Wisdom literature is a genre of literature common in the Ancient Near East. This genre is characterized by sayings of wisdom intended to teach about divinity and about virtue. The key principle of wisdom literature is that while techniques of traditional story-telling are used, books also presume to offer insight and wisdom about nature and reality.
The most famous examples of wisdom literature are found in the Bible. The following Biblical books are classified as wisdom literature:
- Book of Job
- Psalms
- Proverbs
- Ecclesiastes
- Song of Songs
- Wisdom (also known as Wisdom of Solomon)
- Sirach (also known as Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus)
(Wisdom and Sirach are deuterocanonical books, placed in the Apocrypha by Protestant Bible translations.) The genre of mirror-of-princes writings, which has a long history in Islamic and Western Renaissance literature, represents a secular cognate of biblical wisdom literature. Within Classical Antiquity, the advice poetry of Hesiod, particularly his Works and Days has been seen as a like-genre to Near Eastern wisdom literature.
Read more about Wisdom Literature: Ancient Egyptian Literature, Biblical Wisdom Literature, Contrast With Greek Thought
Famous quotes containing the words wisdom and/or literature:
“Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)