Content area
Abstract
This study examines a shift in the Jewish wisdom tradition during the Second Temple period, from an earthly to an otherworldly focus. One of the persistent features of ancient Near Eastern instructions is the guarantee of an act-consequence nexus, as argued by Klaus Koch in a famous essay. Koch's model offers a useful framework for tracing the emergent belief in eschatological judgment in some of the later texts. For a necessary context, both the Egyptian instructions and the book of Proverbs receive attention. Many of these earlier works present a consistent principle of earthly justice, such that righteousness brings tangible benefits and wickedness leads to misery. The books of Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) and Sirach (Ben Sira) reveal a later discussion among the sages, as the possibility of immortality became a debated topic. After explicating the manner in which Qoheleth and Ben Sira contest speculative new proposals about death and the afterlife, this study turns to 4QInstruction. The discovery and publication of this work, the longest sapiential text from the corpus of the Dead Sea Scrolls, marks an important moment for understanding the development within the tradition. Through its otherworldly model for retribution, 4QInstruction indicates a break from the longstanding framework. Written for a peripheral community during the late second century B.C.E., 4QInstruction combines sapiential and apocalyptic elements to present a new act-consequence relationship. The addressee who understands the mysteries revealed by God and lives a virtuous life can expect an eternal existence. Such an understanding would be continued in subsequent books like the Wisdom of Solomon. This dissertation examines all of these instructions to demonstrate the changing modes of sapiential discourse and the diverse reasons for the "eschatologizing" of Wisdom during the Hellenistic age.