Right then, back to something more esoteric after all this grumpy politics. It's been a while since I wrote anything on the Apocrypha , so time I stopped procrastinating and wrote about the Wisdom books. I find Wisdom literature hard for a number of reasons. The collections of sayings can be a bit mind-numbing, and often the content is repetitive. Much of it also seems self-evident - why bang on about what is so obvious? How to write about literature that doesn't hold my interest very well? Yet here it is, in the Jewish sacred writings as well as in the writings of other traditions, so perhaps I've been missing something. Then it occurred to me that a good way of thinking about the Wisdom tradition is to see it in the context of the Law. The five books of Moses are, in a sense, the primary source documents for Jewish faith. They provide a set of laws by which the nation of Israel was supposed to be governed as the people of God. They cover the whole range - the
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson