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:
“They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)