Abstract
Proverbs 30.1b represents a well-known textual conundrum that is regularly resolved by re-dividing and re-pointing the consonantal text of MT. The typical emendation to the initial ‘words of Agur’ results in a text that has this figure lament his weariness. Adopting in part this common emendation while also taking a cue from an older suggestion by Charles C. Torrey, this article contends that an Aramaic Vorlage to the initial three verses of Prov. 30 lies behind the current MT. The proposal explains better than most other suggestions how the corrupted MT of Prov. 30.1b emerged. Unlike most commentators who accept the common emendation to the line but who do not discuss much Agur’s weariness, the proposal also explains why Agur experiences fatigue by considering several key biblical and Second Temple intertexts to Prov. 30.1-4.
1. Introduction
There is widespread consensus regarding the opening line of Prov. 30—that collection of sayings regularly understood as a late appendix to the central collections of Proverbs. 1 Unfortunately, the consensus is that the second half of Prov. 30.1 is corrupt. Otto Plöger speaks of ‘mancherlie Problemen’ in the text; Michael V. Fox calls the verse-half ‘enigmatic’; R. N. Whybray says the line is ‘totally obscure’. For Arndt Meinhold, ‘Der Text ist so unsicher’ that one must concede a variety of possible meanings for the line. Most dramatically, William McKane laments: ‘In such a verse, where there is hardly a glimmer of light, one feels powerless to make even the first move towards its elucidation’. 2 Despite McKane’s despairing, suggestions for emending aspects of Prov. 30.1 have not been few. 3 The following proposal adds to these. It results not merely in a readable text, however. It also offers a plausible account of how the corrupted MT arose and explains crucial imagery in the emended line better than other common proposals by identifying key intertextual relationships between Agur’s words and several other biblical and Second Temple texts, most importantly the Balaam cycle of Num. 22-24 and 4QInstruction. 4
2. The Central Problem
MT of Prov. 30.1 reads: דברי אגור בן־יקה המשא נאם הגבר לאיתיאל לאיתיאל ואכל
A straightforward translation of the line, according to the Masoretic pointing, is: The words of Agur, son of Yakeh, the oracle, the utterance of the man, for Ithiel, for Ithiel and Ukhal.
The names Agur and Yakeh are obscure, and some scholars wish to emend המשא (‘the oracle’) to המשאי (‘the Massaite’) or ממשא (‘from Massa’) in order to understand the term as a reference to ‘the north Arabian tribe mentioned in Gen. 25:14 and 1 Chron. 1:30’. 5 However, the main difficulty in the line is how to understand Prov. 30.1b, which appears to mention the names of Agur’s addressees—Ithiel and Ukhal. The problem is that the name Ithiel, preceded by the preposition lamed, is both awkwardly repeated and relatively unknown (appearing only in Neh. 11.7), while Ukhal is not at all attested as a proper name in HB. What’s more, with this understanding of the line the כי at the outset of MT’s v. 2 is also problematic since, as Fox notes, it ‘presumes an earlier sentence, not only a title compounded of nouns’. 6
Charles C. Torrey long ago noted that ‘since the late 19th century’ the most common emendation to Prov. 30.1b has been to re-divide and re-point the repeated לאיתיאל.
7
Instead of MT’s text one can read, for example, לאיתי אל לאיתי אל ואכל
In this scenario, the repeated לאיתיאל of MT becomes a twice-written qal perf. 1cs of ל־א־ה, ‘to grow weary’ (lā’îtî), followed by the vocative ‘O God.’ The final ואכל (we’ūkāl)—can be understood as a qal 1cs imperfect verb from י־כ־ל—‘to be able, have power, prevail’; or, it can be repointed as wā’ēkel, the 1cs qal waw-consecutive of כ־ל־ה—‘to be completed, finished, exhausted’. The emended line can subsequently be rendered as something like ‘I am weary, O god, I am weary, O god, but I will prevail’ or ‘… I am weary … and am exhausted’. Torrey’s observation from over half a century ago regarding the prominence of such a solution to the line’s problems still stands. An identical or similar emendation of Prov. 30.1 is adopted, for example, by the Lutherbibel, NRSV, NIV, and major commentators (e.g., Plöger, Fox). 8
Certainly, if one accepts the common emendation of Prov. 30.1b, problems remain. For instance, the undetermined vocative אל is somewhat strange. It is not the ‘true form’ of the vocative, as Torrey put it. 9 However, although the vocative ‘should always have the article, in fact that article is often omitted, especially in poetry or lofty prose’. 10 More problematic for any reading of Prov. 30.1 that accepts the common emendation of the line is the fact that like the twice-stated ‘for Ithiel’ in MT’s vocalization, the phrase ‘I am weary, O God’ in the emended text is repeated verbatim. Torrey, in fact, declared the presence of the duplicated phrases with their inauthentic vocatives to be ‘intolerable’, while Fox, who himself argues for the common emendation that Torrey rails against, concedes that ‘perhaps the second l’yty’l should be omitted, as in LXX and Syr’. 11 But the repetition of לאיתיאל is lectio difficilior and should not be so easily eliminated.
A final problem that emerges if one accepts a version of the common emendation of Prov. 30.1b is how to explain well Agur’s fatigue. Such explanations, however, are not usually forthcoming. Tremper V. Longman, for example, simply contends that the generally negative connotation of being tired in the emended v. 1 ‘fits in well with the rather depressing continuance of the speech’. 12 Whybray likewise only supposes that of all the proposed emendations for v. 1, ‘perhaps that which best fits the context’ is the emendation that highlights Agur’s weariness. 13 Richard J. Clifford also passes quickly to the following verses and (like others) contends that what Agur has grown tired of is trying to attain ‘heavenly wisdom’ (cf. v. 3b). 14 This last insight is likely correct in some sense. However, Clifford does not describe this wisdom much and says little about why pursuing it exhausts Agur. 15
Yet regardless of these problems, some version of the usual emendation of Prov. 30.1b should be adopted, especially since LXX—the most important of the ancient versions of Proverbs—has taken significant ‘liberties’ with its Vorlage at this point. 16 However, any compelling proposal for emending the line ought to address the problem of repetition in the line and explain why the emended text focuses on Agur’s fatigue.
3. Torrey’s Aramaic Explanation: Problems and Possibilities
Torrey, who found the repeated phrases and undetermined vocatives of the usual emendation of Prov. 30.1b to be ‘intolerable’, offered his own proposal for understanding the line. He suggested that the Hebrew text originally read לא אנכי אל לא אני אל ואוכל, which he rendered as ‘I am not a god, I am not a god, that I should have power’. Although these words make a clear distinction between humans and the divine, according to Torrey, ‘The Hebrew doctors were always on their guard against any semblance of blasphemy, and would not trifle with the possibility. Here, the flat collocation of a human “I” with “God” (however intended) was intolerable’. 17 Hence, Torrey believed the ancient scribes disguised the original Hebrew text of Prov. 30.1 with an Aramaic rendering of the line, which he reconstructs as: לָאִיתַי אֵל לָאִיתַי אֵל וְאֻכַל. When the consonants of this Aramaic text were again read as Hebrew, they were re-divided and repointed, to produce the names of Agur’s addressees, Ithiel and Akhul. 18
3.1. Problems
Torrey’s explanation regarding the emergence of the difficult text of Prov. 30.1b is ingenious, but problematic. First, one would not expect the notion ‘I am not a god’ to be expressed in classical Hebrew as לא אני [אנכי] אל, but as אינני אל, since in nominal clauses ‘when the subject which is to be negatived is a personal pronoun, it is joined as a suffix to אֵין’. 19 Second, Torrey’s Aramaic rendering of his imagined original Hebrew is ambiguous since the phrase לָאִיתַי אֵל would most obviously mean ‘there is no god’, rather than ‘I am not a god’. As McKane avers, ‘there is some doubt whether lā’ ‘ītay can mean “I am not”’. ‘The form [with the meaning Torrey wants] does not appear in Jewish Aramaic, since [in Jewish Aramaic] the objective and not the pronominal suffix is used in the first person singular’. 20 Put otherwise, although McKane does not say so explicitly, to achieve the meaning Torrey wants, one would expect the pronominal termination nî, not î, with Aramaic אית (איתני;’îtanî) or איתי (איתיני;’îtênî). 21 This is what the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project suggests is usual for Judean Archival Texts; 22 and the construction with a negative adverb is attested at least once in a text from Murabba’at: לא איתיני ידע. 23 One should thus also expect the Aramaic 1cs suffix attached to איתי /אית in other Second Temple literary contexts (e.g., Prov. 30, that late appendix to the core of Proverbs) to appear as an object pronoun and hence be written as nun-yod.
Finally, one further objection to Torrey’s proposal can be mentioned. Neither Torrey’s imagined Hebrew original to Prov. 30.1b—לא אנכי אל לא אני אל—nor his hypothesized Aramaic ‘hiding of’ that Hebrew—לָאִיתַי אֵל לָאִיתַי אֵל—does much to mitigate the repetition of terms in the verse; but it was the repetition of the typical emendation that in part led him to reject that suggestion in the first place!
3.2. Possibilities
Although Torrey’s proposal for understanding Prov. 30.1b and the origins of the textual conundrum of the line is ultimately unconvincing, he nonetheless does two things that are important. First, he discerns through the now-corrupted Hebrew of Prov. 30.1 the original text’s concern with the speaker’s ontological status as a human and not a divine creature. The significance of this distinction will be addressed below. Second, Torrey’s famous (or infamous) ‘Aramaic imagination’ intuited that the difficulties in understanding Agur’s words in Prov. 30.1 involve the line’s relation to an Aramaic text. Others, like R. B. Y. Scott (followed by McKane and others), have also argued that an Aramaic phrase lies behind the enigmatic Hebrew of Prov. 30.1b. 24 However, the problems of Prov. 30.1b are not well explained by imagining, as did Torrey, that the MT of the line is the result of a translation of a Hebrew text into Aramaic and then back into Hebrew. Such a solution is ‘torturous’, as McKane proclaimed. 25 Rather, the difficulties of Prov. 30.1b can be explained more simply by recognizing that the line (and probably all of Prov. 30.1-3) represents an unsuccessful rendering of an original Aramaic text into Hebrew.
There are good prima facie reasons to entertain this proposal. First, Aramaic was in wide use in Syria-Palestine in the Second Temple period, when Agur’s words were likely composed and appended to a Proverbs scroll. Second, there are not only clear models of Aramaic texts serving as key components of literary works that would subsequently become biblical books (e.g., Ezra; Daniel). There are also good reasons to believe that Aramaic works that were translated into Hebrew were incorporated into some scrolls that would later become canonized texts. John J. Collins, for example, has compellingly suggested that Dan. 1 was initially composed in Aramaic as an introduction to the book’s Aramaic tales in Dan. 2-6. However, once Dan 8-12 were appended to the Aramaic chapters of the text (which came to include Dan. 7), Dan. 1 was translated into Hebrew to serve as an introduction to the final form of the work. Fox has also argued cogently that it was an Aramaic version of the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, which likely made its way to Jerusalem via Phoenicia, which served as the basis of the Hebrew text of Prov. 22.17–23.11, that section of Proverbs long understood to be composed in light of Amenemope. 26
However, there are no clear Aramaisms in the broader ‘Agur section’ of Prov. 30. Absent in these lines are the sorts of locutions that might support the view that parts of this collection—whether one considers the initial unit of chapter 30 to end at v. 9 or v. 14—were first composed in Aramaic. 27 However, as Whybray has noted, ‘There is no agreement among the commentators whether the speaker’ in Prov. 30.4 ‘is the same as in vv. 2-3…’. 28 The dearth of Aramaisms in the larger passage can thus be explained by first positing a change in textual voice between v. 3 and v. 4, which other scholars (though by no means all) have on literary and theological grounds likewise sensed. This means that only the initial three verses of Prov. 30 need be strictly associated with Agur; subsequently, they alone should be said to constitute the textual unit that was originally composed in Aramaic. In other words, with v. 4, Agur’s originally Aramaic utterance gives way to a Hebrew response to his words, and a critical one at that, as we shall see below. Second, the absence of traces of Aramaic even in the initial, originally Aramaic lines of Prov. 30 can be explained by the fact that all the terms of vv. 2-3 (bracketing for the moment v. 1) have straightforward Aramaic cognates, which would make rendering those lines into Hebrew fairly ‘clean’ and unproblematic.
4. A New Explanation
The Aramaic text that likely lies behind the troublesome MT of Prov. 30.1, and which can account well for how the Hebrew arose, can now be directly proposed. It is one that accepts partially the common and compelling emendation that understands Agur’s words to express his weariness, but it avoids the common emendation’s (and MT’s) awkward repetition of terms. It is also an explanation that, like Torrey’s, recognizes that the current MT of Prov. 30.1b conceals the original text’s concern with overtly stating the ontological difference between humans and divine beings.
The Aramaic Vorlage of Prov. 30.1 likely read: לאית אלה לאיתיני אלה ואוכל I am weary, O God; I am not divine but I will prevail.
An acceptable Classical Hebrew rendering of this Aramaic text would be: לאיתי אל אינני אל ואוכל
Although this Hebrew rendering of the proposed Aramaic original of Prov. 30.1b does not diverge greatly from the present MT, the similarities, and especially the differences, between the proposal and the MT require further explanation.
4.1. I am weary, O God
The initial term in the likely Aramaic Vorlage of Prov. 30.1b is לאית (le’êt), the pe’al perfect 1cs of ל־א־י (‘I am weary’). It is followed by the vocative אלה (‘o god’), the form of the substantive attested in BA. 29 A rendering into Hebrew of the Aramaic perfect verb לאית with the subsequent vocative אלה as לאיתי אל produces precisely the consonants of MT’s לאיתיאל, “for Ithiel.”
4.2. I am not divine
Although neither the nun-yod 1cs pronominal suffix attached to איתי in the Aramaic original of Prov. 30.1b, nor the fundamental sense of the expression ‘I am not divine’, is obviously represented in the current MT, the emergence from the Aramaic לאיתיני אלה of a second Hebrew לאיתי אל, instead of an expected אינני אל, is not difficult to explain. It is due to a common error in textual transmission, provoked and complicated by the process of rendering an Aramaic text into Hebrew. After rendering the Aramaic words לאית אלה into Hebrew as לאיתי אל, it was very easy in the act of translating the subsequent Aramaic words into Hebrew, for a tradent’s eyes, and mind, to skip over by parablepsis the nun-yod ending of the Aramaic לאיתיני אלה and disregard the final heh of אלה, thereby producing a second Hebrew לאיתי אל. Alternatively, the clustering of identical and similar-looking consonants (י, ת, ה, א, ל) in the original Aramaic of Prov. 30.1b resulted in the translator first regarding, again by parablepsis, the Aramaic לאיתיני אלה as a second Aramaic לאית אלה, which was once more rendered into Hebrew as לאיתי אל. By one or the other (or some combination) of these mechanisms, the original Aramaic phrase לאיתיני אלה (‘I am not a god’) of Prov. 30.1b became a second Hebrew לאיתי אל —‘I am weary, O God’.
4.3. But I will prevail
The ואוכל of the proposed Aramaic Vorlage to Prov. 30.1b (and the acceptable Classical Hebrew rending of this word) is the 1cs imperfect form of the root י־כ־ל—pe’al in Aramaic, qal in Hebrew. The text claims that although Agur is weary, he believes he will overcome his fatigued situation (‘I am not divine, but I will prevail’); or, if the word is understood as constituting a consecutive clause, it would suggest that Agur fears he won’t be able to overcome his weariness given his lack of divine or heavenly status (‘I am not divine that I should prevail’).
Although the current Hebrew of MT (ואכל) is sometimes understood as a defective writing of the qal 1cs imperfect of י־כ־ל, there is a significant objection to understanding it thus—namely, such a form would be unexpected, even ‘aberrant’, since imperfect verbal forms of this root are essentially always attested plene in BH. 30 One would expect, ואוכל not ואכל. The task at this point, however, is not to posit how one might or might not vocalize ואכל in the current Hebrew of MT, but to explain how the present, corrupt text arose from the proposed Aramaic Vorlage of the verse.
It is, in fact, not difficult to imagine a scenario that explains, both simply and well, the emergence of MT’s unexpected, defective orthography, ואכל for ואוכל, from the above proposed Aramaic text. The current MT vocalization of ואכל (we’ūkāl) obviously preserves the phonology of an original ואוכל (we’ûkāl), ‘but I will prevail/that I should prevail’. It is possible that the corrupted Hebrew form arose through a simple haplography: ואוכל > ואכל. However, a more complex explanation is more adequate in light of the above discussion. Once an Aramaic לאית אלה לאיתיני אלה became a repeated Hebrew לאיתי אל, the textual traditions had difficulty understanding not only the repeated cluster of consonants (לאיתיאל), but the verse’s last word ואוכל in relation to those repeated consonants. (The Vulgate’s and LXX’s paraphrases of Prov. 30.1 surely attest to this confusion). 31 However, once the twice-written Hebrew words לאיתי אל become understood as a twice-written לאיתיאל, ‘for Ithiel’, and taken as an allusion to Agur’s first addressee, a 1cs verbal form of י־כ־ל at the end of the line (ואוכל) would be nonsensical. The form thus had to be interpreted differently, for example as an otherwise unattested proper name. However, to distinguish this ‘name’ from a prefixed form of י־כ־ל, which is always written plene, the term came to be written as ואכל. Hence the birth of Agur’s second addressee—Ukhal. At this point, however, the consonants ואכל could also be easily reckoned as form of כ־ל־ה, as apparently reflected in LXX’s rendering of the term as παύομαι (‘I stop’). 32 In other textual traditions, like that which produced the current MT, it would continue to be vocalized in a fashion that evoked we’ûkāl, the 1cs prefixed form of י־כ־ל, which it originally was.
It is thus best to regard ואכל in the MT of Prov. 30.1b as a corruption of the first-person-imperfect Hebrew form ואוכל derived from י־כ־ל, itself a translation of the same, identically written, but originally Aramaic, verb ואוכל. 33 Syntactically, the waw probably should be regarded as adversative (‘but I will prevail’); however, it may also be understood as a consecutive clause (‘that I should prevail’).
The Aramaic text that I propose as a likely Vorlage to Prov. 30.1b thus included no undue duplication of an addressee (לאיתיאל), or repetition of the speaker’s declaration to the divine that he is weary (לאיתי אל); or, in Torrey’s case, no repetition of the speaker’s claim to ‘not be God’ (לא אנכי אל לא אני אל/לאיתי אל לאיתי אל). It does, however, account for how such repetition emerged in MT. Importantly, it also highlights (as did Torrey’s suggestion) Agur’s recognition of his ontological status, which separates him (and all humans) from divine or heavenly beings. This is significant since it is precisely the human-divine ontological distinction, when understood in relation to Agur’s wisdom or knowledge, that explains why Agur complains to God of his weariness.
5. Intertextuality, Ontological Distinctions, and Revealed Wisdom
The claim that Prov. 30.1b preserves in obscured form both a reference to Agur’s originally Aramaic statement of his weariness and his ontological difference from the divine is warranted not only by the textual arguments above, which grew out of an intuitive suggestion by Torrey. It is also supported by the relationship of Prov. 30.1-4 with several key biblical and Second Temple texts, especially the Balaam cycle of stories in Num. 22-24 and 4QInstruction. That these texts constitute apt intertexts for Agur’s words is underscored when two ambiguities of Prov. 30.3 are first resolved.
The first ambiguity of Prov. 30.3 is syntactical. The line reads: ולא־למדתי חכמה ודעת קדשים אדע
Because v. 3a has Agur claim he has not learned traditional human חכמה (cf. v. 2), many commentators assume the לא of v. 3a does double duty in v. 3b, and regard the waw of ודעת as conjunctive. 34 The verse might thus be rendered: ‘And I have not learned wisdom, nor have I דעת קדשים’ (NRSV). However, as Fox concedes, ‘Since the negative [in v. 3b] is not explicit, the [second] clause could also be read as affirmative, hence adversative’ to the preceding. Although Agur has no human wisdom, he confidently proclaims, ‘“but I do have’” דעת קדשים. 35
Second, to what precisely might דעת קדשים refer in a wisdom composition like Prov. 30.1-9 (or 1-14)? Like many others, Fox understands the phrase to refer to ‘knowledge of the Holy One, that is God’. 36 He eschews the notion that דעת קדשים is the esoteric, eschatologically oriented knowledge, which heavenly beings—קדשים (‘angels’)— possess and can reveal to humans. However, attestations of קדשים referring to heavenly beings are well established in both biblical (e.g., Deut. 33.3; Zech. 14.5; Ps 89.6 [5], 8 [7]; Job 5.1; Dan. 8.24) and Second Temple sources (1 Enoch; 4QInstruction, see below). By contrast, קדשים as an independent locution for the divine is not clearly attested in the HB. 37 What’s more, although Agur claims to possess no traditional human wisdom (vv. 2-3), as we will shortly see, both Prov. 30.1 and that line’s intertextual relation to the Balaam tradition suggest that the sort of knowledge he does hold is revealed, prophetic knowledge. When this discourse of prophetic revelation is combined with the rhetoric of angelic knowledge—דעת קדשים—in a relatively late Second Temple text like Prov. 30, it inevitably evokes the esoteric wisdom of more eschatologically oriented traditions (e.g., 1 Enoch, 4QInstruction), even if puzzling out across texts and history the exact status and role of the heavenly figures who can transmit this knowledge to humans is a remarkably complex undertaking. 38
5.1. Agur in Proverbs and Balaam in Numbers
Of course, if Agur possesses heavenly, eschatological knowledge, one might wonder why in v. 2a he states he is more בער than human. Surely knowing דעת קדשים would elevate his moral-epistemological status above that of a ‘brute’ (or a ‘dolt’; cf. the play of בער, ‘dolt’, and בעיר, ‘beast’). To resolve this conundrum, one must fully ‘hear’ in Agur’s words the first key intertext for the opening lines of Prov. 30, which essentially all commentators recognize: namely, the Balaam cycle of tales in Numbers, and Num. 24.3 and 15 in particular. By tending to this intertext with Prov. 30, it is possible to perceive the double-voiced nature of Agur’s discourse, which for the tradents of Prov. 30 ultimately served to undermine the legitimacy of any claims to esoteric wisdom that might make obsolete the traditional wisdom of the rest of the book.
The intertextual relationship between the opening lines of Prov. 30 and the Numbers passages is to a certain extent obvious. Both traditions, for example, share the precise terminology of נאם הגבר (Prov. 30.1; Num. 24.3, 15; cf. 2 Sam. 23.1), and both traditions play on the consonants ב־ע־ר. Balaam is son of be’ōr (24.3, 15); Agur is ‘more a dolt/beast (ba’ar) than human’ (Prov. 30.2a).
However, less obvious intertextual connections between the initial lines of Prov. 30 and the Balaam tales can also be discerned. First, both the Balaam cycle and Proverbs 30.1 cast their principal human characters as prophetic figures. Balaam is one who communicates with the divine (Num. 22.9-12) and acts and speaks as the deity instructs him (22.20, 38; 23.3, 16, 26; 24.1-3). Similarly, the tradition that introduces Agur’s words also clearly casts him as one who speaks like a prophet. Proverbs 30.1a not only describes Agur’s words as נאם הגבר (‘the utterance of the man’), just as Numbers describes Balaam’s discourse. The Proverbs verse also introduces Agur’s utterance as ‘the oracle’ (המשא), a term that like נאם belongs firmly to a discourse of divinely revealed prophetic speech. 39 Although the word משא is not directly deployed in the Balaam texts, both Num. 23.7 and 18 introduce Balaam’s words with the phrase וישא משלו (‘then Balaam uttered his oracle’; NRSV). Given the other clear intertextual relations between Prov. 30 and the Balaam stories, this expression’s use of the root (נשא) to introduce Balaam’s prophetic voice was likely sufficient encouragement for the tradents of Proverbs, first, to regard Agur’s words as a משא. However, because what Balaam utters is itself called a משל, the expression also likely warranted the decision by the redactors of Proverbs to append Agur’s words to the Mishle Shlomo. Just as ‘the utterance of the man’ (נאם הגבר) Balaam, which ‘he lifted up’, could be called a משל, so ‘the utterance of the man’ (נאם הגבר) Agur was surely also reckoned by the later wisdom tradents as a kind of משל—even if it was not explicitly named such in Prov. 30; it was thus rightly appended to a משלי scroll. 40
The intertextual relation between Agur in Prov. 30 and Balaam in Num. 22-24 is also evidenced by the fact that the knowledge both Balaam and Agur possess can be associated with heavenly beings. In Numbers the angel of the Lord (מלאך יהוה; Num. 22.23-35), famously brought to Balaam’s attention via an uncooperative ass, communicates to the seer what he ought to speak to Balak. In Prov. 30.3b, Agur similarly claims to possess angelic wisdom (see above), though in Proverbs the heavenly beings Agur knows of are called קדשים instead of מלאך/מלאכי יהוה.
Finally, an intertextual relationship between Prov. 30 and the Balaam texts is discernible by the fact that in the broader Balaam cycle, divine-human ontological distinctions are clearly articulated, as they are in the proposed emendation to Prov. 30.1b and in what was likely the original Aramaic text of that verse. In Num. 23.19, Balaam reminds Balak that ‘God is not a person’ nor ‘the child of a human’—לא איש אל … ובן אדם. In the Aramaic Vorlage of Prov. 30.1b proposed above, Agur simply states this ontological distinction from his own first-person perspective—‘I am not a divine being’.
When one acknowledges all these intertextual identifications of Agur in Proverbs with Balaam of Numbers, it is possible to discern the double-voiced nature of Agur’s words, which creates an irony that ultimately places Agur, and his claim to angelic knowledge, in a negative light. First, Agur’s words—‘I am more a dolt/beast than human’—which despite his subsequent claim to possess angelic knowledge seem to denigrate Agur’s moral-intellectual status, can now be heard on more than one level. Although Agur’s utterance clearly suggests he is a dolt, with the Balaam intertexts in mind it can also be playfully heard as his own claim—though not necessarily that of the tradents of Proverbs—that he is more akin to that ancient custodian of divinely revealed knowledge, the son of Beor, than he is like other humans: בער אנכי מאיש [י] כ—‘I am more [like the son of] Beor (בער) than a [normal] person’.
The irony of this double-voiced discourse emerges via a reader’s recollection that throughout most of the rest of Proverbs, the wisdom necessary for human flourishing is not revealed heavenly knowledge but that which is preserved and transmitted by human teachers and communities. By attending to such traditional teaching, the book’s addressees can attain a robust practical wisdom by which to discern and choose the good and reject evil, even if some humans will fail to greater and lesser extents in this endeavor and be labeled foolish, wicked, or even a בער (12.1). Because Agur does not learn traditional wisdom (30.2, 3a) and instead in Prov. 30.3b claims to possess—like Balaam, son of בער—revealed, heavenly knowledge, the tradents of traditional human wisdom responsible for the integration of Agur’s words into Prov. 30 have the weary seer himself proclaim—in critical-ironic fashion—that he is indeed a dolt/beast (בער). On the terms of the sages’ long-established moral discourse in Proverbs, one who like Agur refuses traditional wisdom and understanding could be no other. 41
5.2. Proverbs 30 and the Enoch Tradition
This reckoning of the ironic logic of Agur’s words in Prov. 30.2-3 is underscored when one recalls that in Prov. 30.4 a new textual voice likely responds to Agur’s claims.
מי עלה־שמים וירד מי אסף־רוח בחפניו מי צרר־מים בשמלה מי הקים כל־אפסי־ארץ מה־שמו ומה־שם־בנו כי תדע Who has ascended to heaven and come down? Who has gathered the wind in the hollow of the hand? Who has wrapped up the waters in a garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is the person’s name? And what is the name of the person’s child? Surely you know! (NRSV)
As Fox also intimates, the expected response to the rhetorical questions of Prov. 30.4 is likely either ‘God alone’ or ‘no one’—or perhaps both, if ‘no one’ is limited to humans. If, as is often the case among commentators, v. 4 is regarded as a continuation of Agur’s earlier persistent claims (vv. 2-3) to not possess wisdom (ולא־בינת אדם לי ולא־למדתי חכמה)—a view that requires reading v. 3b (ודעת קדשים אדע) as a negative clause (cf. above)—lines 2-4 as a whole can be thought to describe Agur’s intellectual humility, his version of the dictum that the wise person knows she knows nothing. No one, not even Agur himself, can truly possess knowledge; at best this is the purview of God, who in fact is able to traverse the heavens and control natural phenomena. Alternatively, one might think Agur’s claim about possessing no human wisdom is a hyperbolic subordinating of any sort of wisdom—his own included—to the knowledge that comes from the ‘word of God’, which is mentioned in v. 5, the initial line of a cluster of verses that resonate with Deuteronomic rhetoric. 42
However, if v. 4 represents a new textual voice responding to Agur’s words in vv. 2-3, it is better to regard Agur not as a paragon of intellectual humility, but as one who, again, simply refuses traditional wisdom in favor of something like the revealed, heavenly knowledge that the son of Beor traded in. In fact, for many the rhetoric of Prov. 30.4 evokes the figure of Enoch, that legendary scribe who is also associated with an angelic wisdom gleaned from a series of heavenly journeys. As Fox says, representatives of the ‘later parts of the Enoch traditions’, such as 1 Enoch 72-82, might have responded to the rhetorical questions in Prov. 30.4 by insisting that ‘Enoch went up to the heavens and came back down’. 43
The evocation in Prov. 30.4 of Enoch may be signaled in another way as well. As Whybray has pointed out, the effort to identify someone by inquiring of their son’s name does not otherwise seem to be attested in HB. He writes: ‘There are no other examples of such a request for identification in the Old Testament’, adding that it is more usual for the Bible to have someone inquire about a person’s father. 44 Although Whybray may well be correct about all of this, the turn of phrase, שם בנו, that Prov. 30.4 deploys in its rhetorical questioning appears six times in the Bible simply to identify someone’s son. Intriguingly, the first of these attestations is in Gen. 4.17.
וידע קין את־אשתו ותהר ותלד את־חנוך ויהי בנה עיר ויקרא שם העיר כשם בנו חנוך Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch. (NRSV)
The ambiguous syntax of the Hebrew of this line indicates either that Cain names a city he built after his son Enoch (so NRSV) or, as Claus Westermann supposed, that Enoch (the most immediate antecedent of ויהי in the second half of the line and possibly the explicit subject delayed until the end of the line) names the city he built after his son. In either case, the terms שם בנו are closely connected to the name Enoch. On Westermann’s understanding, however, the name of Enoch’s ‘son’ (שם בנו) in the line may have been implicitly assumed to be Methuselah—though the relationship of the Cain traditions of Gen. 4.17 to the genealogies of Enoch and Methuselah in Gen. 5.18-27 is complex and debated. 45
Whatever the precise relationship between Gen. 4.17 and Gen. 5.18-27, in 1 Enoch 81 we read that Enoch passed on his heavenly, angelic wisdom—what one might call his דעת קדשים—to his descendants. Unlike Gen. 4.17, however, this text specifically mentions Enoch’s son Methuselah, who is singled out as the primary recipient of Enoch’s wisdom. After Enoch learns eschatological knowledge from the heavenly tablets that an angel shows him (1 Enoch 81.1-2), he says, … seven holy ones brought me and set me on the earth in front of the door of my house and said to me, ‘Make known everything to Methuselah your son…’ (1 Enoch 81.5; cf. 82.1-4)
46
If one conceivable answer to the question of Prov. 30.4 about who it is that has ascended to the heavens and come back down is Enoch, as Fox intuited but resisted, in light of the Enoch intertexts with this verse, the only real response to the peculiar question about the name of such a person’s son is Methuselah! Although it is not warranted to speak of any direct influence of 1 Enoch 81 on Prov. 30, the two texts nonetheless can be said to stand in intertextual relation. As Nickelsburg notes, the Book of the Luminaries, to which 1 Enoch 81 belongs, is likely the oldest of the Enoch collections; its roots are probably in the late Persian period, while something close to the finished collection may have emerged around 300 BCE. 47
Of course, even as Prov. 30.4 evokes Enoch and Methuselah—figures who like Balaam and Agur possessed revealed divine wisdom—the expected response to the line’s rhetorical questions remains ‘no one’. 48 But now, when v. 4 is reckoned not as the words of Agur but of a different textual voice, this anticipated response to the rhetorical questions of the line takes the force of a rebuke; it is a reprimand of anyone—whether Balaam, Enoch, ‘Aramaic Agur’, or someone else—who might claim to possess an esoteric wisdom regarded as superior to the traditional virtue-oriented wisdom that constitutes most of the rest of the book of Proverbs. In Agur’s context—that is, the context of the literary incorporation of his ‘words’ into Prov. 30—this wisdom can be called דעת קדשים; it is angelic wisdom like Enoch’s; and like Enoch’s it surely entailed eschatological insight.
5.3. 4QInstruction and Proverbs 30
As important as the Balaam and Enoch (inter)texts are for warranting the above proposal for Prov. 30.1b, so too are a couple of passages from another significant Second Temple wisdom text—4QInstruction (Musar le-Mevin). 4QInstruction is typically regarded as later than both Enoch and Prov. 30. Some would date the work to the early second century BCE, or perhaps the late third century. The editors of the editio princeps, for instance, suggest it was composed in the Seleucid period. However, they also acknowledge that its origins may be in the Ptolemaic age, or perhaps even the late Persian epoch. 49 If this is correct, Musar le-Mevin is historically not so far removed from the early Enoch tradition or the relatively late Prov. 30, with which it stands in intertextual relation. Like those verses from the Balaam cycle and the Enoch tradition that resonate intertextually with the opening lines of Prov. 30, these 4QInstruction texts also articulate the ontological gap that separates humans from heavenly beings and speak of humans’ pursuit of revealed knowledge associated with angels. However, they also relate this ontological distinction and pursuit of revealed wisdom to human weariness like that which Agur (in a suitably emended Prov. 30.1b) experiences.
In the symbolic universe of 4QInstruction, the text’s ‘understanding’ addressee, the מבין belongs to a community whose ‘spirit’ is not aligned with the ‘flesh’, but is, along with its work, somehow aligned with that of angelic beings. For example, 4Q417 1 i, 16-17 intimates not only that the מבין belongs to a ‘spiritual people’ (עם רוח) but that ‘according to the likeness of the holy ones he [God] fashioned him [the spiritual people]’ (כתבנית קדושים יצרו). 50 As Matthew J. Goff notes, ‘The mebin is in “the lot of the angels” (4Q418 81, 4-5)’. 51 The human community imagined by 4QInstruction, because of its relation to the angels, thus has access to esoteric knowledge like the heavenly beings do—even as it remains ontologically distinct from the angels.
An initial passage from the Musar le-Mevin that reveals this is the case and which constitutes an apt intertext with the words of Agur in Prov. 30.1-3 is 4Q418 55, 8-11. 52
הלוא יד]עתם אם לוא שמעתמה כיא מלאכי קודש לו בשמים] [ ] אמת וירדפו אחר כול שורשי בינה וישקדו על [ ] לפי] דעתם יכבדו איש מרעהו ולפי שכלו ירבה הדרו ] הכאנוש הם כי יעצל ובן אדם כי ידמה [ ] Do you not know? Have you not heard, that the holy angels to him in heaven [ ] [ ] truth and they chase after all the roots of understanding. And they keep watch over [ ] [accor] ding to their knowledge they are gloriful, one more than the other. And according to his insight his splendor is great. Are they like man? For he is lazy. And (like) humankind? For he comes to a standstill.
Two points about these lines are significant for understanding Agur’s words. First, in 4QInstruction the angelic beings—the holy angels (מלאכי קודש)—are associated with key terms of moral epistemology—truth (אמת), understanding (בינה), knowledge (דעת), and insight (שכל). In Prov. 30.2-3, Agur deploys a related rhetoric. Agur, however, disclaims possession of human understanding (ולא־בינת אדם לי; v. 2) and insists he has not learned wisdom (ולא־למדתי חכמה; v. 3). By contrast, the angels in 4QInstruction seek after the roots of understanding (וירדפו אחר כול שורשי בינה). Second, the angelic beings of 4Q418 55 (cf. 4Q418 164, 2)—elsewhere in 4QInstruction called קדושים (4Q417 1i, 17; 4Q418 81 + 81a, 1, 11-12; cf. 4-5), ‘sons of heaven’ (416 2, 2a-c, 4; 418 69ii, 13; see below), and perhaps ‘spirits of holiness’ (418 76, 3; cf. 4Q403 1 i, 44)—are reckoned as ontologically distinct from humans, even if the ‘spiritual people’ of the work are imagined as standing in close relation to the angels. Because of this ontological distinction, the heavenly beings appear to be, in part, characterologically distinct from humans. As the rhetorical questions at the end of the pericope make clear, the angels are active and diligent; they pursue understanding and apparently keep watch over forms of knowledge, advancing in status in relation to their possession of the same. However, humans (אנוש ;בן אדם) are characterized as lazy (עצל) or inactive (דמה) with respect to their own epistemological efforts. This rhetoric of laziness and inaction, of course, is not precisely a discourse of weariness like that which Agur utters in Prov. 30.1. Yet in a certain sense it can be said to belong to the same semantic field. If one grows weary in an activity and thus ceases to engage in it, this subsequent inactivity could be characterized as laziness, if there were an underlying belief that the activity, or enduring in it, was not, or should not be regarded as, burdensome.
The second text from the Musar le-Mevin that elucidates Agur’s words is 4Q418 69ii + 60 10-14.
ואתם בחירי אמת ורֹדפי [דעת]משח[רי בינה ו]שוקד[ים] על כול דעה איכה תאמרו יגענו בבינה ושקדנו לרדוף דעת בכול מ[ ] ולא עיף בכול שני עולם [ ] הלוא באמת ישעשע לעד ודעה [לנצח] תשרתנו [וב[ני] שמים אשר חיים עולם נחלתם האמור יאמרו יגענו בפעלות אמת ויעפ[נו בכול קצים הלוא באור עולם יתהלכו [כ]בוד ורוב הדר אתם And you, chosen ones of truth, and those who chase [knowledge,] those who diligently se[ek understanding and] those who keep watch over all knowledge. How can you say, ‘we weary ourselves in understanding and we keep watch to chase knowledge’? [ ] in all [ ] and He does not grow tired in all years of eternity. Does He not delight in truth forever and (does not) knowledge [eternally] serve him? And the sons of heaven, whose lot is eternal life, do they really say, ‘we grow weary in deeds of truth and we grow tired throughout all ages’? Do they not walk in eternal light? Glory and great splendor is with them.
As with 4Q418 55, 8-11, several points about this text are relevant for understanding Agur’s words. First, in these lines it is not the angels alone who are said to pursue knowledge and understanding and to watch over the same. Humans, the addressees of the text—the “chosen ones of truth”—do so as well. This pursuit of esoteric knowledge, moreover, is said to be tiresome; and the humans in the lines, again via rhetorical questioning, are chided for articulating their fatigue—‘How can you say, we weary ourselves in understanding…?’ Finally, the text once more articulates a clear ontological distinction between humans and heavenly beings. On the one hand, the deity itself, unlike humans, does not grow weary or tired. On the other hand, the angelic beings, the sons of heaven, likewise do not tire in their ‘deeds of truth’.
Although it is not explicit in the above-cited 4Q418 texts, part of the ontological distinction between humans and angels in 4QInstruction has to do with the fact that the angels presently enjoy eternal life, while humans obviously don’t. As Arjen Bakker explains, in 4QInstruction, ‘Human beings may strive to gather knowledge, but they have their limitations: they become faint, they grow tired and eventually they die ….’ ‘Nevertheless’, Bakker continues, ‘the sage is expected to continually expand his wisdom’, probably by studying Torah and ‘other forms of knowledge’ such as the eschatologically revelatory raz nihyeh. 53 Through such study the text’s addressee will enjoy, in Goff’s words, ‘the potential to attain a blessed afterlife’, as the allusion to the addressee’s potential ‘eternal joy’ (שמחת עולם) in 4Q417 2 i, 10-12 intimates. 54 The ontological distance between the angels and the human ‘insider’ community of 4QInstruction is thus reckoned as one that will be eschatologically adjusted, if not eliminated. One might say that in 4QInstruction, despite the human addressee’s present weariness—which emerges in his striving after esoteric knowledge and which is inevitable because of his human ontological status—he will in the end, much like Agur, prevail.
Of course, the terminology of weariness in the lines from 4Q418 is not לאה/לאי, as is the case in the suitably emended Prov. 30.1b and its likely Aramaic Vorlage. Rather, it is עיף and יגע. Yet all three terms belong to the same semantic field and can be rendered by the same or related Greek terms in LXX.
55
What’s more, at times the Aramaic Targums render יגע precisely with a form of ל־א־י. This is the case, for instance, in Targum Jonathan on at least three occasions with respect to Isa. 40 alone, including Isa. 40.28, a verse 4Q418 clearly invokes.
56
In the Isaiah text, the prophet also distinguishes humans sharply from ‘the Creator of the ends of the earth’, who לא ייעף ולא ייגע אין חקר לתבונתו does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.
57
5.4. Proverbs 30 and Isaiah 40
Isaiah 40, however, is not merely an important intertext for 4Q418 69. As is often pointed out, Prov. 30.1-4 (especially v. 4) and Isa. 40.12-14 also share significant terminology and important rhetorical features.
מי־מדד בשעלו מים ושמים בזרת תכן וכל בשלש עפר הארץ ושקל בפלס הרים וגבעות במאזנים מי־תכן את־רוח יהוה ואיש עצתו יודיענו את מי נועץ ויבינהו וילמדהו בארח משפט וילמדהו דעת ודרך תבונות יודיענו 12 Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? 13 Who has directed the spirit of the LORD, or as his counselor has instructed him? 14 Whom did he consult for his enlightenment, and who taught him the path of justice? Who taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding? (NRSV)
First, the rhetoric of knowledge (forms of ידע, בין) and teaching (forms of למד) in Isa. 40.12-14, which is used to express divine wisdom, resonates with Agur’s words in Prov. 30.2-3, where Agur eschews human understanding and the learning of traditional wisdom, opting instead for ‘knowledge of holy ones’. Both the Isaiah passage and Prov. 30.4 also obviously make use of the interrogative pronoun מי, besides the already-mentioned forms derived from ידע. However, they also both deploy the lexemes שמים (heavens), רוח (wind), מים (waters), and ארץ (earth). Similarly, the two passages each make use of an image of holding natural phenomena in one’s hands —wind (in Proverbs) and water (in Isaiah). The evocation by Prov. 30.4 of Isaiah’s discourse of divine incomparability and the unsearchable nature of the divine’s wisdom serves to underscore the Proverbs passage’s insistence that the sort of heavenly knowledge Agur claims to hold is, in fact, unattainable.
5.5. Why so wearying?
If the fatigue that 4QInstruction attributes to humans in their pursuit of knowledge or wisdom is due to their ontological status as humans and not divine figures, a further passage in the Musar le-Mevin helps clarify further why this activity turns out to be so wearisome: it is, or ought to be, a constant undertaking. In 4Q417 1i, 6 (cf. 4Q418 43-45, 4) the text commands its addressee: יומם ולילה הגה ברז נהיה ודורש תמיד Day and night meditate on the raz nihyeh and study continuously.
The exhortation is not unlike the instruction offered to members of the Yaḥad in 1QS VI, 6-7.
ואל ימש במקום אשר יהיו שם העשרה איש דורש בתורה יומם ולילה תמיד על יפות איש לרעהו והרבים ישקודו ביחד את שלישית כול לילות השנה לקרוא בספר ולדרוש משפט ולברך ביחד And in the place in which the Ten assemble there should not be missing a man to interpret the law day and night, always, one relieving another. And the Many shall be on watch together for a third of each night of the year in order to read the book, explain the regulation, and bless together.
58
As Bakker explains, members of the Yaḥad ensure that constant study occurs ‘by taking turns: if the one studying becomes exhausted he has to be replaced by a fellow’. Although not explicit in the current MT of Prov. 30.1-3, in light of the Qumran (and other) intertexts discussed above, one can conclude that in this late appendix to Proverbs it is Agur’s constant effort to acquire דעת קדשים that provokes the fatigue that the suitably emended text of Prov. 30.1b—derived from the above-proposed Aramaic original of the line—has him lament.
6. Conclusions
This proposal regarding a likely Aramaic Vorlage for the text of Prov. 30.1b not only elucidates the line’s original sense and explains how the corrupted MT emerged. It also suggests a plausible reason why Agur, in the usual emendation of Prov. 30.1b and its Aramaic Vorlage, describes himself as weary. The various biblical and Second Temple intertexts marshalled to support the proposal, however, also reveal some of the contours of a broader Second Temple moral-epistemological debate regarding the locus and nature of the knowledge necessary for human well-being. Although in this larger cultural dialogue Agur rejects traditional wisdom in favor of esoteric, eschatological knowledge, this is not the final word in Prov. 30. The double-voiced nature of Agur’s rhetoric in v. 2, we saw, levels an ironic critique of his moral-epistemic inclination to esoteric rather than traditional human wisdom, while a new voice in v. 4 insists that no one has gone up to heaven and come back down again that they might have access to the sort of heavenly ‘knowledge of holy ones’ that Agur pretends to. These rejoinders to Agur’s claim to angelic knowledge from the side of traditional wisdom, however, themselves encounter (a) further voice(s) in Prov. 30. As Bernd U. Schipper has shown, beginning at v. 5 the rest of Prov. 30.1-9 (14) evokes other Second Temple discourses of knowledge, particularly Deuteronomic voices, thereby adding to the moral-epistemological conversation in the chapter that Agur’s words initiate. 59
Footnotes
1.
The initial literary unit of Prov. 30 extends to either v. 9 or v. 14. Proverbs 30.1–14 is, in any case, an ancient collection, as testified by the Greek, which places these lines after (an expanded) Prov. 24.22. Prov. 30.15-33 is almost always regarded as a discrete collection.
2.
Otto Plöger, Sprüche Salomos (Proverbia) (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1984), p. 358. Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10–31: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 853; R. N. Whybray, Proverbs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 407; Arndt Meinhold, Die Sprüche, Teil 2 Kapitel 16-31 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1991), p. 494; William McKane, Proverbs: A New Approach (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), p. 644.
3.
See, for example, Berend Gemser, Sprüche Salomos (Tübingen: Mohr, 1963), p. 102; Paul Franklyn, ‘The Sayings of Agur in Proverbs 30: Piety or Scepticism’, ZAW 95 (1983), pp. 238-52; Eva Strömberg Krantz, ‘“A Man Not Supported by God”: On Some Crucial Words in Proverbs XXX 1’, VT, 46.4 (1996), pp. 548-53.
4.
‘Intertextuality’ is here understood in a ‘Bakhtinian’ sense whereby intertexts inflect or accent an already at-hand and socially and historically situated discourse for their own rhetorical ends. See Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 3-21. For other understandings of intertextuality in biblical studies, see John Barton, ‘Déjà Lu: Intertextuality, Method or Theory?’, in K. Dell and W. Kynes (eds.), Reading Job Intertextually (New York and London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2013), pp. 1-16.
5.
Whybray, Proverbs, p. 407. Cf. משא in Prov. 31.1, which is also sometimes regarded as a proper noun.
6.
Fox, Proverbs 10-31, p. 853.
7.
Charles C. Torrey, ‘Proverbs, Chapter 30’, JBL 73 (1954), pp. 93-96 (94).
8.
Plöger, Sprüche, pp. 351, 354; Fox, Proverbs 10-31, p. 850.
9.
Torrey, ‘Proverbs’, p. 94.
10.
Paul Joüon and Takamitsu Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (2nd edition; Biblical Institute Press; 2006), p. 476.
11.
Fox, Proverbs 10-31, p. 854.
12.
Tremper V. Longman III, Proverbs (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006), p. 520.
13.
Whybray, Proverbs, p. 408.
14.
Richard J. Clifford, Proverbs: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999), p. 261.
15.
Fox (Proverbs 10-31, p. 853) offers some of the fullest suggestions about Agur’s weariness. He connects Agur’s weariness in Prov. 30.1 both to the speaker in v. 7 who asks for two things ‘before I die’ and to David’s Last Testament in 2 Sam 23, which uses some of the same rhetoric as Prov. 30.1. Subsequently, for Fox, Agur’s exhaustion is due to the fact that he is near death. However, unlike Fox, I understand a shift in voices in the passage starting at v. 4 (see below). Subsequently, the connections between Agur’s weariness in v. 1 and the voice of v. 7 are not compelling to me.
16.
LXX Prov. 30.1 reads: Τοὺς ἐμοὺς λόγους, υἱέ, φοβήθητι καὶ δεξάμενος αὐτοὺς μετανόει· τάδε λέγει ὁ ἀνὴρ τοῖς πιστεύουσιν θεῷ, καὶ παύομαι (‘My son, fear my words, and repent when you receive them; this is what the man says to those who believe in God: Now I stop’; NETS). Cf. Fox, Proverbs 10-31, p. 1060.
17.
Torrey, ‘Proverbs’, p. 95.
18.
Torrey, ‘Proverbs’, p. 96.
19.
E. Kautzsch and A. E. Cowley (eds.), Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910), p. 480.
20.
McKane, Proverbs, p. 645.
21.
William B. Stevenson, Palestinian Jewish Aramaic Grammar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 43.
23.
M72.4, cited by Takamitsu Muraoka, Grammar of Qumran Aramaic (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), p. 256.
24.
R. B. Y. Scott, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 176.
25.
McKane, Proverbs, p. 645.
26.
John J. Collins, Daniel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), pp. 33-38; Fox, Proverbs 10-31, pp. 763-65.
27.
Fox, Proverbs 10–31, p. 706.
28.
Whybray, Proverbs, p. 408.
29.
Or possibly, instead of BA’s אלה, the vocative was written simply as אל, the lexical form of the substantive in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic.
30.
Fox, Proverbs 10-31, p. 854.
31.
For the LXX text, see n. 16 above. The Vulgate renders: Verba Congregantis, filii Vomentis. Visio quam locutus est vir cum quo est Deus, et qui Deo secum morante confortatus, ait (‘The words of Gatherer the son of Vomiter. The vision which the man spoke, with whom God is, and who being strengthened by God, abiding with him, said’; Douay-Rheims).
32.
In LXX, forms of παúω sometimes render piel inflections of כ־ל־ה (e.g., Gen. 18.33, 24.19; 27.30; Deut. 20.9, Josh. 8.24, etc.).
33.
As Franz Rosenthal explains, though the Aramaic yūḵal form may be a ‘Hebraism’, it is ‘probably an ancient’ hup ‘al form, which is ‘commonly used in Hebrew’ and can be preserved in BA. Although the 1cs imperfect of י־כ־ל is not attested in BA, the 3ms and 2ms forms appear at Dan. 2.10 and 5.16 (preserved in the Ketiv). See A Grammar of Biblical Aramaic (6th edition; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995), p. 58.
34.
The LXX of 30.3a reads θεὸς δεδίδαχέν με σοφίαν, καὶ γνῶσιν ἁγίων ἔγνωκα. The initial לא in v. 3 thus possibly reflects a transposition of the letters of אל (‘god, El’). This reading resonates with the description of Balaam’s reception of the word of God (אל) in Numbers (e.g., Num. 24.4, 16), a cycle of tales that constitute an important intertext for Agur’s words (see below). Reading ואל for ולא in v. 3 would not affect substantively the broader movement of my argument regarding the Aramaic original of Prov 30.1b or regarding the subsequent words of Prov. 30.1-4 (see below). However, given that the Greek translator of the early lines of Prov 30 struggles to render well his Hebrew source, it may be that with v. 3 he was simply trying to make better sense of an already corrupted Hebrew Vorlage. Hence I retain the negative adverb and regard v. 3a as a piece of Agur’s rejection, or negative evaluation, of human wisdom (begun in v. 2) in favor of esoteric angelic wisdom, which he immediately claims to possess in v. 3b.
35.
Fox, Proverbs 10-31, p. 855.
36.
Fox, Proverbs 10-31, p. 855.
37.
In Prov. 9.10, דעת קדשים probably refers to sacred matters, but since it parallels ‘fear of the Lord’ it possibly refers to knowledge of God. In MT Hos 12.1, קדושים is similarly paralleled to אל. However, LXX Hos. 12.1 intimates that the line may be corrupt.
38.
See George W. E. Nickelsburg’s excurses on watchers, holy ones, and angels in 1 Enoch 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), pp. 140-41; 208-210 and the discussions of Collins, Daniel, pp. 313-17 and Carol Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice: A Critical Commentary (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 23-38.
39.
Seventeen of the twenty occurrences of ‘oracle’ (משא) are in prophetic contexts; נאם is exceedingly common in prophetic works.
40.
Elsewhere in HB משל can refer not merely to short proverbial utterances (like those in Prov 10-29), but to a range of figurative discourses including certain prophetic speech, such as Ezekiel’s allegories in Ezek 17.2 and 24.3, each of which are called a משל. Cf. Otto Eissfeldt, Der Maschal im Alten Testament (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1913); A. R. Johnson, ‘מָשָׁל’, in M. Noth and D. Winton Thomas (eds.), Wisdom in Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Leiden: Brill, 1955), pp. 162-69; Timothy Polk, ‘Paradigms, Parables, and Měšālîm: On Reading the Māšāl in Scripture’, CBQ 45 (1983), pp. 564-83.
41.
As Linda Hutcheon has explained, to understand fully a multi-voiced text one needs to hear the various levels of meaning at the same time (or nearly at the same time). For Hutcheon, unless we hear both the straightforward meaning of an utterance and the unspoken, ironic meaning of that utterance, ‘we are not interpreting the utterance as ironic at all’. See Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 67.
42.
On the Deuteronomic resonances of Prov. 30.5-9, see Bernd U. Schipper, ‘When Wisdom Is Not Enough! The Discourse on Wisdom and Torah and the Composition of the Book of Proverbs’, in Bernd U. Schipper and D. Andrew Teeter (eds.), Wisdom and Torah: The Reception of ‘Torah’ in the Wisdom Literature of the Second Temple Period (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 55-79.
43.
Fox, Proverbs 10-31, p. 857.
44.
Whybray, Proverbs, p. 410.
45.
Whybray, Proverbs, pp. 408-9; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11 (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984 [1974]), pp. 326-28.
46.
George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), pp. 333-34.
47.
Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, pp. 7-8. Nickelsburg, however, suggests that this section of the Book of the Luminaries may have originally formed part of the Book of the Watchers, which may be nearly as ancient as the Book of the Luminaries. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, pp. 334-38.
48.
Two further features of the intertextual web relating the Agur, Balaam, and Enoch traditions to one another can be noted. First, Numbers 24.3-4 and 15-16, especially the phrase וישא משלו ויאמר (‘and he took up his discourse and said’), is echoed in 1 Enoch 1.2-3. This Enoch text also deploys images of esoteric, angelic knowledge that resonate both with Balaam’s visions and with Agur’s ‘knowledge of holy ones’. It reads: ‘And he took up his discourse and said: Enoch, a righteous man whose eyes were opened by God, who had the vision of the Holy One and of heaven, which he showed me. From the words of the watchers and holy ones I heard everything; And as I heard everything from them, I also understood what I saw’. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, pp. 132, 137. Second, both Prov. 30.4 and Gen. 4.17 deploy the phrase שם בנו. A trace of this rhetoric (בנו) also appears in the Balaam texts. Although the Bible regularly refers to Balaam as בלעם בן בער (e.g., Num. 22.5 and elsewhere), in the introduction to the seer’s oracles themselves he is called בלעם בנו בער (Num. 24.3, 15; cf. בלק … בנו צפר in Num. 23.18). The latter, curious construction is likely ‘an anticipatory genitive’ and can be rendered as ‘Beor’s own son’ or literally ‘his son, (namely), of Beor’. See Baruch A. Levine, Numbers 21-36: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 181.
49.
J. Strugnell, D. J. Harrington, and T. Elgvin, in consultation with J. A. Fitzmyer, Sapiential Texts, Part 2 Cave 4.XXIV (DJD XXXIV; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 21. Cf. the discussion by Matthew J. Goff, 4QInstruction (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013), p. 28.
50.
Unless otherwise noted, texts and translations of 4QInstruction follow Goff in 4QInstruction.
51.
Goff, 4QInstruction, p. 168.
52.
Texts and translations of 4Q418 55 and 4Q418 69ii + 60 follow Arjen Bakker, ‘Sages and Sayings: Continuous Study and Transformation in Musar le-Mevin and Serek ha-Yahad’, in H. Najman et al. (eds.), Tracing Sapiential Traditions in Ancient Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 106-18.
53.
As Carol A. Newsom explains, the enigmatic רז נהיה (‘mystery of existence’; ‘mystery that is to come’) encompasses ‘knowledge concerning the structures of the natural world, the course of human history, and the hidden principles that guide them’. See ‘Models of the Moral Self: Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism’, JBL 131.1 (2012), pp. 5-25 (23, n. 43).
54.
Goff, 4QInstruction, p. 17.
55.
See H. Ringgren, ‘לָאָה’, TDOT 7, p. 396; G. F. Hasel, ‘יָעֵף’, TDOT, 6, p. 152; ‘יָגַע’, TDOT 5, p. 388.
56.
Isa. 40.28, 30, 31.
57.
The Targum translates: לָא בַעֲמַל וְלָא בְלֵיאוּ לֵית סוֹף לְסוּכְלְתָנוּתֵיהּ.
58.
Text and translation of 1QS VI are from Florentino G. Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, Volume 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 82-83.
59.
Schipper, ‘When Wisdom Is Not Enough!’, pp. 55-79; cf. Markus Saur, ‘Prophetie, Weisheit und Gebet: Überlegungen zu den Worten Agurs in Prov. 30, 1-9’, ZAW 126:4 (2014): 570-83.