ABSTRACT
Proverbial wisdom plays a major role in all of the religions, as can be seen from Selwyn Gurney Champion’s comparative proverb collection entitled The Eleven Religions and Their Proverbial Lore (New York: Dutton, 1945). More recently Wolfgang Mieder put together a small collection of 425 Biblical proverbs out of the Old and New Testaments under the title of Not By Bread Alone: Proverbs of the Bible (Shelburne/Vermont: New England Press, 1990). There also exists a vast international scholarship on wisdom literature which has found its way into traditional proverbs. Of particular importance are the newer studies by John Mark Thompson, The Form and Function of Proverbs in Ancient Israel (The Hague: Mouton, 1974); Carole R. Fontaine, Traditional Sayings in the Old Testament: A Contextual Study (Sheffield/United Kingdom: Almond Press, 1982); Raymond C. Van Leeuwen, Context and Meaning in Proverbs 25–27 (Atlanta/Georgia: Scholars Press, 1988); and Alan P. Winton, The Proverbs of Jesus: Issues of History and Rhetoric (Sheffield/United Kingdom: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990).
