ABSTRACT
The first nine chapters of the book of Proverbs seem to have comprised an independent, self-contained sapiential book used in the scribal school.1 Like ancient Egyptian school miscellanies, its textual units – exhortatory discourses and poems – served as texts to be copied or written to dictation and presumably to be memorized by the pupil. We must think therefore of the book as meant for the advanced student who, having mastered the alphabet, has progressed to the writing of individual words and sentences, for it was in such a sequence that the ancient scribal curriculum proceeded throughout the ancient world, much like anyone learning to read today. One began by learning how to trace individual letters but eventually worked on longer textual units of the kind collected in Proverbs 1-9. Although the school background of these chapters seems to be fairly straightforward, the date is more difficult to fix. The reference to the monarchy, the urban milieu, and the allusion to the typical domestic architecture of the Iron Age all point to a pre-exilic date, but it is difficult to be more precise than this.2 Inscriptional evidence from ancient Israel suggests the eighth century BCE as the period when writing became more widespread in ancient Israel, and it is from the middle of this century that we have the earliest, clearly datable literature – the books of the prophets Amos and Hosea. The present writer favours an eighthcentury dating of Proverbs 1-9, though many specialists prefer a later date: the fourth or third century BCE, considering it not one of the earliest but one of the latest literary pieces included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible.
