Whirlpool of Torment: Israelite Traditions of God as an Oppressive Presence

During the past two decades, the resources of Israel's wisdom literature have been explored with renewed vigor, resulting in a wealth of fresh research. This research has been surveyed and summarized by Dianne Bergant, who teaches at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She confines her survey almost entirely to four works: systematic treatments by Gerhard von Rad and R. N. Whybray, and two volumes of collected essays. Despite this limitation, the scope of her survey is not so narrow as one might expect, since one of the volumes Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom. edited by James L. Crenshaw (1976), includes essays written by various authors over several decades, and covering a wide variety of topics.

True to the title of her book, Bergant faithfully reports what "they" have said, but gives us no real clue whether she thinks they were right or wrong. She divides her survey into seven chapters, covering Proverbs, Job, Qoheleth. Sirach, and the Wisdom of Solomon, introduced by chapters on the definition and setting of wisdom, and concluding with a consideration of wisdom influence on other literature. Also included is an annotated bibliography, organized according to the chapters of the book.

Bergant's summaries of the scholarly, essays surveyed are clear and non-technical. This is a book perfectly suited to introduce college and seminary students to the current discussion of wisdom literature, and at least one seminary teacher has found it useful as a convenient summary of that discussion.

James L. Crenshaw, Professor of Old Testament at Vanderbilt University, has written a much different book. His intent is to bring to our view a biblical tradition which portrays God as one who tests the faithful, and in so doing confronts them as an enemy. The texts which Crenshaw studies in this analysis are Genesis 22, the "confessions" of Jeremiah, Job, Ecclesiastes, and Psalm 73. Given Crenshaw's ability as a writer and his frequent reference to the contemporary

371 - What Are They Saying About Wisdom Literature & A Whirlpool of Torment: Israelite Traditions of God as an Oppressive Presence

struggle for faith in God, the book should certainly prove popular with ministers. They will find many sermon texts between its covers.

Crenshaw is a responsible scholar, and his footnotes testify to the solid research underlying this book. Still, one cannot completely avoid the sense that on occasion the texts-particularly Genesis 22 and Jeremiah's confessions have been made to speak of interior struggles when they really want to address us about other matters. I remain similarly unconvinced that theodicy is so central an issue in these texts as Crenshaw suggests. To portray Ecclesiastes so soberly as the product of an anguished and tormented skeptic is to miss its rich sense of humor, and humor provides needed relief after we have been confronted so relentlessly by Crenshaw with a God who is either oppressively present or permanently absent.

The book concludes by saying that we have travelled" with these lonely men of faith along the path of God-forsakenness, for their journey has become ours as well"(p. 119). It is a book well worth reading, even by those who do not recognize that particular path as their own, nor the one travelled by "these lonely men of faith."

Ben C. Ollenburger
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey