Wisdom in a Time of Prose: Form, Function, and the Book of Ruth
Ruth - Rhiannon Graybill
Laura Quick [+]
University of Oxford
Description
The genre of the book of Ruth has been much debated. Variously described as a novel, novella, folktale, or short story, the book is often connected to the Israelite “wisdom” tradition as an example of “narrative wisdom.” Typically, scholars who make this connection suggest that the book was written to affirm and demonstrate some of the ideals of the book of Proverbs. Recently, I turned this idea on its head by arguing that far from affirming these ideals, the book of Ruth can instead be understood as an extended problematization of the limits of “wisdom” as espoused in books such as Proverbs (Quick 2020). Rather than Proverbs, therefore, the book of Ruth might in fact be closer to two of the other so-called canonical texts of the biblical wisdom genre: Qoheleth and Job, which also reflect on and complicate conventional wisdom. In this chapter, I reflect upon these suggestions by further developing the connections between Ruth and the wisdom tradition. By focusing on the thematic and formal characteristics of wisdom literature, I argue that Ruth can be understood as a wisdom text – but one which destabilizes traditional wisdom tenets. And this is inherent to the adoption of prose discourse in the book of Ruth, as a discursive and aesthetic strategy for complicating wisdom conventions.