Wisdom as Encounter with God

IntroductionI have been a colleague of Peter Lockwood for many years, although we work in different institutions. I have always appreciated Peter's gentle nature combined with his perceptive intellect and dedicated commitment to biblical scholarship. To my mind he is the epitome of the modern sage. It is my great privilege to contribute to this volume which honours his wisdom.The Old Testament is full of rich images of God, but we are used to thinking in terms of certain dominant ones. Among these are the creator God of Genesis, the liberator God of Exodus, the warrior God of Joshua and the redeemer God of Isaiah 40-55. This list alone indicates the rich variety of ways in which theological truths are expressed in the Bible.Often readers of the Old Testament are heard to say, quite unjustly but perhaps understandably, that 'the God of the Old Testament is a violent God.' Understandably, because any present-day reader of the books of Joshua or Judges cannot help but be shocked by the command of herem, that is the 'ban', or the command to put everyone, men women and children, to the sword: 'Only the livestock and the spoil of that city Israel took as their booty, according to the word of the LORD that he had issued to Joshua' (Joshua 8:25-27). The epithet of 'violent' however, is not justified in other cases. There are many texts where God is shown to be full of mercy and compassion. To experience the complexities and varieties of the theological understandings about God in the Old Testament, we need only look at Isaiah 40:1-2, 'Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.'A helpful way of understanding the theological differences exemplified by these two texts is to look at the time and contexts from which the various texts come, and to study the passage in its wider literary context. These texts are taken from a time when the people were constantly threatened by wars and unimaginable violence. We might consider as an example the God of Exodus. The God of Exodus is a protector of God's people. Enslaved in an alien land, the people turned to a 'warrior God' who could rescue them from a powerful nation. The narrative is full of attempts to soften Pharaoh's resolve to keep his workforce in his power, but when all else fails, God's omnipotence rescues the Hebrews, and the slaves become the liberated people of a redeemer God. The context of the Isaiah text is a time when the people had 'served their sentence' in exile, and were able to return to their homeland. This historical-critical approach to the biblical texts, where we study the historical context to come to a better understanding of the way in which God is presented in the literature, helps us to understand the ancient witnessing to a God who responded to the needs of the people.This present study is concerned with the wisdom texts of the Bible, which have a quite different milieu from the above examples. The sages, or the writers responsible for the wisdom literature, were the scientists of the ancient world. They studied the natural world to understand how the Creator God acts. Their writings consist of reflections on such human issues as suffering and mortality. Conventional wisdom believed that God had put an order in the world, and if humans lived in accordance with this order, then harmony would ensue. Thus the wisdom literature is concerned with how to live wisely in the world. For the wisdom writers, wise was interchangeable with good, and foolish with evil. The righteous person was one who lived wisely, in accordance with the order God had placed in the world. As Walther Zimmerli's important article had pointed out, in the wisdom literature it is not in history that humankind encounters God, but in the created world.1The Book of Job is possibly the greatest of the wisdom writings and this book precisely challenges the particular view of conventional wisdom that if we live according to the order God has placed in creation, then we will flourish. …