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Wisdom and Law in the Warnings against Strange Woman in the Book of Proverbs

  • Korean Journal of Old Testament Studies
  • Abbr : KJOTS
  • 2019, 25(3), pp.74-101
  • DOI : 10.24333/jkots.2019.25.3.74
  • Publisher : Korean Society of Old Testament Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Christian Theology
  • Received : July 4, 2019
  • Accepted : July 30, 2019

Keun Jo Ahn 1

1호서대

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the traditions of the Wisdom and the Law in the Old Testament by analyzing five texts of the book of Proverbs(2:16-19; 5:1-23; 6:20-35, 7:1-27; 9:13-18), which focus on the warnings against the so called, ‘strange woman’(hrz hva). It has been discussed that the ‘strange woman’ was either an immoral woman or a foreign girl. Sometimes, she has been suggested as a syncretic cultic practice or an ideological metaphor to control women’s body. However, it is hard to pinpoint who she was. Instead, this paper accepts diversified identities of the strange woman as they are by recognizing the characteristic of the Proverbs as a complex of various literary traditions throughout different times. More important question to ask is not about her identity but her other-ness. Why did the woman became strange? This paper interprets all the five ‘strange woman’ texts through structural analysis and intertextual criticism in order to find why the woman has emerged into the symbol of strangeness in contrast to the ‘Woman Wisdom’. Four common points have been found: 1. the strange woman symbolizes the way of the wicked; 2. her estranged way always ends up with ruin; 3. the reason for the strangeness derives from her liminal place on the boundary; 4. the strange woman functions as same as legal ordinances and statutes in the book of Deuteronomy. What brings a literary connection between the legal codes and sapiential instructions is the concept of boundary. The statute(qx) in the book of Deuteronomy sets limits for the covenant people. Likewise, the warning against the strangeness or otherness keeps the faith community from trespassing the regulated border. The scribal circle in the post-exilic times who had preserved all the literary traditions of Yahweh faith transformed the torah tradition into teaching the right way not turning aside to the right or left(cf. Deut 5:32; Prov 4:27) in the frame of wisdom tradition. As a result, this paper identifies the strange woman as a rhetorical instrument of the scribal sages who emphasized the purity of ‘Israelite’ in the Persian period when the identity of the people in Yehud colony was threatened to fall into a confusion. It was the matter of boundary for the sage or sages of the Provers that kept Yahwistic faith alive from the contemporary pagan cults and teachings. By pointing out the consistent traditional flow between the law and wisdom traditions, this paper claims that convergence of wisdom and law has already made in the book of Proverbs already in about 400 BCE, rather than in the book of Ben Sira around 180 BCE as most scholars have proposed thus far. The significance of this paper are two. One is its new approach to the problem of the ‘strange woman’ in the perspective of literary traditions, concluding the strange woman in the Proverbs as integral mixture of both legal and sapiential traditions. The other one is its new discovery that the convergence of the Wisdom and Law was already being processed in the Proverbs. One of the limitations of this paper is that the discussion of prophetic traditions has not included for the limited scope of this paper. However, filled with metaphors of immoral Israelites in the covenant relationship, prophetic traditions also expect deeper study on the literary relationship between unfaithful Israelites and the strange woman.

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