“In manu enim illius et nos et sermones nostri, et omnis sapientia et operum scientia, et disciplina.” Liber Sapientiae vii:16.

When the English nominalist and Dominican friar Robert Holcot († 1349) reaches the sixteenth verse of the seventh chapter in his Wisdom commentary, he seizes the opportunity to underscore his main theme which he had so passionately presented on the preceding pages as well as in his Sentences commentary: Wisdom is a gift of God: man's claim therefore that he can have a natural knowledge of God is false.

“I will not return evil to anybody, with good will I pursue man, for with God rests the judgment of every living being and he is the one to repay man for his deeds. … And the trial of a man of perdition I will not handle until the Day of Vengeance. But my anger I will not turn away from the men of deceit, and I will not be content until He has established judgment.” 1 QS x, 17-20.

An expedition under the writer's archaeological direction and sponsored by Drew University, McCormick Theological Seminary and the American Schools of Oriental Research completed its fourth season of excavation at Tell Balâtah, the ancient Shechem, in 1962. The site lies at the eastern opening between Mts. Ebal and Gerizim, forty-one miles north of Jerusalem. The earlier Sellin expedition had reported two strata of Hellenistic settlement at the site, though the date and extent of the occupation were not clarified. The Drew-McCormick Expedition has been particularly concerned with the Hellenistic occupation for two reasons: (1) The opportunity to clarify an obscure age in the cultural history of Palestine and especially to develop a ceramic typology, with chronologically fixed points, so that a more precise means of dating may be available for the archaeology of the period; (2) the problem of the historical meaning of the Hellenistic ruins at Shechem.