"When the morning stars sang": essays in honor of Choon Leong Seow on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday

During a moment of exponential growth and change in the fields of biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies, it is an opportune time to take stock of the state wisdom and wisdom literature with twenty-three essays honoring the consummate Weisheitslehrer, Professor Choon Leong Seow, Vanderbilt, Buffington, Cupples Chair in Divinity and Distinguished Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University. This Festschrift is tightly focused around wisdom themes, and all of the essays are written by senior scholars in the field. They represent not only the great diversity of approaches in the field of wisdom and wisdom literature, but also the remarkable range of interests and methods that have characterized Professor Seow's own work throughout the decades, including the theology of the wisdom literature, the social world of Ecclesiastes, the history of consequences of the book of Job, the poetry of the Psalms, and Northwest Semitic Inscriptions, just to name a few.

Frontmatter --; Table of Contents --; Introduction --; Abbreviations --; An Intellectual Biography and the Curriculum Vitae of Choon Leong Seow --; Choon Leong Seow: An Appreciation --; The Speaker in Job 28 --; Metaphors of Illness and Wellness in Job --; Blessing and Justice in Job: In/commensurable? --; Job Spoke the Truth about God (Job 42:7–8) --; The Kerygma of the Book of Job --; The Reception of Job in the Dead Sea Scrolls --; The Book of Job and Two Twentieth-Century British Oratorios --; Proverbs 1–9 as Instruction for a Young Man and for “Everyman” --; From Epistemology to Wisdom Theology: The Composition of Proverbs 10 --; On יֵשׁ of Reflection in the Book of Proverbs --; Why is it So Difficult to Read Ecclesiastes? --; A Rhetoric of Indecision: Reflections on God as Judge in Qoheleth --; Solomon’s Wise Words in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature --; When Wisdom Fails --; The Formation of the Scribal Self in Ben Sira --; Translation, Reception, and the Historiography of Early Judaism: The Wisdom of Ben Sira and Old Greek Job as Case Studies --; God and Evil in the Wisdom of Solomon --; The Ambivalence of Human Wisdom: Genesis 2–3 as a Sapiential Text --; What is the Place of Wisdom and Torah in the Psalter? --; Traces of an Original Allegorical Meaning of the Song of Songs --; Royal Inscriptions in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia: Reflections on Presence, Function, and Self-Critique --; Agriculture and Wisdom: The Case of the “Gezer Calendar” --; List of Contributors --; Index of Ancient Sources --; Index of Subjects