Wisdom and knowledge play a central role in the stories of the garden of Eden in Gen 2–3 and Ezek 28:11–19 – both in the synopsis of the texts and in the context of the Hebrew Bible. While in Gen 2–3, the human couple first gains knowledge by reaching for the fruit of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” before it is banished from the garden; in Ezek 28 the king of Tyre is endowed with wisdom and beauty from the outset, both of which he loses as a result of his hubris. In both narratives, it is initially unclear which competencies are associated with knowledge/cognition and wisdom. It only becomes clear that wisdom or knowledge/cognition is more than just a useful skill that can be acquired and learned by humans. Rather, it appears as a divine quality, as it is linked to the mythical space of the garden of Eden. At least wisdom has a superhuman dimension. Its knowledge is located at the interface between God and humans. In Gen 2–3, humans become “like God” by acquiring knowledge; in Ezek 28, the king endowed with wisdom is the only human inhabitant of a mythical sphere. In both texts, wisdom or knowledge is an ambivalent quality in that it is associated with the fall of the respective protagonists and their banishment from the garden.
The two texts thus represent a conception of wisdom that differs from that of the biblical wisdom literature. This results in a desideratum for Hebrew Bible research on wisdom. Treatises on the subject of wisdom in Hebrew Bible scholarship are often narrowed down or confined to wisdom literature. Encyclopedia articles on wisdom in the Hebrew Bible are often headed by the combined lemma “wisdom/wisdom literature” or at least focus on wisdom literature. As a result, conceptions of wisdom as presented in Gen 2–3 and Ezek 28 are neither neglected nor understood entirely in the light of wisdom literature.
To address this desideratum, an International Conference took place at the University of Hamburg in March 20–23, 2023. At the conference the participants took Gen 2–3 and Ezek 28:11–19 as a starting point for concepts of wisdom and knowledge formation that decisively affect the relationship between God and humans. However, the conference was not limited to these two texts but rather placed them in a larger – wisdom and non-wisdom – Hebrew Bible, ancient Near Eastern, ancient Egyptian and early Jewish contexts. The aim was, on the one hand, to better understand the concepts of wisdom or knowledge in Gen 2–3 and Ezek 28 and, on the other hand, to shed light on the superhuman and divine dimensions of wisdom and knowledge in the different cultures of the ancient West Asian and North African world.
The results of the conference are compiled in this volume. It is divided into three parts, which reflect the course of the conference and the focus of its units. Part I attempts to mark the boundaries between divine and human wisdom and knowledge. Part II asks about concepts how we might overcome these boundaries; Part III considers the crossing of the boundaries and the danger associated with it, the development of increasing hubris. The volume concludes with a cross-section that provides an overview of the topics covered in the contributions.
We would like to thank all the authors for attending the conference as well as for sharing their insights about the topic with us. In addition, we would like to express our sincere thanks to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Department of Protestant Theology at the University of Hamburg, and the Förderverein “Theologie am Tor zur Welt e.V.” of the Department for funding the conference. Last but not least, we would like to thank the editors of the SCB series for accepting this volume into their publication series.
Hamburg, Lubbock, and Wuppertal, January 2025
Marcel Krusche, Mark Sneed and Thomas Wagner