An Obituary for "Wisdom Literature"

Will Kynes is Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at Samford University. He is the author of My Psalm Has Turned into Weeping: Job's Dialogue with the Psalms (de Gruyter, 2012), which received the Manfred Lautenschläger Award for Theological Promise in 2015, and co-editor, with Katharine Dell, of Reading Job Intertextually (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), Reading Ecclesiastes Intertextually (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), and Reading Proverbs Intertextually (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019).

• List of tables and figures List of Abbreviations Introduction Part 1: Historical Metacriticism 1: The Rise and Impending Demise of Wisdom Literature: The Modern Scholarly Wisdom Tradition and the Threat of Pan-sapientialism 2: The Ancestry of Wisdom Literature: Ancient Tradition or Modern Invention? 3: The Birth of Wisdom Literature: The Nineteenth-Century Origin of the Wisdom Corpus Part 2: Genre Methodology 4: The Universe of Texts: The Intertextual Network of Genres from Multiple Perspectives Part 3: The Reintegration of Wisdom Literature 5: The Intertextual Network of Job and the Selective Nature of Genre 6: The Intertextual Network of Ecclesiastes and the Self-Reflective Nature of Genre 7: The Intertextual Network of Proverbs and the Subjective Nature of Genre Conclusion Appendix: Ps 107:40 and Job 12:21, 24 in Commentaries on the Psalms and Job Bibliography

Kynes has written a powerful work that forces us to reconsider much we thought we knew and that will probably appear in footnotes for some time. It probably deserves a panel discussion at SBL—though we might wonder which group will be brave enough to do so.