ABSTRACT
The term 'the wisdom writers', when applied to ancient Israel, may be taken for practical purposes to refer to the authors of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, together with certain psalms and some books of the Apocrypha, notably Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon. These books probably originally formed part of a more extensive literature. The wisdom books are distinctive in that they are primarily concerned with man and his world, and in particular with the potentiality and limitations of the individual. The theory of a foreign-dominated royal court as the matrix of the Israelite wisdom literature, and of 'wisdom schools' as the locus of its specific manifestations, did not, however, offer a complete explanation of the phenomenon. The existence of a 'folk wisdom' in Israel comparable with that of other peoples and preceding the composition of wisdom books was recognised at an early stage in the history of modern study of the wisdom literature.
