All this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the Torah
that Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the congregations of Ja-
cob. (Sir. 24:23)In other words, Wisdomisthe Pentateuch, “the book of the covenant of
the Most High God.” Thus, if you wish really to know how the world
works, to know about the underlying set of rules that God established for
it, then the Pentateuch is your basic resource.
The wisdom connection apparent in Ben Sira explains much about
the character of ancient biblical interpretation — not only for him, but for
his contemporaries and predecessors as well. For when these sages-turned-
exegetes approached the Pentateuch, they brought to their reading of it
many of the same expectations and interpretive techniques that they had
used in reading collections of proverbs and other wisdom compositions.
Thus, the full meaning of a proverb was not immediately apparent; its
words had to be studied and sifted carefully before they would yield their
full significance. So too did all of Scripture have to be scrutinized, since the
meaning of a particular word or phrase or prophecy or story might simi-
larly be hidden from view. And just as proverbs were full of lessons for to-
day, so biblical texts, even though they seemed to talk about the past, were
likewise understood to have a message for the present; indeed, those two
favorite opposites of ancient wisdom, the “righteous” and the “wicked,”
might turn out to be embodied in a biblical narrative about the (altogether
righteous) Abraham or Jacob, and such (altogether wicked) figures as Lot
or Esau. The insights of wise proverbs were part of a single weave of divine
wisdom, the great pattern underlying all of reality; even when one proverb
seemed to contradict another (see Prov. 26:4-5), there really was no contra-
diction. Similarly, the Bible, the great compendium of divine wisdom,
could contain no real contradiction; careful contemplation of its words
would always show that they agree. Finally wisdom, although it was trans-
mitted by different sages in different periods, truly had no human author;
these tradents were merely reporting bits and pieces of the great pattern
that had been created by God. Similarly, the books of Scripture may be at-
tributed to different authors, but all of them, since they are full of divine
wisdom, truly have only one source, God, who guided the human beings
responsible for Scripture’s various parts. The various characteristics men-
tioned here are, it will be noticed, none other than the Four Assumptions
shared by all ancient interpreters. It seems likely, therefore, that these com-
mon elements all derive from the wisdom heritage of the earliest interpret-175Early Jewish Biblical InterpretationEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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