Dr. Dylan Johnson

Gardens are typically associated with palaces and, to a much lesser extent, temples.

Really, gardens are architectural features of palaces.

Of course, the man and the woman are king and queen in theory.

But this wisdom is very special in biblical tradition.

Outside of the Eden narrative, it's associated with activities that are normally attributed to kings, such as building, like the temple.

and law-giving, something very close to my heart.

When kings act like law-givers, not only are they described as knowing the difference between good and evil, being exceedingly wise, Solomon being the paragon example, but also emulating the divine.

So in places, David is called like a messenger of God in his wisdom.

King David, I'm guessing.

And his son Solomon, similarly, when he has his famous judgment between the two prostitutes, the people are fearful, and usually you're fearful of gods, because the wisdom of God was in him to execute justice.

So these wisdom themes that are bound up in a creation story are, I think, almost certainly drawing on royal ideology.

Yeah.

But it's been democratized in this story.

No longer is this about kings being exceedingly wise.

This is the fundamental feature of being human.

It's connected, but not in the ways that wisdom literature has traditionally been treated.

So wisdom literature...

actually would not include creation stories for the most part.

Wisdom literature is something more akin to proverbial axioms, fables, ways of teaching people moral right from wrong without prescribing legalistic language to them.

So the way that we define the genre, which I think is a bit problematic, actually excludes these kinds of texts in certain respects.