Knotted Knowledge
The Poetics and Composition of Prov 10:1–22:16
By (author) Yannik Ehmer
Paperback (Forthcoming)
(January 2027)
ISBN: 9783162005274
6.1 x 9.13 inches
Price: $165.00
Yannik Ehmer challenges the paradigm that Prov 10:1-22:16 is a loose collection of isolated sayings. He argues that it forms an anthology of “knotted knowledge.” Integrating philology and philosophy, Ehmer rethinks proverbial wisdom as an ambiguous mode: it is done, undone and redone.
In contrast to dominant scholarship, which typically reads Prov 10:1-22:16 as an unstructured collection of isolated sayings, Yannik Ehmer questions the primacy of the individual proverb and its implications for reconstructing the intellectual history of ancient Israel. He offers a philological and philosophical rereading of Prov 10:1-22:16, aiming to identify the collection’s compositional logics as a meta-poetic phenomenon through a transdisciplinary method. What has long been treated as a corpus of loosely arranged sayings is reinterpreted here as a carefully crafted configuration of “knotted knowledge.”
Engaging with the phenomenology of Michel Serres and drawing on the emic category of the knot, the author develops a phenomenology of knotted knowledge that foregrounds ambiguity as its central feature. In this perspective, proverbial wisdom appears as an alternative mode of constructing philosophy and theology, in which epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics are not separated domains but mutually implicated dimensions of thought.
The prevailing evolutionary model – according to which proverbial wisdom represents a naïvely optimistic starting point on a trajectory culminating in the critical wisdom of Qohelet – is critically reassessed. Instead, Prov 10:1-22:16 is understood as a dynamic textual archive in which wisdom is continuously both done and undone in order to produce ambiguity. A close philological analysis elucidates its compositional techniques and iterative dynamics, which are then integrated into a broader philosophical interpretation. Read as “knotted knowledge,” the text opens a revised perspective on the history of wisdom: rather than a linear progression from simplicity to complexity, it already exhibits a form of second-order thinking within proverbial wisdom itself.
Prologue: Beyond the Dichotomy of Historical-Critical Exegesis and Philosophical Criticism
I On Knots, Entanglements and Knotted Knowledge: Towards an Aesthetics of Reading Proverbial Collections
II Between Alexander and Penelope: Histories of Reading Prov 10:1-22:16
II.1 Reading Language in Prov 10:1-22:16
II.2 Epistemological Readings of Prov 10:1-22:16
II.3 Aesthetic Readings of Prov 10:1-22:16
II.4 Ethical Readings of Prov 10:1-22:16
III A Methodological Interim Conclusion: The מְשָׁלִים as "Dynarchive": Towards a Poetics of Proverbial Anthologies
IV Exegesis of Prov 10:1-22:16
IV.1 קְנֹה־חָכְמָה: Prov 10:1-15:32 and the Dynamics of Doing Wisdom
IV.2 Nodal Points: Prov 15:33-16:15 and the Limits of חָכְמָה
IV.3 חֲסַר־לֵב: Prov 16:16-22:4 and the Dynamics of Wisdom Undone
IV.4 Prov 22:5-16: An Epilogue to Prov 10:1-22:16
V An Exegetical Interim Conclusion: The "Dynarchive" as (Un-)Doing חָכְמָה
VI The Knotted Knowledges of Prov 10:1-22:16 asרֹחַבלֵב and Scribal Practices Reconsidered
VI.1 Language
VI.2 Epistemology
VI.3 Aesthetics
VI.4 Ethics
VII Epilogue: Thinking in Knots
- By (author) Yannik Ehmer
Other Titles in this Series
Wie der Einheimische so der Fremde
Zur Entstehung und Intention des Heiligkeitsgesetzes und der Texte der sogenannten Heiligkeitsschule
Images of Exile in the Prophetic Literature
Copenhagen Conference Proceedings 7-10 May 2017
Volume 103
Covenant and Election in Exilic and Post-Exilic Judaism
Studies of the Sofja Kovalevskaja Research Group on Early Jewish MonotheismVol. V
Volume 79
Storymaking, Textual Development, and Varying Cultic Centralizations
Gathering and Fitting Unhewn Stones
Volume 142
Intertextualitat und die Entstehung des Psalters
Methodische Reflexionen - Theologiegeschichtliche Perspektiven
Volume 114
The Compilational History of the Megilloth
Canon, Contoured Intertextuality and Meaning in the Writings
Volume 59
Mutual Influence in Priestly and Non-Priestly Pentateuchal Narratives
A Study of the Dynamic Interaction Behind the Textual Growth of P and Non-P
Volume 153
The Composition of Genesis 37
Incoherence and Meaning in the Exposition of the Joseph Story
Volume 95
The Compositional History of the Book of Kings
An Analysis of the Evaluative Frameworks in 1 Kings 14–2 Kings 25
The Discourse of Rites
Shaping and Reshaping the (Counter-)Priestly Rituals Conducted Outside the Tabernacle
The Pillars of the First Temple (1 Kgs 7,15-22)
A Study from Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, Archaeological, and Iconographic Perspectives
Volume 116
Divine Presence and Absence in Exilic and Post-Exilic Judaism
Studies of the Sofja Kovalevskaja Research Group on Early Jewish Monotheism Vol. II
Volume 61
Similar Books
Athanasius of Alexandria, Epistula ad episcopos Aegypti et Libyae
Old Slavonic Version and English Translation
Volume 261
Cyril of Alexandria’s Christological Exegesis
Explorations of Partitive Exegesis in the Dialogues on the Trinity
Volume 70
Epiphanies of the Divine in the Septuagint and the New Testament
Fifth International Symposium of the Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti (CJHNT), 14-17 May 2015, Nottingham
Extracanonical Traditions and the Holy Land
Texts, Rituals, and Material Culture in Late Antique Palestine
From Joseph to Jesus
The Joseph Narrative as a Compositional Template from Old Greek Esther to the Gospel of Luke
Volume 125
Paradise Lost in Transmission
The Return to Eden in the Apocalypse of Peter within Its Ethiopic and Early Christian Contexts
Punning in Odd or Elegant Constructions in Jeremiah
The Convergence of Linguistics, Rhetoric, and Textuality in the Hebrew Text of Jeremiah
Shame in the Worlds of the Hebrew Bible and Akkadian Texts
A Linguistic Study and Its Implications
Volume 33
Tabernacle, Table, Ark, and Text
Richard of Saint Victor on the Interpretation of Scripture
Volume 67
The Anglo-Norman Bible’s Books of Kings, a Critical Edition
(BL Royal 1 C III, fols 234r-274v)
Volume 37
The Biblical Tale of Judah and Tamar in Fourteenth-Century Iran
A Judeo-Persian Versified Account by Shāhīn with Scholarly Edition, Annotated Translation and Persian Transliteration
Volume 94, 951
The Body
Lived, Cultured, Adorned: Essays on Dress and the Body in the Bible and Ancient Near East in Honor of Nili S. Fox
The Compositional History of the Book of Kings
An Analysis of the Evaluative Frameworks in 1 Kings 14–2 Kings 25
The Discourse of Rites
Shaping and Reshaping the (Counter-)Priestly Rituals Conducted Outside the Tabernacle
