Poetic Ethics in Proverbs

Anne W. Stewart is Director of External Relations at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her essays have appeared in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, the Harvard Theological Review, the Women's Bible Commentary, and the Encyclopaedia of the Bible and its Reception.

• 1. Poetry, pedagogy, and ethos; Part I. Character and Poetry: 2. Character ethics and the shaping of the self; 3. Form criticism and the way of poetry in Proverbs; Part II. Models of Mûsār: 4. The model of rebuke; 5. The model of motivation; 6. The model of desire; 7. The model of imagination; Part III. Narrative, Poetry, and Personhood: 8. Narrative, poetry, and personhood.

'Throughout, the discussion is well-rooted not only in the regular debates and literature of biblical scholarship, but also in the debates and literature of moral philosophy as well as of the general study of literature. A recurrent emphasis is the limitations of those treatments of Proverbs that see the book as essentially a collection of simplistic and/or dogmatic perspectives; [Stewart] argues that this fails to do justice to the sophisticated understanding of the complexities of the human person and human motivations that she finds to be consistently present … This is one of the best books on Proverbs that I have read.' Walter Moberly, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament