Wise Teaching: Biblical Wisdom and Educational Ministry

This book seeks to be responsible both to biblical scholarship and to pedagogical inquiry. It focuses on wisdom texts in the Bible (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom of Solomon, and the Synoptic Gospels) and on inferences about teaching and learning that can be drawn from these texts. Acknowledging that we cannot reconstruct the practices of the wise teachers of the biblical tradition with historical methods, Meltbert nevertheless argues that the wisdom texts presumably embody not only what these teachers wanted readers to learn but also how it was to be learned.

What do the literary forms and content of these texts presuppose, entail, or imply about reader-learners and about learning and teaching processes? Are some teaching-learning approaches more suitable than others for these texts or more likely to foster engagement with particular themes? Using a variation of reader-response criticism (the "readerly approach"), Melchert engages the wisdom texts (whose authorship is anonymous and whose particular historical-cultural context cannot be reconstructed with any confidence) in an effort to determine why the sages said and taught as they did and what contemporary teachers and learners might pick up from them about teaching, learning, and being wisely religious in a postmodern world. (From the Publisher)