Böcker av Jiseong James Kwon

Previous scholars have largely approached Wisdom and Torah in the Second Temple Period through a type of reception history, whereby the two concepts have been understood as signifiers of independent, earlier "biblical" streams of tradition that later came together in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, largely under the process of a so-called "torahization" of wisdom. Recent studies critiquing the nature of wisdom and wisdom literature as operative categories for understanding scribal cultures in early Judaism, as well as newer approaches to conceptualizing Torah and authorizing-compositional practices related to the Pentateuchal texts, however, have challenged the foundations on which the previous models of Wisdom and Torah rested. This volume, therefore, brings together several essays that aim to reexamine and rethink the ways we can describe the developments of texts categorized as "Wisdom" that proliferated during the Second Temple Period and whose contents point to an engagement with a "Torah" discourse. By asking anew the question of whether "Wisdom" was transformed by/into "Torah" during this period, this volume offers reformulations on the discursive space between Wisdom and Torah through analyzing new identifications, confluences, and transformations.

In this work, JiSeong James Kwon examines a variety of scholarly arguments concerning the distinctive literary and historical relationship between the book of Job and the second part of the book of Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), so-called Deutero-Isaiah. The general methodology in a comparative study between biblical texts has been the author-oriented approach which traces the complex interrelationships between corresponding texts, considering many verbal and thematic similarities. But this approach often arises from the misleading concepts of literary dependence from an early source to a later one. Here, JiSeong James Kwon argues that scribes were writers of biblical materials and belonged to a group of the literate elite in Judahite society. Resemblances between the two books result from the production of a scribal culture. This view may shed a light on traditional researches influenced by form-criticism, which divides the literate groups in Israelite society into different professional groups-priests, sages, and prophets.