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‘Idea of Impartial Society’ Reflected in the Wisdom Theology of Proverbs

Han, Dong-Gu 1

1평택대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

With social attention to make Korean society more just and impartial, related academic discussions have been also heated up. Recently, two books concerning ‘justice’ have been published: John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (2003) and Michael J. Sandel's Justice (2010). One of them, A Theory of Justice by Rawls, brings up ‘a theory of justice as impartiality.’Ancient Israelite society came to be an empire, by David and Solomon. It was consist of various regions and nations and they were in harmony. They needed social systems in which rational economic justice works so that the members of the society may coexist in peace. The aim of this study is to analyze the central part of the book of Proverbs (10: 1 - 22: 16) and see how economic justice and impartiality were sought. The studies of the book of Proverbs have had so far difficulty to find a meaning of verses that seem to be arranged randomly without any connection to each other. So, this study proposes a new method of analyzing them. Most of all, I categorize all verses in the book according to meanings. After that, I subdivide them by themes, and then make three stages of development in their progress of thoughts; (1) Early verses expressing simple phenomena, (2) Developed verses with value assessments, and (3) Developed verses with religious motivation. Early verses expressing simple phenomena bear ‘fortune earning principles’ (=more effort earns more fortune). Under this supposition, they highly appreciate human efforts. These early optimistic economic view was based on the premise that most of the readers of the Proverbs have their own agricultural property. The theologians of the wisdom literature founded their principles of unity of the empire on causationism. In this thought, every thing was managed by rationality. To enhance the rationality, external logic, i.e., assessment with value, was expressed in the verses. These external logic was reinforced by religious motivations.

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