Katharine Dell is Reader in Old Testament Literature and Theology in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. She did her PhD work in Oxford and had a first job there as Old Testament Tutor at Ripon College, Cuddesdon before moving to Cambridge in 1995. She is a world expert on the wisdom literature of the Old Testament and has written extensively on Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. She has also written on prophetic texts in the light of 'wisdom influence', on ecological readings of texts and musical interpretations of Job. She has written an introductory textbook on wisdom and a second on the Old Testament as a whole as well as a book on the worth of the Old Testament in the light of the New Atheist attack on religion and the bible.

• Introduction


• Part 1: Defining wisdom in relation to the Solomonic corpus


• 1: Deciding the Boundaries of Wisdom: Applying the Concept of Family Resemblance


• 2: The 'wisdom' continuum of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (without Job).


• 3: The third Solomonic book: Does the Song of Songs have any connections to wisdom?


• Part 2: Solomon's wisdom


• 4: 'The Lord loved him': Solomon as idealized character and paradigm for character ethics within the 'Solomonic' canon.


• 5: Solomon's wisdom and the Egyptian connection


• 6: The roots of Solomonic 'wisdom' in the pre-exilic period (focusing on Proverbs)


• 7: Scribes, Sages and Seers in the First Temple


• Part 3: Solomonic 'wisdom' influence on psalmic and prophetic texts: literary and contextual


• 8: 'I will solve my riddle to the music of the lyre (Psalm XLIX 4 [5])': A cultic setting for wisdom psalms?


• 9: 'By me kings reign and rulers declare what is just' (Prov 8:15): Isaiah 1-39 and wisdom.


• 10: 'Jeremiah, Creation and Wisdom'


• Part 4: Solomonic 'wisdom' books and intertextual relationships


• 11: 'Didactic Intertextuality: Proverbial wisdom as illustrated in Ruth'


• 12: 'Exploring intertextual links between Ecclesiastes and Genesis 1-11'


• 13: 'The watered (Edenic) garden (Gen 2-3) in the Song of Songs and beyond: an intertextual approach.


• Conclusion


• Bibliography

Solomon is the figurehead who holds the family of 'wisdom' texts together. Intertextuality places fresh texts alongside the Solomonic corpus to show how Solomon is the lynch-pin that holds 'wisdom' in its core texts and wider influence together.