amazon.com/Wisdom-Israel-Ger … +in+israel
This one of those rare books that is suffused with sober scholarship and a bright intelligence throughout. One effect of this is that the Wisdom literature which is the subject of the book - Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs among others, as well as some Apocryphal books and parts of the Prophets - are able to really shine, in a way that illuminates how ‘wise men’ thought, and taught, in a worldview which believed that there is no reality not under the control of Yahweh. (Maybe I should take up a career in blurbery? ** 
)
I’ve been not exactly bored by, but ho-hummish (!) about the wisdom literature, previously. Now I think it is a Key to the Old Testament. I was marginally interested, in the past, about the thoughts of the people of Israel, but I was most interested in WHY they would express their view of Reality in the forms they chose.
As an example: Very early in Israel’s history we read:
“Thou shalt not commit adultery”
Quite a bit later, we read:
Drink water from your own cistern,
flowing water from your own well.
16 Should your springs be scattered abroad,
streams of water in the streets?
17 Let them be for yourself alone,
and not for strangers with you.
18 Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
19 a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Proverbs ch. 5
The vast difference between the two treatments of basically the same subject is easily seen, but WHY the difference? Finding answer makes for a fascinating intellectual trip, and it is just the tip of the iceberg of the entertaining insights von Rad packs this book with.
Here’s one tidbit from the book; the last lines have opened up some new avenues for me.
“…There was never any question of…absolute knowledge functioning independently of their faith in Yahweh. This is inconceivable for the very reason that the teachers were completely unaware of any reality not controlled by Yahweh. In fact, what the sentences teach already surpasses any objective material knowledge in so far as it is dealing with perceptions which have been acquired in connection with a truth for which one has already decided.
It is, in other words, a truth to which one has already committed oneself; one could even call it a truth which has to do with character rather than with the intellect.”
I may post a bit from this work from time to time.