Canter Bridge

In five well-balanced chapters, the author opens up the important question about the extent to which the prophet Isaiah—and thus the book that bears his name—was influenced by the strain of Israelite reflection that scholars call ‘wisdom’. In setting forth his apology and objectives, Whedbee recognizes the danger of explaining the prophets systematically based upon a narrow selection of texts. For some time, scholars drove a deep wedge between the ‘prophet’s word’ and the ‘sage’s counsel’.

A number of changes in the prevailing scholarly winds have made a study like Whedbee’s possible. The sage is now viewed more positively as a guardian of communal integrity than was the case in a previous generation. Also the complex—rather than simple—relationship between traditional wisdom and the prophetic task has become more evident. Whedbee proposes to sort out traditional versus technical wisdom as it appears in Isaiah, presuming that the latter emerges out of the former. Also, he anticipates showing his reader how Isaiah processes and adapts wisdom traditions as he inherits and employs them.

Having sketched out a refreshingly loose-fitting—not to say baggy—profile for wisdom and its origins, forms, and intentionalities, Whedbee approaches the formal matter of ‘Parables, Proverbs, and Related Gattungen’ in an extensive chapter two (pp. 23-79). Methodologically, he cautions against assuming the presence of wisdom influence on Isaiah wherever there is overlap with wisdom terminology. Rather, he seeks distinctive (parabolic) content for the basis of his study. Whedbee is attentive to the ‘heterogonous’ nature of Isaiah’s argumentation, a perspective that allows him to evade the analytical trap of absolutizing genres and then dissecting speeches in order to assign each element to a distinct classification. Isaiah, Whedbee says, is ‘free’ to use a large number of figures of speech, some of which take a sapiential tack, because the disjunction between prophetic word and creation’s witness is a modern rather than an ancient one. For the prophet, the two would have enjoyed an essential unity.

In his third chapter (‘Woe Oracles and Wisdom’, pp. 80-110), Whedbee argues for a close relationship between the Hebrew Bible’s ‘woe’ oracles and the ‘ashrey’ (‘blessed is …’) statements. He approves Gerstenberger’s discernment of a strong concern for social justice in both kinds of affirmations, provisionally accepting as well Gerstenberger’s theory that the statements derive from popular wisdom settings. After surveying some of the distinctly Isaianic ‘woes’, Whedbee concludes that both law and wisdom emerge from a common source and thus it is not wise to distinguish too sharply between their respective influence as traditionary sources for Isaiah. Nevertheless, it would be equally unwise to overlook the instructional/sapiential nature of Isaiah’s utilization of the tradition.

In ‘Counsel/Counsellor and Jerusalem Court Wisdom’ (ch. four, pp. 111-148), Whedbee argues for a non-secular (in the technical sense) view of professional wisdom circles in biblical Israel and Judah. That is, these circles had their own view of the divine source of counsel and wisdom and their own tradition regarding the inherent limitations of human wisdom. Isaiah’s criticism of the sages of his day used their own language (‘etsah) and was not uniquely prophetic. Though he criticizes the counsellors of his day, his vision for the future includes wise counsellors, indeed a messianic figure that is cast in part in the figure of just such a counsellor. In contrast to the policies supported by the court counsellors of his day—some of which Isaiah found inimical to Yahwistic faith—the prophet rests in the divine ‘counsel’ which is not only inscrutable but also trustworthy in its intentions for Israel/Judah.

A conclusion (pp. 149-153) neatly restates the outline of an argument that is both cogent and well-presented in the core of the book. In the thirty-four years since its publication, Whedbee’s work has been criticized but in general has stood its ground admirably. Scholarship regarding the interplay between wisdom, prophecy, and law has been marked by this important work, which now finds itself somewhat in the main stream.