9 - Amos and wisdom

Summary

At the end of the 1940s Johannes Fichtner published an important, pioneering study on ‘Isaiah among the Wise’. He argued mainly that wisdom in Israel was not, as had often been suggested, a purely post-exilic phenomenon, but that there were considerable traces of its existence in the writings of the eighth-century prophet Isaiah. He dismissed the possibility, however, that traces of wisdom could also be found in the other prophets of that century: Hosea, Amos and Micah; wherever such traces are allegedly found, one is dealing with later additions. It is interesting that, according to Fichtner, Isaiah mostly took a strong stand against the sages.

In the present chapter, which I wish to dedicate to one who is not only a colleague but also a friend, I intend to check on the assertion that there is no wisdom to be found in Amos.

First of all, this statement has not met with general approval. Terrien and Crenshaw have each written an essay dedicated to the subject, and the matter is further referred to explicitly in the commentaries of Wolff, Mays, Rudolph, van Leeuwen, and Paul, as well as in my own. Wolff considers any ‘admonition speech’ (Mahnrede) to be derived from wisdom, a thesis which Rudolph rightly criticizes (see also van Leeuwen); the same is true of the use of hôy in invectives, a proposal which is obviously untenable. In another article, Lindblom accepts that there are analogies of style between the writings of the wise men and the prophets, even though none of the latter belonged to a wisdom school.